It’s always pleasing to be proved right. That’s my reaction to the verdicts today finding Army Pvt. Nasser Jason Abdo guilty on all counts for his attempted terror attack on soldiers and military families at Ft. Hood:
A Waco jury found Pfc. Naser Abdo guilty of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder and four other charges Thursday afternoon. The AWOL soldier planned to detonate a bomb in a Chinese restaurant popular with Fort Hood soldiers and shoot the survivors. Sentencing is set for the summer.
Abdo, who was flanked by five U.S. marshals as the sentence was read, showed no reaction to the verdict.
Jurors deliberated for just a little over an hour before reaching their verdict, which followed three days of testimony from about two dozen witnesses. None would talk to reporters afterward.
PJ Media readers might recall that after the Secretary of the Army overruled Abdo’s base commanders at Fort Campbell and granted his conscientious objector petition last June, I responded with an analysis of Abdo’s public statements exhibiting his extremist Islamic ideology and his parroting of claims identical to those of his predecessor, Ft. Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan. That was five weeks before Abdo’s arrest while plotting a second terror attack at Ft. Hood.
So how was I successful in spotting the budding terrorist, where the entire counter-terrorism and homeland security establishment of the US government failed?
Well, it wasn’t the first time that it happened (e.g. Emerson Begolly), but those questions are not allowed to be asked. But if you want a hint, take a look at my post-Ft. Hood massacre articles here and here.
My colleagues LTC Joe Myers, Dr. Terri Wonder and I had also warned the Army about such attacks prior to the Ft. Hood massacre in Nov. 2009, as observed by Bill Gertz at the Washington Times just a few weeks after the terror attack, giving Pentagon anti-terrorism officials a road map of the extremist ideology that only lacked Maj. Hasan’s name, rank and serial number. But that road was not taken at the cost of 13 lives.
The media complicity in Nasser Abdo’s escalating radicalism should also be mentioned.
As I noted last year, Abdo’s conscientious objector claims were championed by CNN, ABC News, the Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and other major establishment media outlets.
But much like the media forgot to mention their support of Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki when he was considered by the New York Times to be “a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West” and NPR hailing Awlaki for being able to “build bridges between Islam and the West”, their US Army poster boy Nasser Abdo will quickly be forgotten by his former media champions.
(Let’s also not forget that Awlaki lectured on Islam inside the Pentagon weeks after 9/11, helped train the military’s Muslim chaplains, and led prayers for Muslim congressional staffers inside the U.S. Capitol.)
One final note: While Abdo claimed after his arrest that his only motive was his Islamic faith, the reason Abdo didn’t receive his honorable discharge after the Secretary of the Army review panel granted his conscientious objector petition (again, overruling his base commanders) was that he faced an ongoing child pornography investigation, for which he was eventually charged.
Could it be that Abdo calculated that he would rather go out in a blaze of glory as a Muslim martyr waging jihad against the infidel in the heart of Dar al-Harb rather than go down as a scumbag pedophile?
If that’s the case, the Obama Administration and the establishment media gave Nasser Abdo half his wish.
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