April 23, 2013
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The Obama administration’s assassination of two U.S. citizens in
2011, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman,
is a central part of Jeremy Scahill’s new book, "
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield."
The book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in
Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has
defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why
Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later.
Scahill reveals CIA Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser
on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager
had been killed "intentionally." "The idea that you can simply have one
branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American
citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present
any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a — we should view that with great
sobriety about the implications for our country," says Scahill, national
security correspondent for The Nation Magazine. On Tuesday, the U.S.
Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing on the Obama
administration’s drone and targeted killing program. However, the Obama
administration is refusing to send a witness to answer questions about
the program’s legality.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill’s book,
Dirty Wars,
is being published today. Jeremy takes a deep look at America’s new
covert wars operated by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations
Command, or JSOC. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Jeremy
shines a light on America’s unregulated and increasingly unilateral
global assassination program. Two central figures in the book are Anwar
al-Awlaki and his Denver-born 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, two American
citizens killed in separate U.S. drone strikes in Yemen in 2011.
Today, an exclusive hour with Jeremy Scahill. I began by asking him to talk about cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Anwar
al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
His father is quite an extraordinary guy. He, Dr. Nasser Aulaqi, had
come as a very young student to the United States, and he studied
English as a young man in Lawrence, Kansas, and ended up getting a
number of degrees in the United States. In fact, he was the alum of the
year in 2002 at New Mexico State University, where he got one of his
degrees. Very distinguished person in Yemen. And as a young man growing
up in—as he put it, in a country that didn’t have a name yet, growing up
in the south of Yemen, he dreamt of going to the United States, and his
dream came true as a young man.
And
so, he was a college student in the United States when his young—when
Anwar was born, in 1971. And he really wanted to raise Anwar as an
American. He viewed America as the—you know, to quote Reagan, sort of a
paraphrased Reagan—the shining city atop the hill. I mean, he really did
view it that way. And I looked at his essays from when he first came to
the United States, and all of the international students wrote essays
about, you know, what it was they wanted to get out of it. And he said
that "the progressivism of America was electric, and I wanted to be a
part of that, and I wanted to take my education and go back to my very
poor country and to make something of my life." And so he started to
build this family, and they lived in Minneapolis. And they showed me
pictures of Anwar pointing out Yemen on the globe in his classroom, and
he couldn’t pronounce the teacher’s name, so he just called her "Mrs.
M." And, you know, there were photos of him at Disney World and—or,
Disneyland in California.
And
so, you had this family that really wanted to do two things. They
wanted to raise their children in the tradition of the American spirit,
but they also wanted to give back to their country. And when Dr. Nasser
Aulaqi got his engineering degrees, he went back to Yemen and became the
minister of agriculture and engineering in Yemen, and he actually built
an entire faculty at the university. He founded this department,
working with USAID and other U.S. officials to build this school of
agricultural engineering. And his main life’s work has been to deal with
the water crisis in Yemen, because Yemen is running out of water.
So,
Anwar moved back with him, went to an international school in Yemen,
where he was studying in both English and Arabic. His English was
stronger than his Arabic, because he had spent the first seven years of
his life in the U.S. So he was in a very international atmosphere. In
fact, Anwar Awlaki went to school with the men who would end up working
on the kill program, from the Yemeni side, to try to hunt him down, with
the children of the country’s dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He went to
school with some of them. And so, then later in life, their paths would
cross again.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t he go to school with Saleh’s son?
JEREMY SCAHILL: He
did, yes, and I write about that in the book. And it’s sort of—you
know, Yemen, in a way, is a very small neighborhood and—when you’re
dealing with government ministers. This was a school, actually, that
Nasser al-Aulaqi helped to found in Yemen, this primary school, and it,
to this day, remains one of the top schools in Yemen.
