Washington Post, 18 Nov 09: Three weeks before Maj. Nidal M. Hasan purchased the semiautomatic pistol allegedly used in the Fort Hood attack, a radical Yemeni American cleric whom he frequently e-mailed gave a broad religious blessing to Muslims who attack “government armies in the Muslim world.”

“These armies are the defenders of apostasy,” Anwar al-Aulaqi wrote in English on his Internet site July 15 from Yemen, according to the NEFA Foundation, a private South Carolina group that monitors extremist sites. “Blessed are those who fight against them and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them.”

Aulaqi’s incendiary rhetoric has been captured in witness statements and on computer hard drives of terrorism suspects in Toronto, New Jersey and Minneapolis in recent years. But current and former U.S. officials say the New Mexico-born imam has skated the line between advocating violent extremism and committing a crime that would land him in the U.S. legal system.

At the simplest level, Aulaqi’s emergence as a spiritual adviser in contact with Hasan returns investigators to the question of what could have been done to stop the 39-year-old Army psychiatrist before he allegedly committed his first crime — bringing an unauthorized weapon onto a military base. More broadly, U.S. counterterrorism officials say, it intensifies a debate over how to prevent Americans from “self-radicalizing” by turning to al-Qaeda supporters on the Internet, such as Aulaqi.

“What do we do as a society about people who are espousing a radical, violent ideology but who are not committing a criminal act?” asked Juan Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser from 2005 to 2009 who now is at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Given the nature of our society and protections of our Constitution, it’s a very difficult question.”

Military authorities say they continue to pursue all possible motives behind the Nov. 5 massacre at the Army’s largest domestic base of 13 people as they rested before deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hasan’s lawyer has said his “mental responsibility” will be part of his defense against charges of premeditated murder.

Intelligence analysts, counterterrorism officials and Congress are already turning to whether Hasan may be part of a larger trend of “homegrown radicalization” and whether changes are needed in how law enforcement investigates individuals absent evidence of crime, what kind of information intelligence agencies can collect on U.S. citizens, or how such sensitive information can be used and shared with others. . . . . . .

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