Pentagon probe to look into lapses in military bureaucracy

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Thursday it will scour its procedures for identifying volatile soldiers hidden in the ranks after the Fort Hood shooting rampage and lapses that might allow others to slip through bureaucratic cracks.

“It is prudent to determine immediately whether there are internal weaknesses or procedural shortcomings in the department that could make us vulnerable in the future,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

A 45-day emergency investigation will examine personnel, medical, mental-health, discharge and other policies in all corners of the vast Defense Department. It will also look at ways to improve security and emergency response at Defense Department facilities.

“The shootings at Fort Hood raise a number of troubling questions that demand complete but prompt answers,” Gates told a Pentagon news conference.

The quick review will be led by two former Pentagon officials, former Army Secretary Togo West and former Navy chief Vernon Clark.

A longer, second review lasting about six months will look at what Gates called “systemic institutional shortcomings.” Gates, who has fired several top officials in three years of heading the Pentagon, did not address any possible consequences of the inquiries he announced Thursday.

Gates broached little new information about the case of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 in the shootings at the Texas military post Nov. 5.

Gates called it disturbing that Hasan had e-mail contact with a radical cleric in Yemen, but stressed that his review is separate from the criminal investigation into Hasan and should not be interpreted as a finger-pointing exercise against Muslims or anyone else.

Investigators have said e-mails between Hasan and the imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, did not advocate or threaten violence. After the shootings, al-Awlaki’s Web site praised Hasan as a hero.

Both Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the chief goal of the Pentagon probe is preventing another such attack and improving future responses by disaster teams.

West was Army secretary in the mid-1990s and later became secretary of Veterans Affairs. Clark was the chief of naval operations from 2000 to 2005.

In 2007, Gates named West co-chairman of a panel created to review rehabilitation-care problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Gates would not comment Thursday on whether he considers the Fort Hood attack a terrorist act. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., told a Senate hearing that he does, and he urged a government investigation “to learn whether the federal government could have acted in a way that would have prevented these murders from occurring.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, questioned whether the government failed to connect dots about Hasan.