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Imprints of al-Qaeda inspired Islamic Jihad is all over the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan's mass-murder rampage in Fort Hood, Texas, but everybody, fron President Obama down, is wilfully determined to ignore them.


"Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims" --- Anwar al-Awlaki.

"Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing… They were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them."  --- Duane Reasoner, Nidal Malik Hasan’s Protégé.

[No pity for Fort Hood dead, says killer’s friend, Jack Bremer; Gavin Lee, BBC, Nov 10, 2009]

Major nidal Hasan
Major Nidal Hasan

When the first reports came out of a terrible shooting carnage at Fort Hood, there was no hint of who might have committed such an act. Then a television station reported that a woman called her parents saying “we’ve been attacked by terrorists” shouting “Allah Akbar”, the signature Islamic ‘war cry’, also used by the 9/11 hijackers. Finally, the name of shooter came out, Nidal Malik Hasan. Given current trends, a lot of people instantly knew what could be the motivation for the carnage.

And immediately, there started a media Jihad (‘Struggle’) by people of the media, academia, establishments and Islamic groups to obfuscate the obvious, and to invent likely reasons---some utterly ridiculously---for Maj. Hasan’s actions. He was American-born Muslim, a nice all-American boy, who wouldn't harm anybody and never said anything radical or bad about America. Therefore, the fact that he was a Muslim or his faith Islam must not be picked on for the shooting.

Obviously the obvious struck immediately President Obama too, and concerned about this Muslim connections being picked on, he asked Americans not to “jump to conclusions”. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano vowed to stamp out the imminent threat of Islamophobia, while General George Casey bravely stated “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse”. It’s bad enough; still FBI officials stated that the “motivation has not been determined”, but the booby-prize has to go to Max Fisher, who wrote on the Atlantic: “Why Home-Grown Islamic Terrorism Isn't a Threat”.

Op-ed pieces in mainstream media wilfully left out the Islamic connection to the shooting, or even condemned any mention of Islamic terrorism. Surely Virginia Tech’s Seung-Hui Cho, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder didn’t need a Quran for their inspiration to cause murder. While that’s true, it hardly proves this wasn’t the case with Hasan.

There’s no immediate need to investigate Muslims in the military. OK agreed. But what about Post-Traumatic Stress disorder, which was blamed for the shooting in those op-ed pieces. Major Hasan became infected with the post-traumatic stress of the war without ever going through any such stress. Obviously, there would be many more, especially those already drilled through deployments in Iraq or Afghanistan, and potentially suffering from “real” post-traumatic stress. Is there a need to make a thorough investigation to seek out the stressed and relieve them of the trauma? We don’t need to get rid of all Muslims in the military, but only those, suffering from the post-traumatic stress and may go on a mission to kill like Major Hasan. It seems that, to the pundits and our establishments, there was only one guy, who suffered from post-traumatic stress of the war without ever going to the battlefield. The case closed.

It would seem that we need absolute proof that Hasan was directed or influenced by an affiliate of al-Qaeda to kill the soldiers to hold his radical Islamic belief responsible for his action. Then only could we call it an act of Islamic terrorism. “Blind” Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman issued a fatwa, but it was his followers who blew up the World Trade Towers in 1995, based on Skeikh Rahman's instruction and religious justifications. Rahman is now serving a life-term for issuing the fatwa, justifying the bombing.

For Maj. Hasan, we know that his spiritual leader had convinced him to put God first, and that his God wanted all good Muslims to kill American soldiers. Could that inspire Hasan to commit the terrorist act at Fort Hood?

Though Hasan is an American-born Muslim, his parents are from Palestine, the major cause of worldwide Muslim grievances against Israel, as well as against the West, particularly America. His mother, then aged 15, was traumatized by her experience in the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the “occupied territories”. Hasan’s family still owns land “near Jerusalem” in Ramallah, West Bank, and the capital of the Palestinian Authority. His parents opposed Hasan's joining the U.S. Army. It is entirely possible they could have set up his meeting with Awlaki on his path to Jihad.

Anwar al Awlaki
Al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born and ed-
ucated spiritual mentor of Major
Nidal Hasan, al-Qaeda's English
language clearance-house for
jihadist messages.

Hasan wasn’t like just any Muslim; he was considered a devout radical even by friends of his mosque, as well as by fellow Muslim soldiers. His major radical Islamic connection is his spiritual mentor, Anwar al-Awlaki, widely considered the leading English language clearance-house for jihadist publications from al-Qaeda, and author/translator of the virtual “lone-wolf jihadist bible”.

Unlike most of Awlaki’s internet fans, Hasan was an in-person follower at Awlaki’s mosques in Virginia, where, the FBI says, three of the 9/11 hijackers had “developed close relations” and may have had “closed door meetings” with the imam. After Awlaki fled America to take refuge in Yemen, Major HAsan continue to seek out Awlaki. That is when Hasan stumbled over a national security trip-wire, because Awlaki was on FBI terrorism radar even before 9/11, and was still deemed worth gathering signals on by the U.S. intelligence agencies. The FBI first conducted a counterterrorism inquiry after he was visited by Ziyad Khaleel, who helped buy bin Laden’s satellite phone. The FBI also believes that Awlaki has contacts with the Holy Land Foundation and others raising money for Hamas, but there was not enough evidence for criminal charges.

