KICKIN' AND SCREAMIN'...........

Representative Pete Hoekstra thinks so:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tells Newsmax that the White House intervened to keep him from obtaining critical information regarding the Fort Hood murders.

The Michigan legislator also warned that “homegrown jihadism” is a real threat to the U.S., and said a thorough investigation of Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood massacre, would help authorities learn how to deal with it.

Rep. Hoekstra charged in a statement on Monday that the Obama administration was withholding information and demanded that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence preserve documents relating to the incident for use in any future investigation.

“On Friday afternoon I asked the director of national intelligence [Dennis Blair] to get a briefing,” Hoekstra said. “We were already starting to hear that Major Hasan had some connection back to the Middle East, perhaps some jihadist link, and I just asked the DNI: Would you share with me the information you have available at this time?

“He indicated that he would give me a call back and let me know. He contacted me on Saturday and said, I think we’re going to make this work. A couple of hours later he called back and said, between the lines, I’ve been overruled by the White House. There will be no briefing for you this weekend, and early next week on Tuesday we’ll give you a briefing.

“Well, there was no reason why we couldn’t be briefed on the information they had at that time. I get suspicious when they don’t give us the information that we’re looking for, especially when they’re going to give it to us in a very limited form, perhaps only to me and the chairman of the whole committee. That’s when my suspicions were raised.

“Now [Monday] night they did come back and brief my staff and some senators on what they knew about Major Hasan and when they knew it, but it was already after most of this information had somehow been leaked to the media.”

As to why the administration might want to withhold information, Hoekstra said: “There are serious questions about whether the FBI did everything appropriately and whether there was enough information out there, enough red flags out there, that reasonable people would have assumed Hasan should have been more closely evaluated than he was.

“I don’t know if that’s it or not, and I won’t know or have a better idea until I’ve had access to all the information…

“I’ve just made it very clear that I want them to preserve all the documents, all the information that deals with Major Hasan, because I want to make sure that we don’t get to a point where, well, we can’t find that information anymore. I want a full, thorough investigation.

“I’m not looking to pin blame on anybody. I believe that radical jihadism, homegrown jihadism, is a real threat to the United States. We need to learn more about it, how to identify it, and how to stop it. This could be a classic case that will give us some of that information.”