U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan – the military psychiatrist accused of opening fire at the Fort Hood army base in Texas – attended “a number” of events at GW’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, according to HSPI’s director, but only attended the events as an audience member.

The Washington Examiner reported this morning that Hasan “was a participant in George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute task force that aimed at providing advice on security to the new administration.”

Yet Frank Cilluffo, director of the HSPI, said Hasan was not affiliated with the HSPI.

“There have been a lot of erroneous stories,” Cilluffo said, adding that Hasan has “no affiliation [with HSPI], was not a member of the task force, but participated in some of the meetings as an audience member.”

Cilluffo said Hasan RSVP’d to these HSPI events “in his capacity as a disaster and preventative psychiatry fellow with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences” – a federal health sciences university which trains its students for “military medicine, disaster medicine and military medical readiness.”

“We try to err on the side of transparency and make available to everyone who is in attendance at our meetings, and that is I’m sure where the linkage came from,” Cilluffo said, referring to the Examiner’s misrepresentation of Hasan’s affiliation with HSPI.