DEBORAH AMOS, Host:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Deborah Amos.
STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
Tom, good morning.
TOM BOWMAN: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What did the government know?
BOWMAN: And then there are also questions about his performance as an officer, that he was a substandard performer. So everyone had a piece but no government agency had the entire picture that he was a threat.
INSKEEP: This is reminding me of reporting at the time from our own Danny Zwerdling, that Major Hasan's colleagues who worked with him in the Army hospitals had concerns about him, specifically at Walter Reed Medical Center.
BOWMAN: The head psychiatric resident at Walter Reed, Scott Moran, tried in the spring of 2007 to kick Major Hasan out. But his superiors never acted on it. Moran wrote in a memo, which NPR obtained, denouncing Hasan for his, quote, "patterns of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism."
INSKEEP: Okay. So somebody wrote a memo. But then there's, of course, the question of who gets it. Was this kind of information available to superiors who not only left Hasan in the service but actually promoted him?
BOWMAN: Now, I'm also told as the Army goes through this report in the coming weeks and months, we expect to see some disciplinary action against some of Hasan's supervisors, maybe as many as a half a dozen or so. And they could be disciplined by let's say letters of reprimand or something like that.
INSKEEP: All right. Letter of reprimand, maybe that seems appropriate for letting someone get promoted when the record didn't seem to show that they really deserved it. But isn't this a good deal more serious? I mean a lot of warning signs were missed leading up to a massacre here.
BOWMAN: No, absolutely. And of course the FBI is at fault here, because, again, they had these emails that Hasan sent to this cleric. And if you put that together with the problems that he had as an officer - what one officer told me, you know, if we had the entire picture of Hasan, the context with this radical cleric in Yemen, the substandard performance, so if you had all that together we would have seen him as a threat, and hopefully we would have tried to get him kicked out of the Army.
INSKEEP: Very briefly, Tom Bowman, what will this Pentagon report due out today recommend to prevent such problems in the future?
BOWMAN: And the other thing is - this is more subjective - they want to make sure the commanders, that they have a responsibility, they're going to tell them, to have a sense of who is serving under them, whether there are any complaints from colleagues and so forth.
INSKEEP: Okay.
BOWMAN: Just a better sense of who they are before any problems arise.
INSKEEP: Okay. Thanks very much. That's NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.