Hasan’s 10-20 e-mails to Awlaki, seeking “spiritual guidance”, starting in December 2008 were handed over to a joint FBI/Defence Department terrorism taskforce. But investigators promptly hit the snooze button, as they saw no immediate threat of “Islamic Jihad in the US Army”. They, instead, decided to continue monitoring him, hoping that his contact with Awlaki would lead them to a “big fish”, though they could have known Awlaki was already a pretty big fish.

The National Security Agency couldn’t find anything over Bin Laden’s satellite phone either until they figured out the code phrases for terrorist acts. [PBS: Nova The Spy Factory]. But there wasn’t any need from coded message as Awlaki calls the faithful in clear text to serve Allah by killing US soldiers. And Awlaki was not kidding either; immediately after the Fort Hood massacre, Awlaki’s website announced that Hasan was “a hero” and declared that “The American Muslims, who condemned his actions, have committed treason”. It isn’t hard to guess what kind of spiritual guidance went into the PowerPoint slides that warned of “adverse events” if Muslim soldiers were called upon to fight in Afghanistan. At the moment, authorities have been searching for Awlaki, who disappeared after being released from Yemeni prison eight months ago. Awlaki is thought to be hiding in remote mountains in the “triangle of evil”, a refuge for al-Qaeda fighters, far away from government control. He is even issuing internet calls to those, fleeing crackdowns in Yemen and other nations, to “Come to Yemen”.

The FBI probably didn't think much that Hasan’s favorite imam was also a visiting professor at Yemen’s Iman University. Sure, they've claimed to have cured 20 cases of AIDS completely. This Institute of Terrorist Technology runs the ROTC version of the training camps that were shut down in Afghanistan. Among its notable alumni are people thought to be responsible for killing three American missionaries, the second-in-charge of the Yemeni Socialist Party, and John Walker Lindh, who is now in prison after being picked from Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban against U.S. forces.

Sheik Abdul-Majid al-Zindani
Sheik Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, Yemeni al-Qaeda
ideologue and Jihadist recruiter.

The president and founder of the Iman University (1995) is none other than Awlaki’s former boss, the red-bearded Sheikh Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. Al-Zindani has made into the al-Qaeda/terrorist/banned lists of the U.S. Treasury Department, United Nations and the United Kingdom. He is still wanted for questioning by the FBI over the USS Cole attack in Yemen in 2000 which killed 17 and injured 39. During the U.S.-supported Mujahideen Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, al-Zindani was a recruiter for fighters and one of bin Laden’s most trusted “spiritual advisors”.  He later helped raise funds and recruit volunteers for the bin Laden organization. While Kevin Bacon might be only six degrees away from everybody, Hasan was only two connections away from bin Laden through Awlaki and al-Zindani.

Al-Zindani is now a prominent businessman and leader of the most radical wing of the Islamic Reform Party in Yemen. Back in the early 2000s, Awlaki was Vice-President for al-Zindani’s Charitable Society for Social Welfare (CSSW), identified as the “front organization to funnel money to terrorists” by the FBI, and has ties to the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, Italy, a center for al-Qaeda in Europe [Burr and Collins, 2006, p. 243; Washington Post, Feb 27, 2008].

Al-Zindani’s office is the contact for the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sunna group that took credit for the explosion at an American base in Mosul, Iraq that killed 22. Yemeni military commander Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a half-brother of President Ali Abdallah Saleh, recruited mujahideen fighters for bin Laden’s training camps in Yemen. The U.S. Justice Department believes that al-Zindani suggested to bin Laden to use charities in Pakistan as a front for terrorists [Wall Street Journal, 4/2/2004]. In Yemen Post, al-Zindani largely denied all these accusations against him, adding:

"America has proved to the world that it is the most oppressive nation in history. It is the country which killed two million and displaced five million in Iraq by a lie it spread to the world. In all its accusations to its enemies it fabricates lies and depends on its arrogance of power."

Only a terminal case of Political Correctness can explain why nobody, from President Obama down, can utter the obvious. When I heard the name of the Virginia Tech shooter, I instantly knew he was a Korean, whose parents worked too many hours in a dry cleaning store, and that they were disappointed he didn't get into Princeton. NASA could have recognized and announced in a minute that the "foam strike" people were right after all about the Space Shuttle. Yes, our initial hunches can be wrong, but obviously not anymore. We have a complete picture linking Hasan to known al-Qaeda terrorists, who all but published a memo addressed to Hasan, identifying al-Qaeda on their business cards, and sent a declaration of war to Obama. 

In the cartoon "Invader Zim", a thinly disguised alien invader, whom everybody likes except when he continually rants about wanting to destroy the planet, is harassed by a troublesome boy who is the only person crazy enough to realize Zim's true identity. That explains everything about how the U.S. authorities dropped the ball with the Fort Hood shootings.


This article appeared in the author's personal blog (Editing by M. A. Khan).