Intelligence sharing is a bit like a game of hot potato: If you get stuck with it, you’ll get burned.

FBI officials in San Diego recently caught just such a hot potato when they intercepted e-mails between Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused Fort Hood shooter, and a radical former San Diego imam named Anwar al-Awlaki.

These intercepts are among the government’s biggest secrets. Yet, at the same time, it would be surprising if Hasan and Nidal didn’t know that their communications were likely to be intercepted.

Awlaki had been an FBI counter-terrorism target for years. As an imam in San Diego in 2000, Awlaki served as a “spiritual advisor” to three 9/11 hijackers.

The FBI has asked him numerous times about his contacts with the hijackers, including when agents visited him in 2007 in a Yemeni prison. The intercepts were made about a year after he got out of prison. Today, he is said to be hiding in Yemen.

As for Hasan, he was a psychiatrist in the military. His contacts with Awlaki were viewed as consistent with some research he was conducting as a psychiatric resident at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center. A 2007 slideshow he gave at Walter Reed was titled “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.”

As many as 20 e-mails between Hasan and Awlaki were intercepted by the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) between December 2008 and May 2009. The communications were deemed “consistent with research being conducted by Major Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center,” the FBI says.

After the shooting that killed 13 people, a blog post on Aulaki’s website praised Hasan as a “hero.”

The communications between Awlaki and Hasan were never shared with the Defense Department, even though a member of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service was on the multi-agency San Diego JTTF.

CIA Director William Webster is conducting a review to find out what happened. According to The Washington Post, Webster will have the authority to make recommendations about possible changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs the highly sensitive communications intercepts at issue.

Awlaki is particularly troublesome for investigators because he is a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971. As a result of that circumstance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the JTTF to apply for a court order of surveillance at the secret FISA court or a certification from the U.S. attorney general. Investigators were required to present evidence that Awlaki was “an agent of a foreign power, or an officer or employee of a foreign power.”

Al-Qaida qualifies as a foreign power, and Charles Allen, a former CIA official and US Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, declared last year that Awlaki was part of al-Qaida’s reach into the U.S. homeland.

So, they got a warrant. Great. What good is such intelligence if you don’t use it?

In Hasan’s case, an investigator and a supervisor concluded that Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or planning.

Further dissemination of the information “was neither sought nor authorized.” In plain English, the JTTF FBI supervisor wouldn’t let the folks from the Defense Department on his task force tell their commanders about the e-mails.

Officials in San Diego told Voice of San Diego’s Kelly Thornton that their counterparts in Washington are to blame:

One federal source described the probe this way: “Webster is going to investigate the Fort Hood guy and al-Aulaqi and whether the FBI screwed up. They’re saying San Diego failed to communicate the e-mails — but San Diego pestered the shit out of them, sending e-mails multiple times. The Washington field office didn’t do anything on it.”

The Washington Post reported Dec. 1 that members of Congress have identified “at least two troubling e-mails” that were intercepted by the San Diego FBI but not shared with Washington.

In a tit-for-tat battle, Thornton’s anonymous San Diego sources responded by saying that everything was fully communicated to Washington, which had “computer access” to everything San Diego had.

The Voice of San Diego, however, leaves out crucial background found in reports by the 9/11 Commission and Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11:

In June 1999, the FBI in San Diego investigated Awlaki after learning that he may have been contacted by a man who bought a satellite phone bin Laden used in the 1990s.

During its investigation, FBI learned that Awlaki knew individuals from the Holy Land Foundation and others involved in raising money for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Sources alleged that Awlaki had other extremist connections.

In early 2000, Awlaki was visited by a subject of a Los Angeles FBI investigation closely associated with Blind Sheikh [Omar Abdel] Rahman.

Around the time Awlaki was holding closed door meetings in San Diego with two of the hijackers, the FBI closed its investigation, stating “the imam … does not meet the criterion for [further] investigation.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that the FBI in San Diego misjudged Awlaki. Then again, no one bothered to tell the FBI in San Diego about two of the 9/11 hijackers whom the CIA had tracked from Bangkok to Los Angeles in 2000 until it was too late.

Anwar al-Aulaqi’s website and his statement praising the suspected Fort Hood shooter as a “hero” has vanished from the Internet. (For those who are interested, the statement in its entirety can be found at the end of this post.)

The words of the former San Diego imam — now said to be living hiding in Yemen — have received wide distribution. The timing of his Nov. 8 statement of support for Maj. Nidal Hasan, however, has escaped notice.

While Aulaqi’s name and his links to Maj. Hasan were being leaked to the Western press, U.S. military officials were quietly holding two days of talks on terrorism and other issues with their counterparts in Yemen, according to Saba, Yemen’s official state news agency.

Brig. Gen. Jefforey A. Smith, recently named deputy director for politico-military affairs in the Middle East (J5) for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed a joint cooperation agreement today, confirming U.S. support for Yemen’s shaky government.

Update: The US embassy declined to comment on whether an agreement had been signed, but tells AFP that talks involving Smith had taken place and said they focused on counterterrorism efforts against groups operating in Yemen. (The AFP misidentified Smith.)

This week’s talks in Sana’a have attracted no attention in the United States. But Yemen’s Chief of the General Staff Ahmed al-Ashwal said the talks were of great concern to the government of President Ali Abdullah Salih, which is battling al-Qaida in the east and tribal rebels in the north backed by Iran.

The Economist reported this week:

Yemen’s increasing lawlessness outside shrinking zones of state control around the main cities is one reason why, earlier this year, al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch announced it was moving across the border and merging forces with its brethren in Yemen. The joint operation, calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”, known in intelligence circles as AQAP, has carried out sporadic attacks inside Yemen, where tacit agreements with the government appear to have broken down. But its main target still appears to be Saudi Arabia.

The most recent State Department report on terrorism described Yemen’s efforts as “mixed.” While it took action against al-Qaida, Yemen, despite pressure from the U.S., continued a surrender program for terrorists it could not apprehend and released all returned Guantanamo detainees.

All of which makes the timing of Aulaqi’s statement even more interesting:

Nidal Hassan Did The Right Thing

Nidal Hassan is a hero.

He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.

Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal’s operation.

The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can defy the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right — rather the duty — to fight against American tyranny. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy.

Allah(swt) says: Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful punishment – Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed, honor belongs to Allah entirely. (al-Nisa 136-137)

The inconsistency of being a Muslim today and living in America and the West in general reveals the wisdom behind the opinions that call for migration from the West. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold on to Islam in an environment that is becoming more hostile towards Muslims.

May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Ameen.