A just-completed Army report recommends several officers be reprimanded or admonished for their failures in overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan, NPR has learned. Hasan is the suspect in a November shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.
The report says Hasan's superiors failed to notice that Hasan's growing Islamic extremism was conflicting with his work as an Army officer. It also says some civilian supervisors are at fault as well for ignoring clear signs of what it called his aberrant behavior.
Still, the report by Gen. Carter Ham says no one could have predicted the tragedy that eventually occurred at Fort Hood.
The report also found there was no evidence that political correctness prevented superiors from dealing with Hasan's extremism. Instead it was a lack of leadership and duty.
A separate Pentagon review last month found that the military was too focused on external enemies and not the behavior of its own troops.
Ham's report finds that "several individuals" failed to exercise oversight of Hasan as a medical student, intern, resident and academic fellow. This was mostly administrative standards, including such items as weight problems and physical fitness.
"More troubling" is that more senior officers and DOD civilians ignored "unmistakable signs" of increasingly "aberrant" behavior, the report states. They failed to document performance and continued to promote him and give him assignments, it states.
The report recommends that "several Army officers" be "reprimanded or admonished" for these "failures."
Hasan is charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center. He was a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six years before being sent to Texas in July 2009.
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