By Ben Pershing

Less than a week after the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, multiple congressional probes of the incident have already begun to take shape.

The House is out of session this week and the Senate is only in town Monday and Tuesday, so many of the details will have to wait until at least next week. But comments by several different lawmakers since Friday make clear that at least three different committees plan to probe the Fort Hood shooting on two separate tracks -- the motivations of the suspect, and the broader military system that failed to detect his intentions.

On Fox News Sunday, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) said his committee would focus on the motives of the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, and his potential ties to extremists. "We don't know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," Lieberman said.

Asked Sunday to elaborate on Lieberman's investigative plans, Homeland Security panel spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said: "I expect this will be a continuation of the more than two years of work by the ... committee into the growing threat of homegrown terrorism. The terrorist threat keeps evolving and the senator will continue to work to understand that threat."

On the House side, a knowledgeable source said the Select Intelligence Committee would also probe Hasan's potential ties to extremist groups, though that investigation will take place behind closed doors. The House Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, is poised to act in full view of the public, though the angle that panel will take remains unclear.

Asked whether he will investigate Hasan's specific motives, Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) said on "Face the Nation" Sunday that he would reserve judgment until the Army and the FBI make progress on their own probes, "I'm going to wait and see what they do. If they are not thorough we will, of course, have additional hearings, briefings on this," Skelton said.

But even if Armed Services doesn't probe Hasan himself, the committee is likely to continue its examination of "stress factors and psychological preparedness as a major institutional concern" in the military, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a senior member of the panel, said Friday. "We're already on that," he said.

"The difficulty here is that it's like trying to account for atoms in a physics course," Abercrombie said of the Ft. Hood incident. "You don't know what an individual atom is going to do."
Abercrombie and other lawmakers said Congress was all but certain to focus on how to spot troubled personnel like Hasan in the future.

"There will be inquiries," said Rep. Mac Thornberry (R), a Texan who sits on Armed Services. "When flags go up [about members of the military], when should there be action? What should merit further scrutiny?"

Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.), who chairs the Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel, said her panel would push forward with its ongoing efforts to highlight what she described as a key systemic deficiency in the military. "We know that, just like in the rest of the country, there are not enough mental health providers," she said.