The U.S. military was aware of worrisome behavior by the massacre suspect long before the attack.
Finger-pointing erupted between federal agencies Tuesday over Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Hasan. Government officials said a Defense Department terrorism investigator looked into Hasan’scontacts with a radical imam months ago, but a military official deniedprior knowledge of the Army psychiatrist’s contacts with any Muslim extremists.
Thetwo government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity becausethey were not authorized to discuss the case on the record, said theWashington-based joint terrorism task force overseen by the FBI was notified of communications between Hasan and a radical imam overseas, and the information was turned over to a Defense Criminal Investigative Service employeeassigned to the task force. The communications were gathered byinvestigators beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early thisyear.
That Defense investigator wrote up an assessment of Hasan afterreviewing the communications and the Army major’s personnel file,according to these officials. The assessment concluded Hasan did notmerit further investigation — in large part because his communicationswith the imam were centered on a research paper about the effects ofcombat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the investigator determined that Hasan was in fact working on such a paper, the officials said.