Hartzler: Skelton dropped ball on Fort Hood probe

In a news release issued today, Fourth District Congressional candidate Vicky Hartzler, a former Republican state representative, charged Congressman Ike Skelton with dropping the ball and protecting President Obama when it comes to the investigation of the shooting of soldiers at Fort Hood:

GOP congressional candidate Vicky Hartzler said today that 17-term Democrat Ike Skelton should call on President Obama to stop stonewalling the bipartisan Senate probe of failures that led to the massacre of American soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. Hartzler is seeking the Republican nomination to the U.S. House for Missouri’s Fourth District.

Army Major Nidal Hasan is in custody and under charge in the shooting rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009. His past associations with radical Islamic teaching were quickly discovered by the news media.

Hartzler said: “This liberal Congress is failing at many of the most basic jobs, including strong oversight of the Obama Administration. This must change, and Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman now are pressing the Administration hard for information that Congress obviously must have about Fort Hood. They now have been forced by the Administration’s indifferent silence to proceed to a subpoena. I call on Mr. Skelton to help them by endorsing this bipartisan insistence on knowing all the facts, and by his prompt demand that the White House stop the stonewalling.

“Many of us hoped for more from Mr. Skelton than he provided at his House hearing in January. The House hearing was notable mainly for reciting what everybody knew – that ‘mistakes were made,’ as they say in Bureaucrat Land, and changes would be made or attempted. The House hearing also provided the Administration with a launching pad for the rightly criticized West-Clark report, which spent a ton of time on trying to not address the issue of radical Islamic terrorism in the United States.

“The safety of the dedicated men and women serving our country and their families living on our military installations is a priority to me and of the people of the Fourth District.  Those who sign on to defend our country need to know that their best interests are being protected by their superiors and that all steps are being taken to ensure their safety.  We need to know what went wrong at Ft. Hood in order to ensure that a similar tragedy does not occur elsewhere.

“I truly hope Mr. Skelton will step up and do two things, now that the Obama Administration has clearly failed any test of reasonable patience. First, I call on him to state his support for the Collins-Lieberman subpoenas and their insistence on the complete facts about Fort Hood. Second, I call on him to tell his White House that oversight and accountability are real, and that we expect and deserve an end to stonewalling on Fort Hood. If Skelton believes the Administration’s is right to refuse to provide this information to Congress, I assume he will tell us why.”