Former CIA official Reuel Gerecht argues that the FBI can't handle counterterrorism:
It shouldn't require the U.S. to have a French-style, internal-security service to neutralize the likes of Maj. Hasan. He combines all of the factors—especially his public ruminations about American villainy in the Middle East and his overriding sense of Muslim fraternity—that should have had him under surveillance by counterintelligence units. Add the outrageous fact that he was in email correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaqi, a pro-al Qaeda imam well-known to American intelligence, and it is hard not to conclude that the FBI is still incapable of counterterrorism against an Islamic target.
No one's arguing that the FBI should be exclusively involved in counterterrorism without the help of agencies focusing on foreign intelligence, but I'd really like to hear Gerecht's plans for determining whether someone has an "overriding sense of Muslim fraternity." The fact that Major Hasan was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi was suspicious behavior on its own. What's disturbing about the Hasan case isn't the "political correctness"--an assertion that has yet to be substantiated in any real sense--it's the possibility that genuine suspicious behavior was ignored.
The past few months have seen the dismantling of a number of homegrown terror plots by domestic law enforcement, so the idea that the FBI can't fight Islamist terrorism is absurd on its face. The agents who posed as al Qaeda sleeper agents and foiled bomb plots in Texas and Illinois would probably also disagree. But I think that, between Gerecht's broad chauvinist declarations ("The West has stimulated every single great modern Muslim conversation") and his wailing about political correctness (meaning I suppose, that "a sense of Muslim fraternity" doesn't count as probable cause) I think we get at what he's really saying:
A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity—that must come into play before any crime is committed—is at odds with a G-man's raison d'être. And much more so than local police departments—which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life—it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.
The Bush administration basically stopped thinking about annoying things like "criminal prosecution" and "admissible evidence" when dealing with terrorism, which is how we ended up with Guantanamo Bay. But of course, if we weren't all so politically correct, we'd just lock all these people up forever and wouldn't worry about it.
Counterterrorism shouldn't solely be the job of the FBI. But the idea that the FBI is "incapable of counterterrorism against an Islamic target" is simply incorrect.
-- A. Serwer