Trial to be in military court.

The FBI and the military investigated contacts between an Army psychiatrist accused of last week’s deadly shooting rampage at FortHood and a Yemen-based militant over the past year but concluded he didn’t pose a terrorist threat, senior law enforcement and military officials said Monday.

The members of two Joint Terrorism Task Forces, including one in the nation’s capital, went so far as to contact Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s superiors and review his academic and military records for evidence of suspicious activity late last year and early this year, according to three senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.

But the investigators from the multi-agency teams concluded that Hasan’s activities weren’t suspicious enough to warrant a more formal investigation, even though the militant imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, had ties to al-Qaida and was the author of a popular Web site espousing jihadist activity, according to the officials.

The officials also said Hasan’s e-mails to al-Awlaki, the imam at a Virginia mosque that Hasan attended in 2001, appeared mostly innocuous at the time and not worthy of further investigation or monitoring.

But one of them acknowledged, “Painted in the worst light, in hindsight, someone could reach different conclusions.”

Read more here.