U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

The story sidesteps the question of whether Hasan actually made contact with al-Qaeda. The reporting so far indicates investigators believe he was acting alone. I think here I should go easier on Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), though the concerns about how his investigation may proceed still stand.

How could U.S. intelligence have not communicated this information to the Army? On the presumption that the intel side did not — which is not proven in the piece — I guess an explanation would be that the intel people were gathering information for future use, but that’s divorced from any actual evidence I possess. Still, there is an extensive apparatus for surveilling people in this country with minimal-to-no judicial oversight precisely for the warning signs of their connections to extremist organizations. How’s that working out for us?

The New York Times reports:

The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges.

Now, that might not really be a substantive renegotiation. The destination of the fuel is less important to the administration than getting the stockpile of it out of Iran all at once. But that’s what the Iranians are apparently still holding out to do. Will the Obama administration agree to that? And if so, how much time would any such agreement put back on Iran’s nuclear clock?

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is awake and talking, a Brooke Army Medical Center spokesman said Sunday.

Dewey Mitchell, public affairs chief at the hospital in San Antonio, said he did not know if the man accused in Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood is talking to investigators.

“I am not sure how much he is talking,” Mitchell said. “There is some communication going on.”

They have grand rounds, right? They, you know, dozens of medical staff come into an auditorium, and somebody stands at the podium at the front and gives a lecture about some academic issue, you know, what drugs to prescribe for what condition. But instead of that, he – Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.

And I said to the psychiatrist, but this cold be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he’s educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I’m a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don’t believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn’t say, well, I’m just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.

That’s a case where, as Gen. George Casey pointed out, the Muslim experience is particularly valuable, as the Muslim in the audience challenged Hasan’s portrayal of Koranic obligations. The fact that Hasan didn’t listen only deepens the point that his religion was a pretext for his psychosis.

The Washington Post reports that investigators, who still find more evidence than not that Hasan acted alone, are checking out Hasan’s attendance of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in northern Virginia. Dar al-Hijrah, which I came across in reporting a couple of years ago about possible Falls Church links to terrorism, had an imam with murky connections to the 9/11 attackers. But, as an anonymous ex-counterterrorism official cautions to the Post, tons of people attended Dar al-Hijrah with no connection to al-Qaeda. What seems more important, judging from what’s being reported about the Hasan investigation, is that the accused murderer apparently spent a lot of time on extremist Websites, which might have sharpened his focus.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

But, as if Casey never said it, here’s the independent senator from Connecticut:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” labeled the shooting spree “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11” and said that as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he intended to investigate Major Hasan’s suspected motives and whether the Army “missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him.”

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Senator Lieberman said. “He should have been gone.”

It’s important to ask the question of whether Hasan acted alone. The early evidence is that he did. But the question is appropriate, because the stakes are people’s lives.

But that’s the stake in Lieberman’s investigation, too. Inquiries like the one he described have an awful tendency to build the conclusion into the premise — turning constitutionally protected speech or religious behavior or dissent into troubling “signs,” when the person exercising his freedoms worships in a mosque and not a church or a synagogue. The soldiers who died at Ft. Hood did not serve their country to see it devolve into witchhunting.

Reliable sources tell The Cable that the review has entered its final stages, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones now taking the lead and putting on the final touches.

Today, Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke cancelled a planned speaking event scheduled for Wednesday, November 18, at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, “due to unforeseen changes in the speaker’s schedule,” a group representative said.

And the administration sent a team to Brussels this week to consult with all 43 member nations of the International Security Assistance Force, including all 28 NATO nations.

An end to “dithering” may come the week of Nov. 16, Josh thinks.

Our Nation’s thoughts and prayers are with the service members, civilians, and families affected by the tragic events at Fort Hood, Texas. The brave victims, who risked their lives to protect their fellow countrymen, serve as a constant source of strength and inspiration to all Americans. We ask God to watch over the fallen, the wounded, and all those who are suffering at this difficult hour.

As a mark of respect honoring the victims of the tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, Tuesday, November 10, 2009. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same length of time at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA.

We know that Dr. Hasan is a devout Muslim who once told a fellow officer that “Muslims have a right to stand up against the U.S. military.” Clearly, yesterday’s rampage was not motivated by love. Given Hasan’s worldview, it’s probable that he was motivated in part by an animus toward Christians and Jews. Assuming that murder charges are brought against him, will Hasan also be charged with a hate crime?

Just count the leaps in logic. It should be obvious that Scarborough is only barely talking about Hasan. He’s talking about Islam in general, since the basis for his wild-eyed speculations is Hasan’s “worldview,” by which the man means that Hasan is a “devout Muslim.” This is the next stage of the slander. In Scarborough’s view, Hasan isn’t even part of a small cohort of psychopaths who hijack Islam as a pretext for their murderous tendencies. He’s following the tenets of his religion — a religion subscribed to by something like a billion and a half people on this planet.

Conservatives want to bleat about how PC hysteria is inhibiting their right to say racist things about Muslims without criticism. But it’s funny how you never see people like Scarborough referred to as what they are: radical clerics.

“This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in a statement. “Our soldiers are being brainwashed.”

The release added that West claims “the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.”

This is further out there than even Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s slanders on Muslim U.S. soldiers. We don’t know what Hasan’s motivations actually were, let alone that he’s a symptom of “the enemy” “infiltrating” the military. Hasan, it’s worth remembering, joined the Army in 1995, even before Osama bin Laden had declared war on America.

But this is perhaps typical of West’s reasoning, as he was disciplined in the Army in Iraq for actually firing his weapon near a detainee’s head during an interrogation, which is typically a crime. CNN:

In testimony at an Article 32 hearing — the military’s version of a grand jury or preliminary hearing — West said the policeman, Yahya Jhrodi Hamoody, was not cooperating with interrogators, so he watched four of his soldiers from the 220th Field Artillery Battalion beat the detainee on the head and body.

West said he also threatened to kill Hamoody. Military prosecutors say West followed up on that threat by taking the suspect outside, put him on the ground near a weapons clearing barrel and fired his 9 mm pistol into the barrel.

To make a point no one should have to make: earlier this year, a deranged Army sergeant named John Russell opened fire near a combat stress clinic — sound familiar? — at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty and killed five of his fellow soldiers. No one speculated about any religious motivations. No one suggested he was part of an enemy “infiltration,” or suggested that U.S. troops have been “brainwashed.” Everyone understood that Russell was a deranged lunatic, not an advance scout for a conspiracy to subvert the military internally. It’s funny how double standards work.

Actually, no. It’s disgusting.

My favorite response to that comes from VetVoice’s Richard Allen Smith:

A dumb f—— idea, not the least of reasons being that Major Hasan’s records indicated he had no religious preference”, so he wouldn’t have been screened anyway.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

Update: Via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter, conservative writer David Frum provides an elegant and moving illustration of this point.