So
when Anwar finished high school, he wanted to go to the United States,
and originally he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps, and he
was going to study engineering. And he arrived in the United States and
was detained at the airport when he flew back into the United States,
because there was a discrepancy on his passport. His Yemeni passport
said that he was born in Yemen, and his American passport said that he
was born in the United States—actually, the other way around. His
American passport said that he was born in Yemen. And the reason it did
is because a U.S. official had told Nasser al-Aulaqi, "If you want to
get your son a scholarship in the United States, we should say that he’s
born in Yemen, so you can have his birth certificate reissued in Yemen,
and then he can get the travel documents." So, he ran into trouble
because his passport—there were some discrepancies with his paperwork,
so that was sort of his first run-in with law enforcement. But it was
resolved, and he was released, and he ended up going to school in
Colorado.
And this
was right at the time when the mujahideen war in Afghanistan—you know,
of course, the United States on the side of the mujahideen fighting
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—was sort of coming to an
end, and the 1991 Gulf War was beginning. And Anwar had never been a
particularly religious guy, and he had never been a particularly
political guy, but he, like a lot of people—and, I mean, I remember this
myself; I was in high school when the Gulf War started. It was really
the first time that I came to terms with the fact that these wars
happen, and I remember being very scared myself. And I think that, you
know, Anwar, that deeply affected him, and he saw the destruction of
Baghdad the first time around, and started going to antiwar meetings and
was invited to go and speak at a local mosque about the war and about
student organizing. And the imam at that mosque said, "You know, you
have a real gift for speaking," and started to invite him back. And
Anwar, this sort of fire was lit in him, and he decided he wanted to
change course in life and decided to study to become an imam, and he
immersed himself in Islamic scholarship and, in fact, became an imam,
and eventually moved to San Diego and started his family. And his eldest
son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was born in 1995. He was actually born in
Denver, Colorado. And the Awlakis started to build a life for
themselves, and Anwar was an imam.
When
9/11 happened, Anwar al-Awlaki was living in Virginia, and he was the
imam at a very large, prominent mosque, the Dar Al-Hijrah religious
center in Falls Church, Virginia. And when 9/11 happened, Awlaki became
the go-to imam for large, powerful corporate media outlets in the United
States to understand the experience of American Muslims in the
aftermath of the attacks. And Awlaki passionately denounced the 9/11
attacks, said the United States had a right to hunt down those
responsible and bring them to justice. He was someone that was profiled
by The Washington Post for a piece that they did about Ramadan.
He was on PBS and NPR and was talking about this, the feelings of many
American Muslims, which is that you hear a president in George Bush
saying it’s a crusade and basically putting a number of Muslim
countries, you know, in the crosshairs around the world, the start of
the rumblings toward the invasion of Iraq, the initial invasion of
Afghanistan, clearly sort of turning into something that was going to be
a much longer-term presence. And Awlaki was affected by all of this.
And when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, you saw a real sort of tilt
toward a radicalization in Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be back with war correspondent Jeremy Scahill on his new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Freedom," sung by Richie Havens in 1969. He died yesterday at the age of 72 at his home in New Jersey. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re continuing our conversation with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book,Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, the book coming out today. We return to Jeremy talking about Anwar al-Awlaki and his time in the United States.
JEREMY SCAHILL: There’s
this a whole other part of this story, which is that Awlaki, at his
mosque in San Diego, two of the 9/11 hijackers had been—had attended
services at his mosque, and a third one had also attended services with
one of the other guys at his mosque in Virginia. And the FBI—he was
already on their radar, but they brought Awlaki in a number of times for
questioning, and they basically cleared him and said that he had—you
know, had nothing to do with those guys except knowing them peripherally
in his mosque. But that’s been the source of a lot of—of intense
scrutiny in the aftermath of the attack and everything that happened
with Awlaki, because some people believe that he was directly attached
to the 9/11 attacks, which I think is a preposterous—I mean, it’s
nonsensical to think that these guys would have keyed in Anwar Awlaki to
the 9/11 attacks at a time when he was viewed as a very moderate guy.
