Report: Naval officer to be charged in Chattanooga

Update: A news story at AL.com attempts to knock down West's assertion as false. But the Navy statement on social media referenced in the story is silent about pending charges, it only states no one has been charged, and the situation remains under review. 


According to former congressman and military officer Allen West, the Depart of Defense plans to prosecute the Navy commander in Chattanooga who returned fire when his installation came under deadly attack by an Islamic gunman.

West writes:

“Let me draw an interesting contrast: Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus is more concerned about lifting the ban on transgendered sailors. Mabus has a problem in that for the first time since 2007 the U.S. Navy will not have a carrier battle group operating in the Persian Gulf. But this knucklehead has no problem with the Navy seeking to destroy the career of a sailor, a commander of an installation, returning fire against an Islamic jihadist attack.

I have not seen word of prosecution reported elsewhere.

Meanwhile, reporting out of Chattanooga suggests the city's miffed at federal refusal to label gunman Mohammod Abdulazeez's deadly shooting spree, that killed five uniformed members of the U.S. military, as "terrorism."

From the Chattanooga Times  Free Press:

Stamping July 16 as "terrorism" doesn't change what happened. It doesn't bring back fathers and sons or return Chattanooga to the small town sense of security it had before Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez armed himself and methodically attacked two local military sites with the purpose of bloodshed. 

But to many the label of terrorism is critical. 

To the families, it means their loved ones died for something bigger than random violence. It means they were casualties of war, of the same dangerous ideology that has taken so many American soldiers. It means, in the truest sense, that they were heroes, sacrificing their safety for ours.

While it won't label what happened in Chattanooga as terrorism, the federal government immediately deployed an FBI terrorism task force in Atlanta to investigate last week's placement of four small Confederate flags near the MLK memorial and nearby Ebeneezer Baptist Church.  The church's pastor called placement of the flags a "terroristic threat."

Do you have to have a Confederate flag to now qualify as a terrorist under Obama-era rules of political correctness?