Lawmakers seek answers on Fort Hood

  
The Senate Armed Services Committee, which had been due to hear from US Army Secretary John McHugh and Army chief of staff General George Casey, gave no reason for the delay or new time-frame for the closed-door session.
  
But a Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the panel's inner workings, said lawmakers had wanted to bring in additional US intelligence officials who were not available for the Monday briefing.
  
The committee's chairman, Democratic Senator Carl Levin, said last week he expected "a detailed accounting" of the incident, which left 13 dead and 42 wounded on the sprawling military base in Texas.
  
McCain wants answers

And the panel's top Republican, Senator John McCain, wants to "learn how we can prevent this from happening again," spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said, two days after US President Barack Obama promised "the full story" on the rampage.
  
Obama, speaking Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address, said the official investigation into the November 5 spree would unearth "what steps, if any" might have prevented the attack.
  
The US president vowed a complete assessment of the "motives" of the alleged gunman, army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, "including his views and contacts" amid questions about his alleged ties to an radical Muslim cleric.
  
Obama insists "full story to be told"

"Given the potential warning signs that may have been known prior (to) these shootings, we must uncover what steps -- if any -- could have been taken to avert this tragedy," said Obama. "I will insist that the full story be told."
  
Other congressional panels with oversight over law enforcement and the US military are expected to zero in on the same issues this week.
  
The Senate Judiciary Committee is almost sure to quiz Attorney General Eric Holder about it at a Wednesday hearing, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has set a Thursday session on the rampage.

Shooting was 'permissibile' under Islam: Yemeni cleric
  
The issue of Hasan's "contacts" gained fresh import Monday as a radical Yemeni cleric who exchanged emails with him "blessed the act" and said the deadly shooting was "permissible" under Islam.
  
In his first interview since the November 5 rampage, Anwar al-Awlaqi said the attack was allowed under Islamic law, sharia, because it was a form of jihad, or holy war, but that he had not ordered or encouraged it.
  
"I blessed the act because it was against a military target," Awlaqi told Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist who interviewed him for The Washington Post.
  
"And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq. America was the one who first brought the battle to Muslim countries," Awlaqi said.
  
US intelligence agencies intercepted emails between Hasan and Awlaqi, who is now in Yemen but was a leader of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque outside Washington, attended by Hasan and two hijackers of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
  
In about a dozen email exchanges, Hasan seemed to question the US military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, often using "evidence from sharia (Islamic law) that what America was doing should be confronted," Awlaqi said.
  
The cleric, who described Hasan as a man serious about his Muslim faith and eager to learn how to interpret sharia, said the shooting suspect first contacted him in an email dated December 17, 2008 recalling that he had previously attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
  
Awlaqi declined to be interviewed by an American journalist writing for The Washington Post, preferring to be questioned instead by a Yemeni at his home in the restive province of Shabwa in southern Yemen.