Ace Ed makes the point I did yesterday: Hassan's propensity for violence was immaterial. (The FBI botched that evaluation rather badly, as it turns out.) But people with security clearances are not, get this, allowed to make undisclosed contact with the enemy. Robert Hansen and Aldrich Aames weren't "violent." On the other hand... we don't just blow off their communications with the enemy (the Soviet Union, in those cases, which was merely a cold enemy, rather than a hot one, as Al Qaeda is.) This bastard Hassan was going to deploy to Iraq (at least before he personally decided his actual deployment would be to the Central Texas Theater). Troop deployment information -- timing, number, composition -- is sensitive. And this guy is chatting up Al Qaeda in what the FBI sagely deemed to be " consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse"? Ah. No big deal then. He was merely seeking religious guidance from the psychopathic murder cult Al Qaeda. As harmless as any number of other religious supplicants, such as Mohammad Atta. You know the scariest thing about this? It's not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response. Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don't understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let's-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.