He endorsed George Bush for president in the 2000 election. In fact,
Bush had a lot of support in the Arab-American community, because many
people felt that he would be better than Al Gore on the issue of
Palestine. And so, you know—but Awlaki had had this contact with these
9/11 hijackers. He also had been busted twice on solicitation of
prostitute charges, and then those were resolved through community
service and probation. But—
AMY GOODMAN: And were they real?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, we don’t know. Awlaki says that they weren’t, that it was a—that it was a setup. You know, I’ve—
AMY GOODMAN: To try to flip him?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well,
so what happened is that he gets busted, I think the first time in '96
in San Diego on a solicitation charge, and then he's pulled in. And he
claimed—Awlaki claimed that the FBI tried to get him to start informing
on people in his mosque and keeping an eye on them and telling them who
was coming in and out of his mosque, and, you know, claimed that he told
them to get lost. There was actually an interesting sort of development
with this whole story, in that Awlaki had repeated interactions with
the FBI. And I talked to a former senior FBI agent who had worked the
Awlaki case, and said he believed that the bureau was trying to flip him
or that they maybe had in fact gotten Awlaki to start doing some
informing.
And so,
when Awlaki then, years later, leaves the United States, he’s
looking—you know, in terms of his public persona, he’s looking at the
impending invasion of Iraq, he’s looking at Guantánamo starting to grab
headlines around the world and the images that we saw coming out of
that, people being dressed in orange jumpers with hoods on their head,
and, you know, eventually then the Abu Ghraib photos. But he also had
this private battle that he was waging with the FBI. They were really
putting pressure on him to become a full-blown informant.
And
so, Awlaki, for a combination of reasons, ends up leaving the United
States, spends a number of years in Britain, is a very prominent figure,
popular at Islamic centers and mosques, and still is preaching a
message that was very much in line, I think, with mainstream antiwar
thinking and also was in line with how a lot of Muslims around the world
were feeling about the—about the increasing global wars. And that’s
really when Awlaki started to end up on the radar of the U.S.
counterterrorism community, because they viewed him as someone who was
speaking a language that a lot of diaspora Muslims, English-speaking
Muslims around the world, could relate to. And they saw him sort of
becoming more and more radical.
Awlaki
then goes back to Yemen, where his father was living and was at the
university. And his parents build him an apartment for him and his young
family in their compound in Sana’a. And I’ve visited, and I’ve been in
the apartment. It’s sort of a big compound, and the family has—each of
the siblings have their families within this compound. And so, Awlaki
was there, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. His dad—and it
was sort of joking, but he’s like, "Anwar had these dreams of getting
involved with real estate." And he always had some, you know, idea of
how he was going to make money, but really he was just trying to—he was a
man trying to figure himself out. And he started preaching at some
mosques in Yemen and attended classes at a university there.
And
then, in 2006, he is arrested on trumped-up charges of having
intervened in a tribal dispute in Yemen, and he spends 18 months in
prison in Yemen, 17 of them in solitary confinement. And he comes out a
totally changed man. And I get into the book his prison writings. And
they would only allow him, you know, certain books, but he read the book
by Michael Scheuer, the former CIA operative, his writings about bin
Laden. He read a lot of Dickens and was—made comparisons of the U.S.
government to various characters in Great Expectations. And, you know, he did food reviews of the prison food. But he—you could really see that when came out, he was a changed man.
AMY GOODMAN: And why was he imprisoned?
JEREMY SCAHILL: So,
he was—my understanding is that he was arrested initially on a request
from the United States that—and I heard from a former senior Yemeni
official that there was a meeting with John Negroponte, who at the time
was the director of national intelligence, with Bandar Bush, you know,
the Saudi ambassador, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington, one of
the most powerful diplomats in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Very close to the Bush family.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Very close to the Bush family. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Who, two days after 9/11, was having cigars with President Bush on the Truman balcony.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Exactly.
