Oh wait.

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.

The ABC News piece doesn’t, as I write at the Windy, explain whether, if at all, those connections were shared with the Army. But let’s put this in perspective. from 2001 to 2007 there was an expansive and presidentially-directed constellation of programs, outside the reach of the judicial branch, to collect intelligence about Americans’ prospective connections to extremist organizations. In 2008, Congress and President Bush decided to carve up the 4th Amendment to make the program legally kosher, a move that now-President Obama voted for in the Senate. And, as Marcy Wheeler has documented more thoroughly than anyone else, there remains widespread surveillance of Americans, including what most likely is a very broad datamining program. All of this is to protect Americans from extremists killing them.

And now we learn that with this apparatus in place — with the national-security pointer shifted further away from the civil-liberties region of the dial — a guy goes searching for members of al-Qaeda; and while it’s not known if he made contact or what happened later, he kills 16 Americans on an Army base; and U.S. intelligence had, apparently, some basis for suspicion that this was going on. I stand by my concerns about where Joe Lieberman is going with all this, but an investigation is necessary to determine if the intelligence agencies did, in fact know about Hasan and why his murderous attack nevertheless succeeded. At this point “radicalization” in the armed services — a surely minute and peripheral concern, even after Hasan — is less important than determining why it was that the architecture of surveillance, pushed on the public so heavily as vital to preventing precisely what happened at Ft. Hood, failed us.