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Pentagon targets inside threats

WASHINGTON — Since 2005, the Pentagon has studied ways to spot potentially dangerous personnel who may have divided loyalties or have been radicalized by outside influences — the types of threats at issue in the Fort Hood mass killings.

An obscure Pentagon research center produced the studies, Defense Department documents show. Air Force Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to discuss the research or say whether the safeguards it proposed were in place at the time of the shooting.

Army Maj. Nidal Hasan has been charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. The military is investigating Hasan's contacts with a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen and what influence they may have had on the Army psychiatrist. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a panel to review the incident to examine "internal weaknesses" that may have left the military vulnerable to the attack.

The Defense Personnel Security Research Center in Monterey, Calif., did the studies. Its efforts are intended to speed security clearances for military personnel and identify internal threats.

A 2006 study produced guidelines for finding potentially dangerous employees using a combination of behavioral and psychological profiling. Insiders who pose threats often act in ways that concern coworkers and are influenced by stress and "personal predispositions," the study said.

A 2005 study recommended that the Pentagon improve how investigators share information and update its policies concerning ways in which employees may communicate online with extremist groups. Both issues are factors in the Hasan investigation.

A Pentagon author of that report, Kelly Buck, did not respond to phone calls. But she referred a reporter to Amotz Brandes, a managing partner of Chameleon Associates, a Canoga Park, Calif., consulting firm that advises the Pentagon on internal security procedures.

Brandes said that a program of profiling military personnel who display questionable conduct such as that attributed to Hasan might have identified him as a risk. "I'm talking about (uncovering) intent," Brandes said. "At the end of the day, a lot of these people have to choose sides. And some of them choose sides to be with the U.S. military and some of them choose to go against it."

Butterbaugh declined requests to interview the studies' authors. "We prefer not to discuss specifics that may be addressed in the review" ordered by Gates, he said.

The FBI has acknowledged that an anti-terrorism task force had been monitoring e-mails between Hasan and radical Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and did not share that information with the Army.

Most insiders in the military who pose threats will likely come "from active-duty persons being recruited or converting to radical ideologies out of religious conviction or after becoming recruited or converting to radical ideologies out of religious conviction or after becoming disaffected with a commander, a fellow soldier, an assignment or military service in general," the 2005 report said.

Hasan is a devout Muslim who became more outspoken about his beliefs and his opposition to being sent to war in Afghanistan against other Muslims, according to reports by National Public Radio and the Associated Press. He was slated to deploy there when the shootings occurred.