Well, more stuff keeps coming out, further reinforcing the image of Nidal Hasan as viewing himself to be a militant jihadi.

Now, not only his own leavings like his e-mails, business card captions self-proclaiming himself to be a “Soldier of Allah”,  but his Yemeni Sheikh correspondent modestly concedes that he could claim a role in transforming Major Hasan into jihadi Hasan, as reported by that not exactly right-wing rag, The Washington Post.

Cleric says he was confidant to Hasan

In his first interview with a journalist since the Fort Hood rampage, Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans, but that he considered himself a confidant of the Army psychiatrist who was given a glimpse via e-mail into Hasan’s growing discomfort with the U.S. military.

The cleric said he thought he played a role in transforming Hasan into a devout Muslim eight years ago, when Hasan listened to his lectures at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Northern Virginia. Aulaqi said that Hasan “trusted” him and that the two developed an e-mail correspondence over the past year.

As to whether or not Sheikh Aulaqi is qualified as a militant himself, he can speak for himself:

Explaining why he wrote on his Web site that Hasan was a “hero,” According to Shaea, Aulaqi said: “I blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Aulaqi’s views are controversial, earning him not only designation by U.S. counterterrorism officials as a leading English-language promoter and supporter of al-Qaeda, but also criticism from other fundamentalist Islamic clerics. Sheik Salman al-Awdah, a Saudi religious leader, gave an interview last week calling the massacre at Fort Hood “unjustified,” “irrational” and “inadvisable” because it will cause a backlash against Muslims in America and Europe.

But Aulaqi’s statements reflect the increasingly radical path he has taken since settling in Yemen in 2004. Print, video and audio files of his words have been found on the private hard drives of terrorism suspects in Canada in 2006 and in the United States in 2007 and 2008. He also wrote congratulations to al Shabaab, an Islamic extremist group leading an insurgency in Somalia, after it apparently used the first U.S.-citizen suicide bomber last fall.

In the light of just what has been reported from various sources, ANYONE who is still holding to the shibboleth “Don’t jump to any hasty conclusions about Hasan’s motivation” has their head firmly in a location where the sun never shines, whether it their name is Obama, Napolitano, Leahy, or anything else.