The big questions about the Ft. Hood massacre: What did the FBI and others know about Maj. Nidal Hasan, when did they know it, and why didn't they do more?

Investigative officials held a nearly hour-long briefing with reporters on Monday night, trying to answer those very questions. Here is one of the most in-depth and unabridged accounts published to date of the questions asked and answers given at that briefing...

HOW AND WHEN DID AUTHORITIES FIRST LEARN ABOUT HASAN?

The officials said that "we learned of Maj. Hasan last year" as "a result of our investigation" into another individual. (Sources have identified that individual to FOX News as radical cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen with ties to Al-Qaeda who is now believed to be in Yemen.) According to the officials, starting in December last year and going into early this year, Hasan communicated 10 to 20 times with the individual, who one official said "has been espousing some radical views and coming very close to advocating violence." An official said of the communications: "We learned of them when they occurred."

(Sources have since told FOX News that the communications were via email and did not elicit much of a response, if any, from Awlaki.)

HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE HASAN'S COMMUNICATIONS?

"The general tenor of the communications, at least in my mind, were fairly benign and did comport with a research project he was doing that was sanctioned by Walter Reed [Army Medical Center]," one official said. (Hasan was researching Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for his Master's degree during the time he sent communications to Awlaki.) Another official said the communications appeared "consistent entirely with what he was doing as a licensed psychiatrist in dealing with soldiers [or] what he's doing for his Master's work." As for the specific content of the communications, one official would only say that it included "social" topics and "religious guidance."

WHAT DID AUTHORITIES DO AFTER DISCOVERING THE COMMUNICATIONS?

"We did an assessment as to those communications and identified Maj. Hasan," one official said. "And then working through the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which [Department of Defense] of course is part of, learned who he was and what his background was, where he was assigned, and then did what we would consider a logical [assessment]." One official said the assessment was "of a limited duration," and it included reaching out to the military about Hasan's work. One official said the JTTF looked at: "Who is this person? What are they working on? Any issues with them? Disciplinary matters? All those things just part of due diligence." Hasan's "performance reports were reviewed" but "there was nothing that raised ... a red flag," according to one official. The official said he didn't know whether any of Hasan's colleagues at Walter Reed had filed any reports about Hasan.

When asked whether Hasan himself was ever contacted by the FBI, the officials wouldn't comment, one insisting, "I won't address that."

In the end, one official said, "There was no indication that Maj. Hasan was planning an attack ... at all ... or that he was directed to do anything."

HOW MUCH WAS THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT INVOLVED IN THE ASSESSMENT OF HASAN?

"The Department of Defense is part of the JTTF, so it's a joint [assessment]," one official said. "As part of that assessment there was a lot of work done in terms of his military record, his background, who he was, where he'd come from, you know all those type things." One official insisted, "these again were JTTF [reviews] ... so the decisions were made by JTTF with input from all of the components of that," which would include state and local officials, FBI officials, and Defense Department officials.

One official said the information about Hasan "was handled in at least two" of the 168 JTTFs across the country. That included "DoD representatives who collaboratively did a scrub of: What does this mean? Is there a threat? Is there a basis for opening an investigation?," the official said.

A FORMAL INVESTIGATION WAS NEVER OPENED. WHY NOT?

"What we had was some contact and some communications that wasn't enough to get us into even the preliminary investigation box," one official said. "We didn't have enough for a preliminary investigation."

"We cannot predicate an investigation of a U.S. person ... solely on First Amendment activity," the official said. "So if all you have is First Amendment activity -- so it's protected speech, there's nothing that suggests advocacy of violence, nothing that suggests incitement to violence, nothing about the connection between him and the [individual overseas FBI was investigating] ... then what do you have? In order to open a preliminary investigation we need information or allegations that person is or may be, in this context, a national security threat. And that can't be based solely on protected First Amendment activity."

The official suggested that Hasan's case involved "a communication that doesn't involve advocacy to violence, doesn't involve a threat to violence, and it's just a contact to another person and there's nothing about that contact in and of itself [to make it illegal]."

The officials repeated that point throughout Monday night's briefing.

