Accused Ft. Hood Shooter Moved to Jail
After four months in a military hospital, the Army psychiatrist charged in the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military base will soon be moved to a county jail near Fort Hood.
Defense attorney John Galligan said Monday that Maj. Nidal Hasan could be moved as early as next week.
Bell County Jail administrator Bob Patterson says Hasan will be housed in a cell in the medical unit. Patterson says the facility that opened a year ago to replace the county's aging jail is prepared to handle inmates with medical needs.
Hasan, 39, was taken to a San Antonio military hospital shortly after the Nov. 5 shootings. He was paralyzed below the chest when he was shot by two civilian members of Fort Hood's police force.
Special Section: Tragedy at Fort Hood
According to two officials familiar with the case, as many as eight Army officers could face discipline for failing to do anything when Hasan displayed erratic behavior early in his military career. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because that information has not been publicly released.
Retired Adm. Vernon E. Clark and former Army secretary Togo D. West Jr., who led the investigation, told reporters that there were discrepancies between Hasan's performance and his personnel records.
Their investigation also found that his top-level security clearance hadn't been properly investigated. Had policies been properly followed, investigators say his clearance may have been revoked "and his continued service and pending deployment would have been subject to increased scrutiny."
Officials say that several midlevel officers overlooked or failed to act on red flags in Hasan's lax work habits and his fixation on religion. Hasan was seen by the reviews as a loner who was passed along from office to office and job to job despite professional failings that included missed or failed exams and physical fitness requirements.
Findings about Hasan and those who supervised him are contained in a confidential addendum to a larger report about the Pentagon's handling of potential extremism in the ranks and readiness to handle the sort of mass casualties Hasan allegedly inflicted.
The officers supervised Hasan when he was a medical student and during his early work as an Army psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
The report, called "Protecting the Force," concludes that the Defense Department had outdated and ineffective means to identify threats from inside as opposed to outside the military. It also says the department's means of sharing and collating information about a potential troublemaker are inadequate, one official said.