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By Paul J. Weber The Associated Press FORT HOOD, Texas » The sol- dier who killed three people at Fort Hood may have ar- gued with another service member prior to the at- tack, and investigators be- lieve his unstable mental health contributed to the rampage, authorities said Thursday. The base's senior officer, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, said there is a "strong possibility" that Spc. Ivan Lopez had a "verbal altercation" with an - other soldier or soldiers im- mediately before Wednes- day's shooting, which un- folded on the same Army post that was the scene of an infamous 2009 mass shoot- ing. However, there's no indi- cation that he targeted spe- cific soldiers, Milley said. Lopez never saw combat during a deployment to Iraq and had shown no apparent risk of violence before the shooting, officials said. The 34-year-old truck driver from Puerto Rico seemed to have a clean re - cord that showed no ties to extremist groups. But the Army secretary promised that investigators would keep all avenues open in their inquiry of the soldier whose rampage ended only after he fired a final bullet into his own head. "We're not making any assumptions by that. We're going to keep an open mind and an open investigation. We will go where the facts lead us," Army Secretary John McHugh said, explain - ing that "possible extrem- ist involvement is still being looked at very, very care- fully." Investigators were also looking into Lopez's psycho- logical background. He had sought help for depression, anxiety and other problems, military officials said. "We have very strong evi- dence that he had a medical history that indicates unsta- ble psychiatric or psycholog- ical condition," Milley said. "We believe that to be a fun- damental underlying cause." Scott & White Memorial Hospital in nearby Tem- ple, Texas, was still caring for several of the 16 people who were wounded. All of them were in either serious or good condition, and some could be discharged before the end of Thursday. Hospital officials had no information about patients being treated elsewhere, in - cluding at a base hospital. But because Scott & White is the area's only trauma center, the patients with the most serious injuries were probably taken there. Investigators searched the soldier's home Thurs - day and questioned his wife, Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said. Scene of the rampage Lopez apparently walked into a building Wednesday and began firing a .45-cal- iber semi-automatic pistol. He then got into a vehicle and continued firing before driving to another build - ing. He was eventually con- fronted by military police in a parking lot, Milley said. As he came within 20 feet of a police officer, the gunman put his hands up but then reached under his jacket and pulled out his gun. The officer drew her own weapon, and the sus - pect put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger, Mil- ley said. Lopez grew up in Guay- anilla, a town of fewer than 10,000 people on the south- western coast of Puerto Rico, with a mother who was a nurse at a public clinic and a father who did main - tenance for an electric util- ity company. Glidden Lopez Torres, who said he was a friend speaking for the family, said Lopez's mother died of a heart attack in November. The soldier was upset that he was granted only a 24- hour leave to attend her fu - neral, which was delayed for nearly a week so he could be there, the spokesman said. The leave was then extended to two days. Lopez joined the island's National Guard in 1999 and served on a yearlong peace - keeping mission in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in the mid- 2000s. He enlisted with the Army in 2008 and saw no combat during a four- month deployment to Iraq as a truck driver in 2011, McHugh said. sHOOTing Ar gu me nt m ay h av e pr ec ed ed F or t Ho od a tt ac k Eric Gay — ThE associaTEd PrEss Bob Gordon works on a memorial for the victims of Wednesday's shooting at Fort hood, Thursday at central christian church in Killeen, Texas. By stephen Ohlemacher The Associated Press WasHingTOn » Wind farms, NASCAR tracks and film- makers would keep their treasured tax breaks as part of an $85 billion package of temporary tax cuts passed by a key Senate committee Thursday. Some U.S. firms with for - eign income would be win- ners too after Senate Fi- nance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., backed off plans to significantly trim the package. Congress routinely passes the package of more than 50 temporary tax breaks for businesses and individuals, but they were allowed to ex - pire at the start of the year. The Senate Finance Com- mittee voted Thursday to extend all but two of them through 2015. The bill passed on a voice vote, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. Congress is expected to pass the tax package by the end of the year, so businesses and individuals can continue to claim the tax breaks when they file their 2014 taxes next year. Among the biggest breaks for businesses: A tax credit for research and develop - ment, an exemption that al- lows financial companies to shield foreign profits from being taxed by the U.S., and several provisions that al - low businesses to write off capital investments more quickly. The biggest tax break for individuals allows peo - ple who live in states with- out an income tax to deduct state and local sales taxes on their federal returns. An- other protects struggling homeowners who get their mortgages reduced from paying income taxes on the amount of debt that was for - given. Taxes Bill extends tax breaks for wind farms, filmmakers By Bradley Klapper The Associated Press WasHingTOn » The Sen- ate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to release parts of a hotly contested, secret report that harshly criticizes CIA terror inter - rogations after 9/11, and the White House said it would instruct intelligence officials to cooperate fully. The panel voted 11-3 to or - der the