In late 2010, Jason Naser Abdo, the soldier charged Friday in a bomb plot targeting personnel at Fort Hood, Tex., called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation looking for help in his effort to be discharged from the Army as a conscientious objector.
Zachari Klawonn, then a specialist in the Army and the foundation’s liaison with Muslims in the military, spoke to Abdo by phone for a half-hour and came back with a blunt assessment: Stay away from him.
An AWOL soldier accused of plotting to launch an attack on Fort Hood was defiant during his first court appearance, yelling out the name of the Army psychiatrist blamed in the 2009 deadly shooting rampage at the same base. (July 29)
“He was very anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Army,” said Klawonn, in a phone interview from Morocco, where he is on vacation. “There was something off about his demeanor. I said it would not be wise to take this guy on as a client.”
Over the next couple of months, Abdo, who was based at Fort Campbell, Ky., with the 101st Airborne Division, continued to phone and e-mail Klawonn and insisted that he wanted to go to Fort Hood, where Klawonn was based.
Klawonn brushed him off and eventually stopped taking his calls, in part because he didn’t want someone so vocally anti-military around a base still trying to recover from the shooting rampage of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is facing capital murder charges in the deaths of 13 people. When Klawonn spoke of Hasan as an “atrocious killer,” Abdo seemed to demur, saying the major might have been forced into a corner.
“We just never felt good about him,” said Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who also spoke to Abdo.
Abdo, 21, was charged Friday in U.S. District Court in Waco, Tex., with possession of an unregistered destructive device in connection with a bomb plot. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
When the judge entered the courtroom Abdo refused to stand, according to the Associated Press. At the end of the proceeding, as Abdo was led out of the courtroom, he shouted, “Nidal Hasan, Fort Hood 2009” and called out the name of an Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered in 2006 by U.S. soldiers.
Abdo was arrested Wednesday in Killeen, Tex., and authorities said they discovered bombmaking materials in his backpack and in a motel room, as well as a copy of an article from the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, produced by the terrorist group’s Yemen affiliate.
Abdo was discharged from the Army in May, on the same day that military authorities charged him with possession of child pornography, an allegation that his lawyer said he has denied.
Abdo’s father, Jamal, was deported to Jordan in February 2010 after being convicted of soliciting sex online from a police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl called “Molly,” according to court records cited by the Dallas Morning News.
Jamal Abdo, interviewed in Jordan by the AP, rejected the allegations against his son. “My son loved people no matter who they are, whether Jews or Christians,” he said. “Naser is not the kind of a person who harbors evil for the other people, he cannot kill anyone and he could not have done any bad thing.”
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