College football fans showed their patriotism Thursday afternoon at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Before Notre Dame and Georgia played their College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Caesars Superdome, there was a moment of silence for those killed and injured in the New Orleans terror attack New Year’s Day.
More than a dozen people were killed and many more were injured when Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck through a crowd on New Orleans' Bourbon Street.
The terror attack prompted the postponement of the Sugar Bowl, which determines who will play No. 6 Penn State in one semifinal of the College Football Playoff.
Authorities opened Bourbon Street hours before the game Thursday, which Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry attended.
"Security is going to be tight," Landry said during an appearance on "Fox & Friends." "We have all confidence that we’re gonna put this game on. The Superdome is completely secure. Again, the FBI continues to pour resources into the state."
Many reacted to the senseless act of violence, including Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman, who spoke to his team about what happened.
"The first part of that meeting was to mourn and pray for our country," he said during an appearance on ESPN.
"In the toughest moments, the culture of any program, of a nation, are revealed. I have a lot of faith we're going to rally around the city of New Orleans and support all the victims and families that were affected today."
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.
"Though the number of those in the military who commit prohibited extremist activities may be small, even a single incident can have an outsized impact on the Department and its mission," Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough told Fox News Digital when asked about the recent attacks and efforts to root out radicalism.
"The Department is committed to ensuring that extremism does not gain a foothold within the Total Force and will continue its efforts to ensure that all service members can focus on mission accomplishment without the negative and divisive influence of extremist activities."
Here’s a look back at some other military radical extremists who have conducted attacks on U.S. soil in the 21st century:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A military appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cannot rescind the plea deals of detainees at Guantanamo Bay including alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Fox News has learned.
The court opinion, which has not been formally published yet, said the plea deals reached by military prosecutors and defense attorneys were valid and enforceable, and that Austin exceeded his authority when he later tried to nullify them.
The Pentagon has the option of going next to the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court for emergency review, but the court docket did not show any filings as of Tuesday afternoon.
A hearing is scheduled next week at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Mohammad and two other defendants could plead guilty in separate hearings, with the death penalty removed as a possible punishment.
The plea deals in the long-running case against the terrorists were struck over the summer and approved by the top official of the Gitmo military commission.
The plea deals have been condemned by a number of 9/11 victims and U.S. politicians.
"Joe Biden, Kamala Harris have weaponized the Department of Justice to go after their political opponents, but they’re cutting a sweetheart deal with 9/11 terrorists," now Vice President-elect JD Vance said at the time.
The Pentagon revoked the deals in July. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024," a letter from Austin states.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates. Fox News' Andrea Margolis contributed to this report.