"In order to open a formal investigation, as those of you who have been to the Attorney General guidelines tutorials know, there is certain predication that has to be met. So we have to have certain information in our possession before we can simply open an investigation. So you could presume that if an investigation wasn't opened, perhaps what we knew didn't rise to that level," one official said.

And then the official said this later: "Recognize that we didn't have an investigation open, and to the extent there were communications that were overtly threatening, that would certainly qualify as predication for an investigation. So draw the logical conclusion from that in terms of what the content of the communications were."

DID WORRIES OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS PLAY A ROLE IN THE LACK OF FURTHER INVESTIGATION INTO HASAN?

At the briefing, one reported asked: "Are you prepared to emphatically bat down the suggestion ... that Mr. Hasan was the recipient of very light treatment because of his religious background?"

One official answer this way: "I don't have any evidence of that, that I'm aware of. I don't know the state of play with interviewes at Walter Reed with his supervisors and co-workers, but I had not heard that allegation [and] I don't have any evidence to back it up."

WHO ELSE WAS KEPT IN THE LOOP ABOUT HASAN?

When asked whether people at Walter Reed or Ft. Hood had been notified about potentially worrisome information concerning Hasan, one official said, "I don't know the specifics of the lines of communication ... I can't answer you specifically, I just don't know."

Asked whether senior officials -- inside and outside of the FBI and JTTF -- had been briefed about Hasan, one official said, "That's part of what our teams are assessing right now ... to look at best practices. I don't have the definitive answer to that right now."

One official said that, generally, "There's a lot of intelligence collection that goes on every day, and if there's a reason that an individual causes more concern, then obviously the higher that gets briefed and gets acted on."

The official continued, "If somebody is in touch with a person that we have an investigative-collection interest in, then if it's a benign conversation ... that's going to be handled in the normal course of business." Asked whether that means the information about the person would not be sent above an FBI field office, the official said, "Typically."

Would the Army usually obtain this type of information from someone on the JTTF? "It has to rise to the level of concern," one official said. "Not necessarily."

DID OFFICIALS KNOW ABOUT TWO KEY MOMENTS -- AND IF NOT, HOW'D THEY MISS THEM?

In August, Hasan bought a pistol at "Guns Galore" in Killeen, Texas. But one official said the FBI didn't know about that at the time. "I'm not aware that we did," the official said.
Officials said that -- while the gun purchase went through an FBI background check, or "Brady gun check" -- there is no legal way to alert others to the purchase. "That's not permissible under the law," one official said.

"When we do a Brady gun check and clear someone to purchase, we're only checking to see if there's an exclusion, if there's some reason why the person is not permitted to purchase a weapon," another official said. "There's a very specific list of exclusions. Simply that someone has come onto the FBI's radar screen at some point is not an exclusion. ... [The FBI employee doing the Brady gun check] can't pick up the phone and call the other side of the FBI and say, 'Oh, by the way, this person who maybe appeared somewhere in your holdings just bought a gun.'"

The officials were pressed on that issue. "Someone that comes to your attentionm, the JTTF, purchases a weapon. Is that not the kind of thing that people that are doing the intelligence assessment are not able to do?" a reporter asked.

An official responded: "Are you asking for an opinion, or what the law is? ... Obviously from an investigator's standpoint, there's all kinds of information like that that we'd like to know."

Separately, officials said that, despite media reports to the contrary, they did not know about a posting online in May that compared suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on grenades. The message was posted by someone named "Nidal Hasan."

But, one official said, "We didn't know about that at the time."

Asked to explain how authorities could miss a posting like that, one official said, "There are a million blogs all throughout the Internet, and the notion that the FBI is omniscient in terms of every blog posting is just wrong."

The official continued: "There seems to be a theory in the press that we knew everything. Recognize that what we've been trying to tell you is that we had heard of Hasan by virtue of connections to an unconnected investigation. We didn't have an investigation open, and we don't just monitor across the board every blog posting that might go up. So draw from that ... whether we would have knowledge of just a random blog posting by someone who we don't have an investigation up on."