Obama faces questions at Fort Hood

President Barack Obama joins this shaken military community yesterday in mourning victims of a bloody rampage amid growing questions about the chief suspect's links to militant Islam.
In a television interview on the eve of his visit, Obama said the question being asked was, “Is this an individual who's acting in this way or is it some larger set of actors?”
Major Nidal Hasan emerged from a coma and was able to talk for the first time since he allegedly opened fire on fellow soldiers Thursday, killing 13 people and wounding 42 others before being gunned down by a female police officer.
"He is talking. He is conversing with the medical staff," a spokeswoman for the Brooke Army Medical Centre in San Antonio told AFP, refusing to say whether he had been questioned by army investigators.
The Washington Post reported that Hasan, an army psychiatrist, warned a roomful of senior army physicians a year and a half ago that to avoid "adverse events" the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released from duty as conscientious objectors.
"It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims," he was quoted as saying in the investigation.
While investigators believe 39-year-old Hasan, a devout Muslim, acted alone, new questions arose as to whether the shooting could have been a terror attack, amid reports he may have had links to an American-born imam who has backed al-Qaeda.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday Hasan in late 2008 had communicated with a subject of a terrorist investigation, but that the topics he discussed were part of his work as a psychiatrist and "nothing else derogatory was found."
The investigators "concluded that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning," the FBI said in a statement.
However, it added, Obama met with FBI Director Robert Mueller and ordered a full review of the shooting incident with the aim of determining whether "with the benefit of hindsight, any policies or practices should change based on what we learn."
Obama told ABC television that he was determined "to complete this investigation and we are going to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again."
Federal investigators are examining possible links between the army psychiatrist and Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was the spiritual leader of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, The Washington Post reported.
Hasan had attended the mosque in 2001, a year before Aulaqi left the United States and settled in Yemen.
The imam was said to have crossed paths with al-Qaeda associates, including two September 11 hijackers, and is now believed to have become a supporter of the terror network, the paper said, citing a senior US official.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has said he would launch a probe into whether the army missed any warning signs, which could have prevented the attack.
"There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," he told "Fox News Sunday."
Some 5,000 people were expected to join Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the memorial service for the victims.
"I'll be heading to there tomorrow so that I can personally express the incredible heartbreak that we all feel for -- for the loss of these young men and women," Obama said.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates visited the base on Monday to meet the families of those killed and to visit some of the wounded, including police sergeant Kimberly Munley, hailed as a heroine for confronting the gunman.
The bloody spree left army officials still scrambling to understand how one of their own could turn on his fellow soldiers, prompting pledges of better monitoring in the future.
The shooting suspect "was a soldier and we have other soldiers that, you know, that might have some of the same stress and indicators that he has," Lieutenant General Robert Cone, the base's commander, told reporters.
Officers must now keep an eye out for similar signs of disquiet "across our entire formation, not just in the medical community, but look hard to our right and left," he said.