I'm running a networking service in android where I direct all my http requests to run and get callbacks from the service when the requests are complete. I run the requests in a ThreadPoolExecutor to limit the number of concurrent requests. As the requests run within the pool, they eventually create an HttpGet or HttpPost, both of which indirectly implement AbortableHttpRequest , which allows one to cancel the connection (say, if it's blocking for a long time). If a user cancels a request, I'd like to somehow drill into the thread queue and call the abort routine for that request. If, for example, a web site is not responding and the user chooses to do something else, right now my only option is to wait for the standard 5 minute http timeout to occur for that hung request before that thread is freed up. If I could access the thread that has my request and call abort, that would free things up right away. From what I can understand, it appears once my request has gon