And, of course, the Saudis run a huge portion of the U.S.
counterterrorism operations to this day in Yemen. I mean, the U.S. has
basically outsourced anything vaguely resembling intelligence in Yemen
to a network of Saudi spies and to Saudi intelligence. I mean, that’s a
whole other fascinating story. But there was this meeting in Washington
with Yemen’s ambassador, Bandar Bush and John Negroponte, where
Negroponte said that they wanted, according to my sources, Awlaki kept
in prison for four or five years so that people would forget about him,
because he was starting to become popular at that time. His books and
his speeches were on sale in airports around the Middle East and also
very popular in London and elsewhere. And they basically just wanted him
to go away. And so, he was kept in prison for 18 months without charge.
The United Nations investigated his imprisonment and declared that it
was wrong and that it was an unlawful imprisonment. And the FBI came to
interrogate Awlaki when he was in prison and, you know, were trying to
ask him questions about the 9/11 attacks, and effectively trying to
convince him to shut his mouth.
So,
Awlaki comes out of prison and starts a blog, and essentially
becomes—and that’s why people often refer to Awlaki as like the YouTube
imam or the Internet imam. You know, he comes out, and he starts
pontificating on the state of affairs in the world, and he has a vibrant
comments section in his website, and young Muslims around the world are
asking him questions about different interpretations of the Qur’an or
the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad. And Awlaki becomes this sort of
figure on the Internet. And his mosque was the Internet. And as the U.S.
wars intensified, Awlaki’s rhetoric intensifies.
And
really the turning point in this story was in 2009, when Major Nidal
Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on his fellow soldiers. He was an
Army psychiatrist and gunned down more than a dozen of his fellow
soldiers and wounded many, many others. And he, himself, was shot and
paralyzed. It emerged, after Nidal Hasan did this massacre in 2009, that
he had been in email contact with Anwar al-Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen.
JEREMY SCAHILL: While
Awlaki was in Yemen. And so, the story was floated in the media, and it
continues to this day, that Awlaki helped to plan the Fort Hood
shooting. There has never been a shred of evidence produced publicly
that Awlaki had anything to do with the Fort Hood shooting before it
happened.
What we
now know, because the emails have been released, the communications
between Awlaki and Nidal Hasan, that Nidal Hasan was sort of a pathetic
man who was writing to Awlaki saying everything from—asking him
everything from questions about the proper conduct of a Muslim in a
military—one of them should have caught the eyes of investigators. He
was asking Awlaki, basically, is it OK to shoot a fellow soldier if you
think that they’re engaged in, you know, crime against Islam, you know,
if they’re going to be going to another country? But he was putting it
in the context of Israel and Palestine, and not sort of directly asking
about himself. But he also asked Awlaki if he could help find him a
wife. And then he tried to donate money to Awlaki and said, "I want to
give a prize in your name for the best essay."
AMY GOODMAN: But as you point out in your book, he actually had interaction with this man 10 years earlier.
JEREMY SCAHILL: So,
Awlaki—so, in one of the emails, Nidal Hasan says, "You might not
remember me, but I met you once at your mosque in Falls Church,
Virginia." And Awlaki didn’t remember him, but it turned out that Nidal
Hasan’s parents were members of Awlaki’s mosque, and they had gone to
Awlaki concerned about their son at one point, that he wasn’t—I don’t
want to mischaracterize it, because I haven’t talked to the Hasan
family. But in any case, they went to Awlaki, and they asked him for
some guidance for their son, and so Awlaki had met him at one point, but
it wasn’t—you know, he was the imam at a big mosque, and this would
happen. And Awlaki said that, you know, he didn’t remember him.
