The complaint filed by federal prosecutors yesterday against four California men who were actively planning on joining the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers and attack U.S. bases there was led by Soheil Omar Kabir, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan. Kabir converted two of the other cell members, eventually radicalizing and recruiting all three other men. He was arrested in Afghanistan.
One curious element noted in the complaint is that Kabir also served in the U.S. Air Force prior to the 9/11 attacks. So the leader of a homegrown terrorist cell led by a U.S. Air Force veteran had recruited others to kill U.S. soldiers in the field.
This is the kind of insider threat that two of my colleagues and myself warned the U.S. Army about 18 months prior to the Fort Hood attacks by Major Nidal Hasan (and were ignored). After those attacks I reported here at PJ Media that little has been done by the U.S. military to define and address the threat. Back in June, NPR reported that the Defense Department was investigating more than 100 extremists in the U.S. military, with at least a dozen of those cases considered serious.
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