Independent Review of the Washington Navy Yard Shooting
Pentagon Finds Washington Navy Yard Killings Could Have Been Prevented
WASHINGTON — A Defense Section review of the mass shooting that killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in September has concluded that the deaths could accept been prevented if the Navy had properly evaluated and reported alarming behavior past the gunman, Aaron Alexis, a old Navy reservist.
At a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel released the review along with an independent review that institute that threats to war machine men and women were increasingly coming from within, including from colleagues with security clearances.
In response to both reviews, Mr. Hagel ordered new security procedures at the Pentagon and at American military bases in the United states of america and overseas.
The independent review called the overall security process at Pentagon installations outdated, with too much focus on keeping a secure perimeter against outside threats and not enough on examining the potential threats from people granted secret-level clearance to enter the installations. The review recommended that the Pentagon examine the number of people with security clearances and consider revoking at least x percent of them.
Mr. Hagel said the reviews institute "troubling gaps" in the Defense Department's "ability to detect, prevent and respond to instances where someone working for usa — a government employee, member of our military, or a contractor — decides to inflict harm on this institution and its people."
A month before the Navy Thousand shooting, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was convicted of carrying out the largest mass murder at a military installation in American history, a shooting in Nov 2009 that killed xiii people and left more than 30 wounded at a medical deployment center at Fort Hood, Tex.
From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Alexis was a full-time reservist in the Navy, where he served every bit an aviation electrician's mate and achieved the rank of petty officeholder third form. At the time of the shooting, he worked for a company called the Experts that was a subcontractor for Hewlett-Packard and serviced the Navy's Net system. He had a secret-level clearance.
On the morn of Sept. 16, Mr. Alexis entered the base of operations with a concealed, sawed-off shotgun, killed 12 people and wounded 4 others before he was killed past the police an hour and a half subsequently he first opened burn.
The Defense Department review found that both Navy officials and Mr. Alexis' employers should accept raised alerts virtually events in Mr. Alexis' history that the review portrayed as red flags. In particular, the report took the contracting companies to chore for non taking any action to deal with his "emotional, mental and personality condition, even when they had concerns" that he could harm others.
"Had this data been reported, properly adjudicated and acted upon," the review said, Mr. Alexis' "authorization to access secure facilities and data would have been revoked."
In 2004, 3 years earlier enlisting as a Navy reservist, Mr. Alexis brandished a .45-quotient pistol and fired at the tires of a construction worker's machine. In September 2010, he was arrested by the police in Fort Worth later on he fired through the ceiling of his residence. Merely commanders stopped efforts to force Mr. Alexis out of the Navy with a less-than-honorable discharge because the constabulary declined to pursue the example, and it was not entered into his military file.
In August 2013, a few weeks before the shooting, Mr. Alexis told the police in Rhode Island that he was hearing voices sent past a "microwave automobile," prompting the authorities to fax a written report to a naval police in Newport, where Mr. Alexis was working temporarily every bit a contractor. Only the naval law did not alert superiors in Washington.
At the time, Mr. Alexis' visitor temporarily withdrew his admission to classified information and contacted his mother, who told them, according to a subsequent company investigation, that her son was paranoid and that the microwave episode was not the first of that kind he had experienced. But the study said the company restored his secure access after concluding that the information was based on rumor.
Paul North. Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defense force who worked on the contained review, told reporters at the news briefing that for decades the military has operated on the premise that "if we build a fence effectually us, we'll be secure." But he said that approach "is outmoded, it'southward cleaved, and it needs to be replaced." Much more needs to be done, he added, to brand certain that people working on American military bases are not dangerous to others.
The independent review, led by Mr. Stockton, also suggested conducting more background checks on people who already take security clearances.
Currently security clearances are reviewed every five or 10 years, depending on the level of clearance. "The assessment is that that approach limits our ability to understand the evolution that may occur in a person'due south life that may have them evolve from a trusted insider to an insider threat," said Marcel Lettre, the principal deputy nether secretary of defense for intelligence, who spoke at the news conference.
Defense officials said they would as well work to "de-stigmatize" mental health treatment in the military, although they did not go into specifics on how.
Mr. Stockton said 1 possibility might exist changing the question on standard security questionnaires. The electric current form, he said, asks whether a respondent seeks mental health care.
"I believe that this question ought to be drastically changed," he said, adding that "self-reporting is inherently unreliable."
But defence force officials as well said that they must try to make sure that military machine men and women, and the civilians who work with them, practice not finish up getting the bulletin that they volition be fired if they seek mental health care.
"Information technology is important as we move forward to remember near the services that we can provide to both our military and our civilian work forcefulness to assistance them as they determine they may need to seek mental health counseling," Mr. Lettre said. "And we demand to make sure that nosotros do that in conjunction with, in parallel with the other efforts that nosotros've undertaken here to deal with the insider threat claiming."
Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was "imperative that we fix these glaring issues before another tragedy occurs."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/us/navy-yard-rampage-could-have-been-prevented-pentagon-review-says.html
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