KILLEEN - Ordering a soldier to erase cell-phone videos of a mass shooting at Fort Hood could be a crime, two former military lawyers said Saturday.
"It could be obstruction of justice because it could be potentially destruction of important evidence," said Washington, D.C., attorney F. Whitten Peters, who was the Pentagon's No. 2 lawyer from 1995 to 1997, when he became the Air Force's top civilian leader.
Another lawyer, Morris Davis, who served as the third chief prosecutor in the Guantanamo military commissions, said those involved in destruction of the videos could be criminally liable.
Peters and Davis were asked for their opinions in light of stunning testimony Friday by Pfc. Lance Aviles, who escaped the shooting at Fort Hood last year that left 13 dead and at least 32 injured. Aviles said during an evidentiary hearing for the accused shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, that an officer and a noncommissioned officer ordered him to delete the video from his cell phone on the day of the shooting.
Aviles testified about the videos and their erasure during cross-examination by the lead attorney for Hasan. Aviles didn't divulge the content, which was taped on his BlackBerry phone at a Fort Hood deployment center where the shooting occurred.
On Saturday, Hasan's lawyer, retired Army Col. John Galligan, said in an interview that one video was about 1 minute and the other was 35 seconds.
Aviles didn't mention them when he met with Texas Rangers days later, Galligan said, but he did during a Dec. 9 interview with Fort Hood's Criminal Investigation Division.
"'I saved it on my phone,'" Galligan, reading from a transcript, quoted Aviles as saying. "'I took my phone out again and recorded it, a lot of it was of the ground but I figured people like you might need it.'"