FBI Dropping Attack Dogs for Attack Goats

Like a Zippo lighter out of fluid, the Imam Abdullah story sparks and sparks, but never catches a flame.

Fourteen people showed up Monday outside the Dearborn Police Department to mark the release of Abdullah’s autopsy report by the Wayne County Medical Examiner. Considering the high Muslim population, and the high black population, and that self-appointed spokesmen like Dawud Walid and Ron Scott are hoping to paint his shooting as an attack on both communities, this is hardly a groundswell of support.

At this point, the strategy remains to float as many alternative explanations for how Abdullah got dead as they can think up, no matter how far-fetched. Anything but acknowledge the most obvious one--that after refusing to surrender to a force of armed lawmen, Abdullah opened fire.

On another tack, John Conyers has allowed himself to be recruited for a cameo at the press conference. This story has so little oomph the reporters were more interested in asking him about his troubled wife.

Conyers explained at the press conference that he got involved because the House Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, has “jurisdiction over,” among other things, “the Constitution.” I think that might mean that Conyers has jurisdiction over the Constitution. And I thought that was Eric Holder.

Says Conyers: “On the surface, someone being shot 21 times raises quite a few questions in the criminal justice system.” A valid point, in those cases where the victim is unarmed, and isn’t involved in any criminal activity at the time of the shooting, as happened, say, in New York with Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo . Even in those cases, juries acquitted the officers for having no criminal intent.

Not so with Abdullah. He was on the business end of a federal criminal complaint, armed in the midst of a felony, and resisting arrest. His criminal cohort had all been arrested unharmed when commanded to surrender. The FBI sent in a trained K-9 to subdue Abdullah non-lethally when he refused to show them his hands. Instead, Abdullah shot the dog.

In civil-rights utopia, that would have been the point at which the task force agents laid down their weapons to re-assure Abdullah they meant him no harm and just want to talk things over. In real life, agents returned fire.

Walid is now demanding a copy of the dog’s autopsy, “to confirm it was killed by bullets from a nonpolice weapon.” And why exactly? Because Walid has a hunch that the FBI first assassinated Abdullah, handcuffed his corpse to violate his civil rights, and then shot their own dog because he was an eyewitness.

Speaking of dogs, Abayomi Azikiwe, of the Michigan Emergency Committee against War and Injustice, (their motto: “Because Every Demonstration Needs a Commie!”), thinks the FBI agents should be prosecuted because, after they shot Abdullah, “they dumped him in a trailer like a dog.”

Walid, on the other hand, has been complaining since last October that Abdullah’s civil rights were violated because the FBI didn’t treat him like a dog, or at least like their dog, who was medivaced to surgery after Abdullah shot it. The dog died anyway.

To top off all this anti-dog rhetoric (betternot have any dog-lovers on the jury!):

Nabih Ayad, who represents Abdullah's wife, Amina, as well as a defendant in the federal indictment handed down in the Abdullah case, said using a dog to confront a Muslim creates an environment for hostility because dogs are seen as unclean.

Leave it to Ayad to complain about a hostile environment during an FBI takedown.

This whole thing can go one of two ways. Either it all blows over, the agents are cleared, and Nabih Ayad and a six-pack of attorneys are denied a gigantic damage award from a wrongful-death claim against the federal government.


Or local and federal law enforcements disband their K-9 units out of deference to Muslim sensibilities, and start taking attack goats on their Dearborn raids.

[CORRECTION: This post was amended to correct my erroneous reference to Imam Abdullah being on the business end of a “grand-jury indictment,” when in fact the FBI was acting on a federal criminal complaint known as an “information.” ]