HOMELAND INSECURITY

Did Hasan radicalize others at Fort Hood?

Alleged Army terrorist counseled 48 Muslims in chaplain's absence

Posted: November 09, 2009
2:11 am Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

The suspected Fort Hood terrorist served as a lay Muslim leader running Islamic services on the base in the absence of the Muslim chaplain, WND has learned. He also mentored to at least one young convert to Islam whose parents worked at the sprawling Texas post.

Hasan's religious activities raise the specter that others may have been radicalized, investigators worry. There are nearly 50 Muslim soldiers serving on the base.

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly shot 46 fellow soldiers and security guards and murdered 13 in the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11.

Witnesses say the devout Muslim officer jumped up on a desk and shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" – Allah is greatest – before opening fire and spraying more than 100 bullets inside a crowded building where troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Get "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," autographed, from WND's Superstore.

"He was preparing for a martyrdom operation," a U.S. Army intelligence official said. "There is no evidence that this was an issue of an emotional aberration. It was well planned."

Not long after Hasan transferred to the base earlier this year, he sat down with Muslim chaplain Maj. Khalid Shabazz to discuss carrying out Shabazz's "vision" at the Fort Hood chapel when Shabazz was away. Shabazz helped lead Islamic services at the base's Ironhorse Chapel, which serves 48 Muslim soldiers.

"I found him to be very pleasant," Shabazz said of Hasan.

Shabazz, who recently left the base, met privately with Hasan several times.

Before his posting at Fort Hood, Shabazz ministered to Muslim inmates at the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was known as a "sympathizer" among military police. Shabazz scolded MPs for making noise while al-Qaida detainees were praying.

"I would have to go down and chastise those guys," he recalled in a 2008 interview with NPR, "telling them 'Hey man, those guys are praying. Have the decency not to play the national anthem and agitate them while they're praying.'"

The NPR interview was posted last year on the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the FBI says is a front group for Hamas terrorists. (Following CAIR's blacklisting by the Justice Department as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, the FBI last year cut off formal ties to the group.)

Shabazz, who says it's tough trying to be a good Muslim and a good U.S. soldier, serves as a member of a chaplaincy steering committee for the Islamic Society of North American, or ISNA.

Federal prosecutors recently named ISNA – a sister organization to CAIR – as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history. ISNA, they say, like CAIR is a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, parent of Hamas and al-Qaida.

The Brotherhood, which supports violent jihad and Islamic rule, is the subject of the bestselling new book, "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America."

Federal investigators are looking into Hasan's use of his neighbor's computer, and a visitor he had the day before the Fort Hood attack. Reports say Hasan was "mentoring" on Islam that Muslims shouldn't be in the U.S. military, because Muslims shouldn't kill Muslims.

Hasan counseled on more than a dozen occasions recent Islamic convert Duane Reasoner, an 18-year-old whose parents worked on the base.

"He said he didn't want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan," said Reasoner, who was raised a Catholic. "He didn't want to be deployed. He said Muslims shouldn't be in the U.S. military, because obviously Muslims shouldn't kill Muslims."

Reasoner added: "In the Quran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

An Army chaplain interviewed by McClatchy Newspapers on the condition of anonymity confirmed that there are other Muslim soldiers who are conflicted about honoring their duty while fighting other Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hasan told colleagues, "I'm a Muslim first and an American second." he clearly put the Islamic nation above the secular nation he took an oath to protect and defend.

He's not alone. At least a dozen other Muslim soldiers have been convicted of terrorism or espionage since 9/11. Here's a sampling:

* NAVY SIGNALMAN HASSAN ABUJIHAAD last year was convicted of tipping off al-Qaida to battlegroup movements in the Persian Gulf, including disclosing classified documents detailing the group's vulnerability to terror attack

* ARMY RESERVIST JEFFREY LEON BATTLE in 2003 pleaded guilty to conspiring to wage war against the U.S., confessing he enlisted "to receive military training to use against America

* ARMY RESERVIST SEMI OSMAN in 2002 was arrested for providing material support to al-Qaida and pleaded guilty to weapons charges after agreeing to testify against other terror suspects

* MARINE ABDUL RAHEEM AL-ARSHAD ALI trained at a suspected al-Qaida camp and was charged with selling a semiautomatic handgun to Osman

* ARMY SGT. ALI "THE AMERICAN" MOHAMED trained Green Berets at the elite Swick warfare school at Fort Bragg before stealing classified military secrets for al-Qaida and helping plan the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa

* ARMY SGT. HAMMAD ABDUR-RAHEEM in 2004 was convicted of terror-related charges

* ARMY SPC. RYAN G. ANDERSON in 2004 was convicted of leaking military intelligence to al-Qaida terrorists, including sensitive information about the vulnerabilities of armored Humvees

* ARMY SNIPER JOHN ALLEN MUHAMMAD was sentenced to death after fatally shooting 10 in the nation's capital a year after the 9/11 attacks

* FORMER ARMY LINGUIST AHMED FATHY MEHALBA in 2005 was convicted of stealing secret documents listing, among other things, the names of al-Qaida detainees from Gitmo

* SENIOR AIRMAN AHMAD AL-HALABI in 2004 was convicted of mishandling classified documents as an Arabic linguist at Gitmo

* ARMY CAPT. JAMES "YOUSEF" YEE in 2003 was formally charged with mishandling classified information – including maps of a new Gitmo facility – as a Muslim chaplain at Gitmo.

"Muslim Mafia" co-author Paul Sperry says Hasan is just the tip of a jihadist Fifth Column operating inside the U.S. military – which is too blinded by political correctness to see the internal threat.

"If military command is too PC to protect its own troops from Islamic fanatics on its own soil, how can Americans be confident they can protect the rest of the country?" asked Sperry, also author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."

He says that each branch of the military operates a counterspying unit in charge of force protection.

"Why didn't the Army investigate Hasan with all the red flags waving around him?" Sperry said. "And what other radicalized soldiers – and I would include chaplains among them – are they failing to investigate now? What is the military doing to stop the next Maj. Nidal?"

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