(7 of 8)
Congress is bound to ask, How was it possible that even as his performance was poor, his personnel file was being reviewed and his communications with a radical cleric were being analyzed, Hasan was promoted from captain to major last May and dispatched in July to Fort Hood, the largest active Army base in the U.S.? One explanation is a desperate need for mental-health professionals. With its 50,000 soldiers and 150,000 family members and civilian personnel, Fort Hood has the highest toll of military suicides; posttraumatic-stress-disorder cases quadrupled from 2005 to 2007.
But others are convinced that his religion protected him from stronger action by the Army. "He'd have to murder the general's wife and daughter on the parade ground at high noon in order to get a serious reprimand," says Ralph Peters, an outspoken retired Army lieutenant colonel who now writes military books and a newspaper column. While stressing "there shouldn't be witch hunts" against Muslims in uniform, Peters insists that "this guy got a pass because he was a Muslim, despite the Army's claim that everybody's green and we're all the same." A top Pentagon official admits there may be some truth to the charge. "We're wondering why some of these strange encounters didn't trigger something more formal," he says. "I think people were overly sensitive about Muslims in the military, and that led to a reluctance to say, 'This guy is nuts.' The Army is going to have to review their procedures to make sure someone can raise issues like this."
Obama's Response
Less than an hour after the shooting began, the Situation Room notified the White House that there had been an event at Fort Hood; Obama was briefed in the Oval Office a half hour later. Reports were all over the place--how many shooters, how many dead. As the day went on, the principals from the White House and Pentagon pushed for clarity as to whether this was part of a broader plot. Obama knew about the al-Awlaki e-mails long before he went to bed that night. "We were looking to see if there might have been any code or anything embedded in that," an official says.
The next morning, Obama ordered all the agencies to do an inventory of their files, collect every scrap they had on Hasan and review how that information had been handled. "We needed to understand what we knew and when we knew it," the official says, "and not to make any preliminary or premature judgments about anything."
Investigators continued to comb Hasan's computer, search his garbage, scrub his phone records. By Saturday, Hasan was awake and talking, though only to his doctors and lawyers. He will face a trial, most likely in a military court, and if convicted, he could become the 16th person sentenced to death under the current military death-penalty system. Ten of the previous 15 had their sentences commuted, and five sit on death row in Fort Leavenworth, Kans.