Army massacre fiend Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly tried to make contact with al Qaeda terrorists, something intelligence agencies were aware of months ago.
It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that Maj. Hasan, an Army shrink, was seeking to connect with suspected terrorists, ABC News reported today on its Web site.
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A senior lawmaker, who was not identified by ABC News, said the CIA had refused to brief congressional intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.
CIA director Leon Panetta has been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the senior lawmaker.
Hasan is accused of killing 13 people and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday.
Investigators want to know if Hasan kept in contact with a radical mosque leader from Falls Church, Va., Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and promotes jihad against the US.
In a blog posting this morning, titled “Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hassan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people,” ABC News reported.
The Telegraph of London reported that Awlaki had made contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers when he was in San Diego and that Hasan prayed at the same mosque with them before the attacks.
Hasan was scheduled to be deployed soon to Afghanistan, and that might have fueled his deadly rage, officials said.
But clearly, the massacre might have been an act of terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said yesterday.
“I want to say very quickly we don’t know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act,” Lieberman told Fox News Channel.
Either way, the Army should have booted the deeply disturbed Hasan the moment he showed any signs of extremism, said Lieberman, who heads the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Hasan’s classmates at the Uniformed Services University, the military college where he recently took master’s courses, said they repeatedly griped to higher-ups about his constant anti-American rants.
One said he warned superiors that the raging Hasan was a “ticking time bomb” after he made a presentation defending Islamic suicide bombers.
Another classmate said he complained to five officers and two civilian faculty members.
He wrote in a document sent to Pentagon officials that fear in the military of being seen as politically incorrect prevented an “intellectually honest discussion of Islamic ideology” in the ranks.
Lieberman said, “If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the US Army has to have zero tolerance. He should have been gone.”