Then,
you know, the shooting happened, the discovery of the emails between
Awlaki and Hasan comes out, U.S. intelligence reviewed them, said there
was nothing to indicate that Awlaki had anything to do with it, yet the
story still persisted in the media. Then the shooting happens, and
Awlaki writes a blog post that says Nidal Hasan is a hero, and he
praises the Fort Hood attack and says, "This should be a sort of a model
for Muslims in the military going forward," and essentially calls on
other soldiers to do this. And that’s—he hit the tripwire there when he
did that. And then it became a thing from being concerned about Awlaki’s
speech and the idea that he would radicalize young people to actually
praising this killing and calling on other Muslims in the U.S. military
to do the same thing. The U.S. intelligence then got Awlaki’s blog shut
down, and Awlaki started to be harassed by Yemeni intelligence, and he
eventually went to his family’s province of Shabwa in southern Yemen to
basically lay low.
And
while Awlaki is there, he has numerous interactions with the
U.S.-backed Yemeni intelligence. The Awlaki family is in communication
with the U.S.-backed Yemeni dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh. And
they’re saying to the Awlaki family, these U.S. proxies in Yemen, "Look,
if you don’t get Anwar to come back to Sana’a, to the capital of Yemen,
and we’re going to put him in prison here, the Americans are going to
kill him. They’re going to kill him with a drone. So you have a choice:
He can either live under the protection of our intelligence services in a
prison, and we’ll treat him nicely until the Americans forget about
him, or he can continue doing what he’s doing, running around in the
mountains, and the Americans are going to kill him with a drone." And
they said this years before Awlaki was killed by a drone. And Anwar’s
father, the last time that he talked to him, I believe, was in May of
2009. He went down to Shabwa, Nasser Aulaqi and his wife, and they tried
to convince Anwar to come back, because they were concerned that the
U.S. government was going to kill him. And their position was: You
haven’t done anything that’s criminal, and if you have, then you should
be able to face the evidence. And Awlaki said to his family, "I will not
allow the Americans to tell me which way to position my butt at night.
You know, I was born free, and I’m going to die free. And I’m not going
to allow the Americans to do this." And he said, "I’m going to continue
to do what I believe is right."
And
that was the last conversation that Nasser Aulaqi had with his son,
because in December of 2009, the U.S. started bombing Yemen for the
first time in seven years. Bush had bombed Yemen once. It was a drone
bombing in 2002, November, and ended up killing a U.S. citizen in that
strike, though he wasn’t the target of the strike. So the first time
that the U.S. did a targeted strike that killed a U.S. citizen in Yemen
that we know of was under Bush in November of 2002. In December of 2009,
President Obama authorizes a series of missile strikes, not just drone
strikes. The most deadly one that we know of was December 17th, 2009,
cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah, and it killed
46 people, three dozen of whom were women and children, which is
stunning and horrifying. And we have video footage in our film of the
aftermath of that strike, interviews with the survivors of when the
missile hit. But it was in pursuit of one person that they said was an
al-Qaeda operative, and they wiped out an entire Bedouin village. And we
went there, and the cruise missile parts are still strewn across the
desert. They’re there to this day just rusting out there. But the U.S.
also used—
AMY GOODMAN: How many people were killed?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Forty-six
people were killed, and I think 35 or 36 of them were women and
children. And I was leaked the official parliamentary investigation in
Yemen with the names and ages of all of the dead. And I have it—I have
it stained in my head, the images that I’ve seen of the videos that
people I met there had taken on the scene. You know, one tribal leader,
Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, who’s the head of the Awlak tribe in Yemen, he
went there right after the attack. And he said to me, "If someone had
weak heart, they would collapse, because you saw meat, and you couldn’t
tell if it was goat meat or human meat. And you saw limbs of children."
And he, himself—and he’s this older man—actually found body parts and
helped to bury—try to bury people with dignity. And he’s this incredibly
wealthy man who went there himself and is the main reason why there
still is agitation for justice for the victims of the Majalah bombing,
that—because these tribal leaders have said, "We will not forget what
you did to this village of nobodies, one of the poorest tribes in all of
Yemen."