declassification of al- most 500 pages of a 6,300- page review that concluded waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" were excessively cruel and ineffective in pro - ducing valuable intelligence. Even some Republicans who agree with the spy agency that the findings are inac - curate voted in favor of de- classification, saying it was important for the country to move on. The intelligence com- mittee and the CIA are em- broiled in a bitter dispute related to the three-year study. Senators accuse the agency of spying on their investigation and deleting files. The CIA says Senate staffers illegally accessed in - formation. The Justice De- partment is reviewing com- peting criminal referrals. "The purpose of this re- view was to uncover the facts behind the secret program and the results, I think, were shocking," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif., the committee chair - woman. "The report ex- poses brutality that stands in sharp contrast to our values as a nation. It chron- icles a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again. This is not what Americans do." White House press sec- retary Jay Carney restated President Barack Obama's support for declassifying the document and said in - telligence officials would be instructed to conduct the work quickly. CIA spokes- man Dean Boyd said his agency would "carry out the review expeditiously," but suggested the process may be difficult. "We owe it to the men and women directed to carry out this program to try and en - sure that any historical ac- count of it is accurate," Boyd said. Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the intelligence committee's top Republi - can, joined the vote in favor of declassification despite criticizing the report as a "waste of time." He said the U.S. public should be able to see the report alongside res - ervations among the GOP members of the committee. "This is a chapter in our past that should have al - ready been closed," Cham- bliss told reporters. Members of the intelli- gence community have criti- cized the investigation for fail- ing to include interviews from top spy agency officials who authorized or supervised the brutal interrogations. They questioned how the review could be fair or complete. "Neither I or anyone else at the agency who had knowledge was inter - viewed," said Jose Rodri- guez, the CIA's chief clan- destine officer in the mid- 2000s, who had operational oversight over the detention and interrogation program. "They don't want to hear anyone else's narrative," he said of the Senate investiga - tion. "It's an attempt to re- write history." Rodriguez himself is a key figure in the Senate re- port, not least for his order in 2005 to destroy 92 video- tapes showing waterboard- ing of terror suspects and other harsh techniques. Congressional aides said the CIA's own field reports, internal correspondence, ca - bles and other documents de- scribed day-to-day handling of interrogations and the de- cision-making and actions of Rodriguez and others. As a result of the vote, the CIA will start scanning the report's contents for any passages that could compro - mise national security. That has led to fears that a recal- citrant CIA might sanitize key elements of what inves- tigators aim to be the fullest public reckoning of how al- Qaida suspects were treated in CIA-run prisons abroad. inTelligence Senate panel votes to release CIA torture report By Maria Danilova The Associated Press KieV, UKRaine » Ukraine's interim authorities accused the country's ousted presi- dent of ordering snipers to open fire on protesters and getting help from Russian security agents to battle his own people — but their re - port Thursday provided no evidence directly linking him to the bloodbath in Kiev. Acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov also charged that his predecessor em - ployed gangs of killers, kid- nappers and thugs to terror- ize and undermine the op- position during Ukraine's tumultuous winter of dis- content. The preliminary find- ings revealed by Kiev's new leadership examined the months of anti-government protests that culminated in the deaths in February over 100 people in Kiev, mostly protesters. That violence forced a truce between the opposition and the govern - ment, but the arrangement quickly collapsed and Presi- dent Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia. In the weeks since the bloodshed, Russia seized and then formally annexed Crimea, Ukraine's strate - gic Black Sea peninsula, and the U.S. and the European Union slapped sanctions on those responsible, mainly Russian President Vladi - mir Putin's inner circle. Also Thursday, Ukraine sent 16 senior officers to Bulgaria to join a NATO military exercise in a very public demonstration of co - operation between the alli- ance and the crisis-torn former Soviet republic. The computer-simulation drills involved over 700 troops from 13 NATO members and partner nations and were being held just a few hundred miles away from Crimea. The crisis now gripping Ukraine has its roots in three days of bloodshed that peaked on Feb. 20. Speaking at a televised press conference in Kiev, Avakov said police snipers at the time shot at demon - strators near the city's cen- tral square, known as the Maidan, as they walked to- ward the government dis- trict. He said 17 people were killed by government snip- ers positioned at the Octo- ber Palace cultural center and that one government sniper alone killed as many as eight people. Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky said 12 mem - bers of an elite riot police unit named "Black Squad- ron" have been detained on suspicion of shooting pro- testers. easTeRn eUROPe Ukraine: Yanukovych ordered snipers to shoot alExandEr shErBaKov — ThE associaTEd PrEss olesya Zhukovska, le, is helped aer being shot in her neck by a sniper bullet, in independence square, the epicenter of the country's current unrest, Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 20. 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