Word: pentagonals
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...tradition took on great power - in the past, the Pentagon took great pains to ensure the bodies of unknowns remained unidentified, even going so far as to destroy relevant documents about where bodies were discovered and with what, if any, personal effects. But with the advent of DNA testing in the 1980s and '90s, the tradition of burying an unknown soldier has begun to decline. Most soldiers around the world are now required to supply blood samples upon joining the military to ensure their bodies can be identified if they are slain in the line of duty. Although military personnel...
...first alarms began to sound while he was still in training. "He was very vocal about being a Muslim first and holding Shari'a law above the Constitution," says an officer who attended the Pentagon's medical school with Hasan but would speak only off the record because his commanders ordered him not to discuss the case. "When fellow students asked, 'How can you be an officer and not hold to the Constitution?,' he'd get visibly upset - sweaty and nervous - and had no good answers." This officer was so disturbed when Hasan gave a talk asserting that...
...Washington-area Joint Terrorism Task Force reviewed the transcripts along with the task force's representative at the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS); they reviewed Hasan's personnel file and concluded there was no need to open an investigation. The exchange was just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, that al-Awlaki was having with people in the U.S. The contents of the e-mails seemed relatively innocuous, inquiries about his legitimate area of research - trying to figure out how Muslims in the military are affected when sent to fight against fellow Muslims. Says a counterterrorism official who spoke...
...Pentagon said it never heard about the e-mails; thus began the finger-pointing. "Once they're assigned," a senior Pentagon official says of DCIS officers, "they work for the task force, not us." FBI Director Robert Mueller has ordered a review of the bureau's knowledge of Hasan to determine whether "any policies or practices should change based on what we learn." Among other challenges will be figuring out how to distinguish real threats from provocative behavior and how to train agents to be confident enough to make that judgment. At this moment, there are hundreds of thousands...
...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...