Fort Hood review will call for FBI policy changes

(CBS/AP) An independent review of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting massacre will recommend 18 changes in FBI policies and protocol, according to a letter obtained by CBS News.

In the July 3 letter to Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., Judge William Webster, who was tapped by FBI Director Robert Mueller to lead the independent investigation of the shootings, said the final report will outline "18 recommendations for corrective and enhancing measures on matters ranging from FBI policies and operations to information systems infrastructure, review protocols, and training."

Webster said the report, which culls information from more than 50 formal interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, will address how the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces "handled and acted on counterterrorism intelligence before and after the shootings." Webster, a former FBI director, said the report would be handed over to Mueller by July 13.

Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly 2009 shooting rampage, faces the death penalty if convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the shootings. The court-martial is to start Aug. 20 on the Texas Army post.

The case has drawn attention to U.S. intelligence lapses. Less than a month after the Fort Hood rampage, the Pentagon's top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots, CBS News correspondent David Martin reported in 2010.

According to that report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw the multiple e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

After the Washington task force decided Hasan was not dangerous, it never asked to see his subsequent communications with Awlaki.

None of the e-mails specifically mentioned Hasan's plans for a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but because he was a member of the military the FBI showed them to a Pentagon investigator with the note "comm" written on it. To the FBI that meant "commissioned officer." The Pentagon investigator thought it meant "communication."

As a result, there were no red flags that an army officer was emailing a radical cleric suspected of being a talent spotter for al Qaeda.