
As Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (I-CT) vows to have the Senate itself investigate the shootings at Fort Hood, disturbing new evidence suggests that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the chief suspect in the shootings, might not have been acting entirely alone.
Hasan was already known to have prayed at some of the same mosques where two of the assassins involved in the Manhattan Incident, aka "9/11", also prayed. The Daily Telegraph (London, England) states that Hasan worshipped at a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, when those two assassins were present. (They were not likely to share with Hasan the details of a highly sensitive operation; he might, after all, "blow" it by accident.) But this morning, ABC News learned that Major Hasan had tried several months ago to contact certain known or suspected figures in Al-Qa'ida ("The Base"), the most prominent global Muslim terror network. Representative Pete Hoesktra (R-MI-2nd) has already sent in a request for document preservation to four separate intelligence-agency directors, each of whom might have something on paper bearing on this question.
Update: Fox News has learned from two officials, speaking on background, that investigators have now found copies of e-mails that Hasan sent to these Al-Qa'ida figures. Whether they actually answered him is an open question; one official suggests that these Al-Qa'ida persons "did not take Hasan seriously."
The original cleric, or imam, at that mosque now lives in Yemen and runs a radical website. Today he flatly called Major Hasan a hero for what he did.
For his part, Senator Lieberman says that the shootings constituted a terrorist act. He could have called it that strictly on the basis of the location and the casualty count. But he based that determination on the details that are now emerging about Hasan's psychological profile:
There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act.
Add to it that Hasan had been trying to connect with a terrorist network, and he begins to look more like a terrorist every day.