A pair of suspected terrorist attacks on New Year’s Day were both allegedly carried out by former U.S. service members, raising questions about how those with access to sensitive intelligence and the nation’s most advanced weapons get swept up in radical beliefs.
Early Wednesday morning, Texas resident Shamsud-Din Jabbar allegedly plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14. He was a former Army staff sergeant, with a deployment to Afghanistan under his belt.
Hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded in flames outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas — a suspected terror plot that was linked to active-duty Army Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger, who allegedly carried out the attack that led to his own death while on approved leave. He was a member of the elite Green Beret unit.
From 1990 to 2022, 170 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds plotted 144 unique mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the United States — 25% of all individuals who plotted mass-casualty extremist crimes during this period, according to a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
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Questions posed to the Department of Defense about its plans to identify and root out radicals by Fox News Digital went unanswered.
Here’s a look back at some other military radical extremists who have conducted attacks on U.S. soil in the 21st century:
2009: Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan kills 13
In 2009, former Army Major Nidal Hassan killed 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas. The Islamic extremist and former Army psychiatrist had spoken out about the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Retired Colonel Terry Lee, who worked with Hassan, told Fox News that the Army major would make “outlandish” statements like, “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,” referring to U.S. troops.
Hassan reportedly shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” as he opened fire, killing 13 and injuring 30 others in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military base.
Hassan admitted to the killings in court and now sits on death row.
2021: Army Private Cole James Bridges tries to provide intel to ISIS
In 2021, Army soldier Bridges, 24, was arrested for conspiring to blow up the 9/11 memorial in New York and attempting to assist ISIS in killing U.S. soldiers.
Now serving 14 years in prison, Bridges was caught when he began communicating online with a covert FBI agent who he believed to be an ISIS supporter in contact with ISIS fighters in the Middle East.
2020: Army Private Ethan Melzer provides intel to neo-Nazi group
Melzer, 24 at the time of his sentencing, is serving 45 years in prison for sending sensitive U.S. military information to the Order of the Nine Angles (O9A), an occult-based neo-Nazi and White supremacist group, in an attempt to facilitate a mass-casualty attack on Melzer’s Army unit.
He was arrested in 2020 after joining the Army in 2018 to infiltrate its ranks and gain insight for his work for O9A. After being deployed to guard a remote, sensitive foreign U.S. military base, he shared details about the site with O9A members and began to call for a deadly attack on his colleagues.
2014: Frazier Glenn Miller kills three outside Jewish centers
Miller, a lifelong White supremacist, shot and killed three people, two outside a Jewish community center and one outside a Jewish retirement home, in Kansas in 2014.
Miller had been vocal about intending to kill Jews, though all of his victims were Christians.
He served in the Army for 20 years, serving two tours of duty in the Vietnam War and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets. Having led a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, Miller had a history of run-ins with the law. He served three years in prison after being convicted in 1987 of conspiring to acquire stolen military weapons and for planning robberies and an assassination.
Miller has since died in prison.
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2014: Knife-wielding Navy vet Zale Thompson injures police officers
Thompson, a Navy veteran, committed a Salafi-jihadist-inspired hatchet attack in Queens, New York in 2014, injuring four police officers. The attack was deemed an act of terrorism as Thompson was a recent Muslim convert. In the months preceding the attack, he visited hundreds of websites associated with terrorist organizations. Thompson was involuntarily discharged from the Navy in 2003, after having been arrested six times between 2002 and 2003 in domestic disputes.
He was shot dead by police on the scene of the 2014 attack.
2016: Afghanistan War vet Micah Xavier Johnson kills five police officers
In 2016, Johnson ambushed police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five and wounding nine others. The 25-year-old Army reserve Afghanistan War veteran was angry over police shootings of Black men. He perpetrated the attack at the end of a protest against the recent killings by police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
2020: Three veterans try to bomb a Forest Service building
Las Vegas authorities arrested Andrew Lynam, an Army reservist, alongside Navy veteran Stephen T. Parshall and Air Force veteran William L. Loomis — all self-identified Boogaloo Bois — on May 30, 2020, for conspiring to firebomb a U.S. Forest Service building and a power substation to sow chaos during a police protest after the killing of George Floyd.
In total, 480 people with a military background were accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, some 230 of whom were arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
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