updates on fort hood shooting,

The Pentagon Channel, a Department of Defense broadcaster, has posted video on its Web site of Thursday’s two news conferences at Fort Hood, both featuring the base commander, Gen. Robert Cone, who said in the first briefing that the suspected gunman, Major Nidal Hasan had been killed, and then corrected that statement in the second briefing.
Reporters in the Washington area, where Major Nidal Hasan, the suspected gunman, lived and worked before being sent to Fort Hood to prepare for his deployment to Afghanistan, have discovered that he prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring. Md. The Washington Post reports:

In an interview, his aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, said he had endured name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had sought for several years to be discharged from the military.

“I know what that is like,” she said. “Some people can take it, and some cannot. He had listened to all of that, and he wanted out of the military, and they would not let him leave even after he offered to repay” for his medical training.

In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC Friday morning, Gen. Robert Cone, the Fort Hood commander, said that Major Hasan is in stable condition but has not yet been interrogated. Mr. Lauer said that a relative of one of the witnesses to the shooting said that Major Hasan shouted “Allahu akbar” (”God is great”) during the rampage. Gen. Cone said that “there are first-hand accounts here from soldiers that are similar to that.”

A news conference is underway at Fort Hood, where Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist facing deployment to one of America’s war zones, killed 13 people and wounded 30 others on Thursday in a shooting rampage at the huge Army base in central Texas.

An Army spokesman, Col. John Rossi, told reporters that the military is still checking to see if the handguns the gunman used during the rampage were licensed or not.

Another Army spokesman, Col. Steven Braverman, the commander of the base’s hospital, said that there has been “an initial surge of behavioral health providers” to help soldiers deal with the trauma of the attack. The gunman, Major Hasan, was a psychiatrist who provided that sort of assistance to soldiers. Before his deployment to Fort Hood, he was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress in Bethesda, Maryland.