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AP PHOTO

Family members of Pvt. 1st Class Kham Xiong, who died in the Fort Hood shootings, grieve by a photo of him at a memorial service at Fort Hood, Texas, Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - As the nation mourned the 13 people shot dead last week at Fort Hood, Texas, finger-pointing in Washington intensified Tuesday about whether officials at several agencies had failed to coordinate as they tracked the suspect's activities or to react to warning signs in the months before the attack.

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended a somber memorial service at the sprawling Army post, where he spoke about each of those killed.

"Their memory will be honored in the places they lived and by the people they touched," the president said, adding, "Neither this country, nor the values that we were founded upon, could exist without men and women like these 13 Americans."

Near the base, investigators continued searching for clues to the attack, with blue-gloved FBI agents sifting through garbage outside the Islamic Community Center of Greater Killeen, where Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan worshiped before allegedly firing more than 100 rounds from a high-powered weapon last week in what authorities call the largest attack at a military base in the United States.

In Washington, lawmakers and counterterrorism experts debated whether officials bungled the intelligence analysis or played down the potential threat that Hasan may have posed.

The concerns resonated in part because of similar accusations that, in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes, officials had missed opportunities and neglected to share information, contributing to their failure to detect or prevent the attack. Reforms in the eight years since have focused on improving communication between agencies and making intelligence capabilities more nimble.

Hasan, a psychiatrist who had worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, came to the attention of two Joint Terrorism Task Forces in December, as he corresponded by e-mail as many as 20 times with radical imam Anwar al-Aulaqi, who has exhorted followers in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere to pursue violent jihad. The task of vetting Hasan fell to a Defense Department analyst on the Washington D.C.-area task force, who searched the doctor's background, employment records and other paperwork. The analyst concluded that the chatter was innocent, in keeping with Hasan's research interests, and that he did not have ties to terrorism, two government officials said Tuesday.

Authorities closed the matter this spring, opting against a full-blown investigation in which Hasan and his co-workers might have been questioned, one of the officials said.

Other facts that have emerged since did not enter into the analysis, including Hasan's purchase of a weapon Aug. 1, his alleged posting to a Web site six months ago about suicide bombings, or unease among some of his Walter Reed colleagues after a 2007 presentation he delivered on Muslim soldiers with "religious conflicts."

"Why didn't they interview him and run this to ground?" asked one former U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing probe. The official asked the Obama administration this week whether the FBI's operations guidelines prevented agents from doing more before the incident. If the bureau's hands were tied, "where was the Department of Defense?" the official said.

"I find it unbelievable the FBI was not worried - regardless of the content of the communications - that an author in the U.S. military outside his job responsibilities was trying to contact somebody who is one of the world's most famous advocates of jihad," said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism researcher with the NEFA Foundation, a terrorism research group based in Charleston, S.C. "That alone to me is a red flag."

A senior defense department official countered the impression that military "knew of Maj. Hasan's contacts with any Muslim extremists before this tragic shooting," saying "it was not until after the shooting that his e-mails were first brought to our attention by federal investigators."

One senior investigator told reporters Monday evening that there were no signs that Hasan was pursuing an attack and that he had maintained positive job evaluations and a secret security clearance throughout. "Sure you can go back after the fact, 20-20, and read in all kinds of things about what it meant," he said.

Still, debate simmered even within FBI ranks about whether the bureau had been hampered by guidelines dictating when officials can launch investigations, according to one government source.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president has directed agencies to evaluate what went wrong and to ensure it does not happen again. And FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has ordered a "red team" of investigators to fan out and determine whether the bureau should have handled the information differently.

The FBI and Defense Department continue to assert that Hasan acted on his own, without direction from terrorists or radical elements, but they cautioned that the investigation could take "some time." Senior investigators have said that an alleged motive for Hasan, who has refused to talk to the FBI or the Army Criminal Investigative Division, was proving elusive and could long remain a mystery.

Whether or not Hasan was directed by outsiders to allegedly commit the shootings, counterterrorism experts and former government officials say that the events are indicate limits in the capacity to detect an actual terror plot, given that al-Qaida has advocated infiltrating the U.S. and other militaries in the past, and many terrorist attacks have involved people posing in uniform or using their military positions.

In a July 2006 propaganda video, for example, an al-Qaida spokesman, California-native Adam Gadahn, explicitly encouraged viewers with grievances against U.S. military actions in Iraq "to go on a shooting spree at the Marines' housing facilities at Camp Pendleton," according to the NEFA Foundation.

Investigators said that Hasan emerged last year only because he was in contact with Aulaqi, the subject of a sensitive, ongoing probe, but that until last week's shooting they had "no legal authority whatsoever...to look at his e-mail."

On Capitol Hill, backbiting continued among members of the House Intelligence Committee where Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., clashed with chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, over the timing and substance of briefings that intelligence services have yet to provide on the Fort Hood incident.

But after the memorial service, Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, whose district includes the post, said he "put great store" by the Texas Rangers, FBI and the CID and urged people not to jump to conclusions about whether warning signs were ignored.

"As an old trial judge who has spent a lot of time on the bench, I know you don't have anything until the evidence is unveiled," said Carter. "The rest is just speculation."

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Staff writers Ellen Nakashima, Ben Pershing and Ann Scott Tyson in Washington and Ann Gerhart in Texas and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.