Holding back on Ft. Hood probe

Maybe there’s a good reason…something to do with national security perhaps?…that the feds won’t fully cooperate with the congressional investigation into the whole story behind the Ft. Hood massacre. But headlines about the government’s ‘partial compliance’ does beg the question. Why only partial compliance?

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, an independent, and Susan Collins, the panel’s top Republican, issued their subpoenas last week after the departments of Justice and Defense failed to provide the materials.

Committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips called the Pentagon’s response “an affront to Congress’s constitutional obligation to conduct independent oversight of the Executive Branch.”

But she stopped short of saying whether the panel would pursue a contempt of Congress citation and a court fight with the administration. “Senators Lieberman and Collins are weighing their options for future action,” Phillips said.

The two senators have been trying for months to obtain documents and gain access to witnesses they say are critical to their investigation of November’s shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army base in which 13 soldiers were killed and dozens wounded.

In addition to Hasan’s personnel file, [Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff] Morrell said the committee would be given access to sensitive information contained in an internal Pentagon investigation of the shooting that had previously been withheld from the committee.

Not sure where this stands, because at the top of the article it says the sensitive information from the internal invesgation would not be given to the congressional panel. At bottom, in has the Pentagon saying they would give the panel access to at least some information.

Back in the Bush era, media heavyweights and popular resistence groups loudly and frequently called for investigations and full disclosure by the administration. Why so little attention on this glaring mishandling of a deadly shooting spree that, by many indications we do know of, could have been avoided?

Just wondering.