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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: Fighting over Ft. Hood

By Michael McGough
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Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the sort-of Democrat who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is accusing the Obama administration of stonewalling the panel’s investigation of last year’s Ft. Hood massacre. The administration has given the committee some of the documents it subpoenaed, but not others, citing the possibility that release of transcripts of some interviews might jeopardize the court-martial of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting spree. The administration also has refused to provide the committee with access to Pentagon and FBI agents who reviewed Hasan’s communications with the U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar Awlaki.

One expert on military law agrees with Lieberman that giving the committee the additional information won’t compromise Hasan’s court-martial. Even so, the committee should give the administration the benefit of the doubt. Congress already has enough information about Ft. Hood to determine, for purposes of legislation, that new procedures are necessary to discover when a member of the armed services ‘self-radicalizes’ as Hasan apparently did.

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Although Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the panel’s ranking Republican, insist they don’t want to intrude on the criminal investigation, they have acted as if the committee should be the definitive fact-finder in this case. That was true even when facts were scarce: The committee rushed to hold hearings within two weeks of the massacre, opening itself to charges of grandstanding.

There are occasionally situations -- Watergate is the prime example -- when a criminal investigation is fatally compromised by politics or corruption. In such cases, Congress serves the public interest by conducting the equivalent of a criminal investigation on the pretext of educating itself for the purposes of legislation. This isn’t one of those circumstances.

-- Michael McGough

Opinion L.A.
Michael McGough

Michael McGough is the Los Angeles Times’ former senior editorial writer, based in Washington, D.C. He wrote editorials for The Times from 2006 to 2021. Before that, McGough worked for 30 years for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a reporter, editorial writer, editorial page editor and Washington correspondent. He wrote about law, national security, politics, foreign policy and religion. McGough is a graduate of Allegheny College and also attended the University of Kent at Canterbury in England and Yale Law School, where he received a master of studies in law degree.

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