Togo West, a former Army secretary and native of Winston-Salem, and another retired military official will lead a sweeping Pentagon review of events that led up to the Fort Hood rampage, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday.
"The shootings at Fort Hood raise a number of troubling questions that demand complete but prompt answers," Gates told a Pentagon news conference.
"We do not enter this process with any preconceived notions. However, 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."
Former Navy chief Vernon Clark will lead the 45-day review along with West.
Hours earlier, a Senate committee opened the first public hearings into the shootings, with several legislators asserting that the Nov. 5 attack, in which an Army psychiatrist is accused of killing 13 people and wounding 43 others, was a terrorist attack by a homegrown extremist who may have slipped past law- enforcement and military authorities.
Gates said that the goal of the review is threefold: to find any Defense Department deficiencies in identifying service members who might be a threat; to assess the military's mental-health and counseling programs, among others; and to examine how the department responds to "mass casualty" events at its facilities.
The 45-day review will shape a longer four- to six-month follow-up Pentagon examination of any institutional shortcomings, Gates said.
Gates offered little new information yesterday about the case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused in the Fort Hood shootings.
He called the fact that Hasan has e-mail contact with a radical cleric in Yemen disturbing, 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.
Both Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the chief goal of the Pentagon investigation is to prevent another such attack and to improve disaster teams' responses.
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.
West, a 1960 graduate of Atkins High School in Winston-Salem, finished first in his class at Howard University Law School. In 1969, he joined the Army as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In 1980, he was named the Defense Department's top lawyer.
He joined a Washington law firm in 1981, and eight years later moved to the Washington office of Northrop, a defense contractor. In 1993, President Clinton named him secretary of the Army.
In that position, West ordered a 1995 review of the Army's racial climate, including whether there were ties between extremist groups and members of the military.
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