US Army Private Naser Abdo Arrested in Terror Plot
Private First Class Naser Abdo has reportedly been arrested by Texas police near Fort Hood, Texas. Abdo wasn’t assigned to Fort Hood; he was assigned to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. The Army said Abdo was AWOL from Fort Campbell.
Local police indicated they had interrupted a “terror plot” in their arrest of PFC Abdo. He was reportedly found with guns, gunpowder, and the makings of a backpack bomb. The arrest was made possible by a tip from local gundealer Guns Galore. Clerk Greg Ebert said the staff of the store was concerned because Abdo was purchasing large quantities of gunpowder — while asking questions about how to use it. Guns Galore is reportedly the same store where Maj Nidal Malik Hasan purchased his firearm.
According to AP reports, Abdo has admitted to planning an attack at Fort Hood to “get even,” and chose Fort Hood because of the attack in 2009 by Hasan. He reportedly said he planned to blow up a restaurant frequented by Fort Hood Soldiers and shoot the survivors as they came out.
Abdo had applied for conscientious objector status, and it had been approved — despite criticisms from a Muslim group that he was a “traitor” for using his Islamic faith to get out of the military. Among other comments, Abdo had said
“Any Muslim who knows his religion or maybe takes into account what his religion says can find out very clearly why he should not participate in the US military.”
His discharge was subsequently put on hold pending his referral to a General Court Martial on child pornography charges. The pictures were apparently found during an investigation following “anti-American comments” during a language class.
While PFC Abdo has been named in many articles alongside Army Specialist Zachari Klawonn, who was “represented” by Michael Weinstein’s MRFF, it does not appear Weinstein has had any public relationship with Abdo (beyond Abdo “liking” him on Facebook).
Wow, JD, you really just can’t help yourself, can you? You are so obsessed with Mikey and MRFF that you need to find a way to work MRFF into your post, even if it’s to say that this guy WASN’T a client of MRFF? I’m sure that he WASN’T represented hundreds of organizations. Why didn’t you list everybody else who DIDN’T represent him?
The comment does seem to imply that Mikey and the MRFF [should] have some connection to this terrorist (Abdo), where as Klawonn hasn’t been accused of anything (that I know of) except being a faithful Muslim in a very anti-muslim Military. Seems like guilt by non-association.
@watchtower
It was the MRFF that publicized the article in which both Klawonn and Abdo were prominently featured (and were said to have “similar” stories). This site has only pointed out Weinstein’s inconsistency on this topic:
As linked above, Weinstein said
However, Weinstein has said nothing about Abdo, who did exactly the same thing (and, apparently, has chosen a path similar to Hasan).
The problem Weinstein has is that he currently claims to be prepping a lawsuit for Klawonn (and hundreds of others, of course), and he may have difficulty separating the public perception of Klawonn from Abdo. (Again, their “issues” have essentially been equated in the press, as the linked article showed.)
If a lawsuit was in the works, which seems unlikely, it was probably just put on hold until this is out of the press.
Huh? JD is talking about one article but quoting another!
What JD is quoting an article that Mikey wrote criticizing Hasan and the military’s failure to do anything about his espousing of extremist religious views. What’s inconsistent? Mikey has criticized the military for failing to do anything about people pushing fundamentalist Christian views, and he criticized the military for not doing anything about someone pushing fundamentalist Islamic views. That’s completely consistent, unless of course, you need to keep up the lie that MRFF is just out to target Christians.
What any of this has to do with Abdo is beyond me. Abdo wasn’t an officer pushing his religious views about being a conscientious objector on others in a way that should have set off alarm bells among his superiors and caused them to take action, which is what Mikey was criticizing. Abdo was a private who made a personal religious decision that led him to seek conscientious objector status. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t appear that anyone could have predicted that Abdo might snap the way they could have with Hasan, so the situations are apples and oranges.
As for MRFF linking to an article that happened to quote both Abdo and Klawonn, (whose stories have little in common, by the way), we always link to articles about our clients (which Klawonn was). The fact that the writer who wrote this article also interviewed Abdo had nothing to do with anything. He was just somebody else quoted in an article that we were linking to because of the part about someone else.
@Chris Rodda
Welcome to the internet. There are these things called “links.”
Actually, he criticized Hasan for having those views, called for his court martial, and said he was responsible for the “hostile environment surrounding him.”
Even when Weinstein finally jumped on the bandwagon criticizing Hasan, he still managed to blame Christians, remember?
To borrow a phrase from watchtower, if Weinstein was consistent, “the MRFF [should] have some connection to this terrorist (Abdo)” — and the connection would have been a call for his court-martial, the claim he helped “create” the “hostile environment” he complains of, etc. He has never made such a public statement.
Weinstein’s quote is available for people to judge for themselves. To this point, it appears the general public disagrees with you.
I’m all for people judging for themselves.
Here’s the article Mikey wrote about Hasan:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/11/should_hasan_be_court-martialed.html
And here’s the article that quoted Zachari Klawonn (who happened to be a MRFF client) and Naser Abdo (who wasn’t a MRFF client but happened to be quoted in the same article):
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101120/conscientious-objectors-war-101120/
People can just read these articles for themselves rather than having to rely on anyone else’s opinion.
@Chris Rodda
You successfully repeated the links already included here. Nice work.
OK … now I can say that Abdo did contact MRFF, and that he did speak to Zachari Klawonn, who was then acting as a volunteer liaison for MRFF, but we didn’t take his case. I had to wait for this article to come out, but now everybody can read the full story.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/awol-soldier-naser-abdo-charged-in-fort-hood-bomb-plot/2011/07/29/gIQAFKAUhI_story.html?hpid=z4
Oh, and JD, I posted those links so that people could go read the full articles for themselves without the confusion of what you were saying about them and your blurring of what were two entirely separate articles that had nothing to do with each other.
No one’s asking why you didn’t take Abdo’s case.
All you’ve done is confirm Weinstein’s inconsistency.
How, JD? What exactly has Mikey been inconsistent about? How can somebody even BE inconsistent about situations that don’t have enough in common to generate similar responses?
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