All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said red flags in the Fort Hood shooting suspect's past were ignored out of officials' fear of being labeled as bias against Muslims.

Maj. Nadil Malik Hasan is accused of killing 13 people and wounding 29 others in an attack at an on-base medical facility earlier this month. In the wake of the shooting, a host of potential warning signs that were never acted upon were uncovered.

Among them:

A joint terrorism task force was aware of e-mail exchanges between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical imam who espoused hostility against U.S. soldiers overseas. Investigators didn't follow up because they said the communications contained no references to terrorism.

Supervisors at Walter Reed Medical Center expressed concerns that Hasan could be belligerent about religious issues. And according to a 2007 evaluation letter published by NPR Wednesday, Hasan exhibited a "pattern of poor judgment and lack of professionalism."

Hasan also delivered a lecture at Walter Reed on the dangers of forcing Muslim soldiers to fight against other Muslims. He advised the military to grant conscientious objector status in such cases.

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Updated 5:17 p.m. ET, with additional information

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attended one of the Fort Hood funerals today in Mountain City, Tenn., for Fort Hood victim Specialist Frederick Greene (seen at left).

He'd been invited by Specialist Greene's father. Gates met the family at the Fort Hood memorial last week.

This was Gates' first time attending a military funeral outside the Washington area.

His spokesman Geoff Morrell says he's wanted to do this before -- "to be part of a sendoff for one of our fallen heroes, where the whole town turns out to honor him." But he hadn't wanted to be a distraction. This funeral -- where he had been personally invited, and the geography meant he could attend without alerting large numbers of press, made it possible.

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Former Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will visit Fort Hood Army post next month as a part of her book tour, her publisher told the Wall Street Journal.

Palin is going on the road to promote her memoir "Going Rogue," which goes on sale next week. She had reportedly been planning to visit Fort Hood on her tour before the shootings at the military outpost, which left 13 dead.

Special Section: Tragedy at Fort Hood

According to the Journal, an official at Fort Hood contacted Palin's publisher at some point after the attack to indicate that she should go ahead with the planned appearance, scheduled for December 4th.

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It's one of those terms that might seem to belong to an earlier era: political correctness. But in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, critics are seeing exactly that in both the treatment of alleged gunman Nidal Malik Hasan by the military before the shootings and in the comments of politicians and members of the media afterward.

"Who’d think the U.S. Army could be seized with a sudden case of political correctness?" columnist Margaret Carlson wrote Thursday, dubbing the army "oversensitive."

"If they hadn’t been so cautious, authorities could have pieced together the links between Hasan and radical Islam and possibly prevented Fort Hood," she argued. Authorities, Carlson notes, knew Hassan had visited radical jihadist Web sites; some officials at Walter Reed, where he had worked, thought he might have been psychotic. "It wouldn’t have been an act of bigotry, just an act of sanity."

"Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity," complained Major Shawn Keller. "The Army as an institution has been neutered by decades of political correctness and the leaders in Hasan's chain-of-command failed to act accordingly out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report."

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President Obama spoke at a memorial service for the men and women killed at the shooting rampage at Fort Hood Army post, honoring the dead and predicting justice for the shooter responsible for their murder.

"It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy," Mr. Obama said. "But this much we do know – no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world, and the next."

The president said the fact that the shooting took place on American soil "makes the tragedy even more painful and even more incomprehensible." He said those who were killed will endure "through the life of our nation."

"Every evening that the sun sets on a tranquil town; every dawn that a flag is unfurled; every moment that an American enjoys life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – that is their legacy," said the president.

Photos: Fort Hood Memorial Service

Mr. Obama spoke individually about those who were killed in the shootings, offering background information and details about their lives. When Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger's mother told Krueger she couldn't take Osama bin Laden on by herself, the president noted, "Amy replied: 'Watch me.'"

"Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity the decency of those who serve, and that's how they will be remembered," Mr. Obama said of the fallen.

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The Senate Homeland Security Committee will conduct an investigation into last week's shootings at Fort Hood, beginning with a public hearing next week, the committee's leaders announced Monday.

While the investigation will not interfere with the Army or FBI's criminal investigations, "this murderous attack should be examined from every angle to make sure nothing like this occurs again," Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said in a statement.

The committee will investigate the potential motives of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the man accused of opening fire at the military base. It will also look into whether the government missed warning signs of the incident and what lessons can be gleaned from the tragedy to prevent such future attacks.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Tragedy at Fort Hood

"As this investigation continues, we would do no favor to the thousands of Muslim Americans who are serving our military with honor and the millions of patriotic and law-abiding Muslim Americans by ignoring real evidence that an individual Muslim American soldier may have become a violent Islamist extremist," Lieberman said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking Republican on the committee, said Congress owed the investigation to the military, their families and their communities.
"Our military must be prepared to detect the warning signs for potential violence and to intervene and prevent similar attacks in the future," she said. "This hearing is vital to assuring the men and women serving in our military and their families that their safety is a top priority for us."

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President Obama is delaying his long-planned trip to Asia by a day so he can attend tomorrow's Memorial Service at Fort Hood and pay homage to the victims of last week's shooting spree.

He and the First Lady will fly to the sprawling Army post in Central Texas on Tuesday morning to visit privately with the families of the 13 personnel shot dead last Thursday. It's an incident Mr. Obama has condemned as "a horrific outburst of violence." Twenty-nine others were wounded in the massacre in which an Army medical officer is suspected of deliberately targeting military personnel in an act of madness or anti-American rage at U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Families are coming in from all over the country," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs of the Memorial Service. He made it clear late last week that Mr. Obama was determined to attend the service no matter what. It means his departure for Asia, originally scheduled for Wednesday, is put off a day.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Tragedy at Fort Hood

The president has also already spoken out three times to denounce the attack at Fort Hood.

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