Who knows
why the U.S. bombed it? It could have been that the Yemeni government
was under pressure from Obama’s administration, and they said, "No one
will care about these people. Let’s just say this is an al-Qaeda camp,
because it’s in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to care about
them, and no one’s going to go there to investigate." But when we went
there, we saw it. The cluster bombs, these are flying land mines,
they’re banned. And yet the United States continues to use them, and
they shred people into meat. I saw it in Yugoslavia in the '90s, and
I've seen it again now in Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN: So the weapons used were?
JEREMY SCAHILL: The
weapons used? They used a Tomahawk cruise missile, and they used
cluster bombs. And the cluster bombs are—they are like flying land
mines. And they drop in these parachutes, and they explode, and they can
shred people. I mean, it’s their—they’re probably the most horrifying
weapon I have ever seen the aftermath of in a war zone.
So,
this is the first strike that President Obama authorizes, and it’s
unclear who the real target even was. They claimed it was this one man
and that he was killed. When I talked to people in Yemen, they said,
"That guy is old—that guy is—yeah, he was a mujahideen in Afghanistan,
but he had nothing to do with the leadership."
AMY GOODMAN: Mujahideen, who the U.S. worked with.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Who
the U.S. worked with, right. You know, Yemenis went to Afghanistan in
the '80s in huge numbers. And, you know, they have a very serious
fighting spirit, and there were a lot of Yemenis that had gone there and
fought on the same side as the United States. But the point I'm getting
at here is that—so, the Obama administration starts to intensify this
bombing in Yemen. They bomb al-Majalah. And then, seven days later,
they—but remember that the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for
the strike, and Obama’s administration released a statement praising
Yemen for this attack. Yemen doesn’t have cruise missiles. Yemen doesn’t
have cluster bombs.
So,
but for, you know, some brave local journalists going there and
photographing it initially, we probably would—never would have been able
to prove that it was a U.S. strike. And we could talk about him later,
but Obama, President Obama, is directly responsible for the first Yemeni
journalist to report on this story, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, continuing
to be in prison. He was arrested after he exposed the Majalah bombing,
and he remains in prison to this day. In fact, the last line in my book
is to say that he’s still in prison, and he should be set free. This was
a journalist that had worked with major U.S. media outlets, broke this
huge story that the U.S. had bombed Yemen for the first time in seven
years, using cluster bombs, and then he ends up in prison on trumped-up
terrorism charges, put on trial in a court that was set up specifically
to prosecute journalists, and then when he was going to be pardoned,
President Obama called Ali Abdullah Saleh and said, "We don’t want him
released," and he remains in prison to this day. So, he was the first
journalist to do that. He’s in prison.
Seven
days after that bombing, the Yemeni government puts out a press release
saying they’ve conducted these air strikes in Shabwa and Abyan province
and that among the dead is Wuhayshi and Shihri, the two heads of
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki. So the first
time that we know of that the U.S. intended to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was
in December of 2009. This is before we understood that he had actually
been officially put on the kill list. We didn’t find out about that
until two months later. So, this first strike, Yemeni government takes
responsibility, but in fact it was a U.S. strike. Then Awlaki knows that
they’re trying to get him. Drones start appearing all throughout Yemen.
There hadn’t been drone strikes in Yemen since 2002. So drones start
appearing over Shabwa and over Abyan, and people start seeing them, and
there’s an intensification of these attacks.
Then, in January of 2010, a story leaks to The New York — to The Washington Postthat
there are a number of U.S. citizens that have been put on the kill list
that’s maintained by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command,
and that among these, most prominently, is Anwar al-Awlaki. And after
the Post published that story, they had to run a correction, because the CIA got in touch with the Post and
said that we don’t have Americans on our kill list. So then they had to
clarify that it was the Joint Special Operations Command, and then, in
fact, there were two separate kill lists. So, once Awlaki knew that he
was a target, he went totally underground and spent the remaining two
years of his life on the run.
And
his father, Nasser al-Aulaqi, wrote a letter to President Obama begging
him not to kill his son and saying, "We could—there’s another way to
resolve this. And if there’s evidence that my son is involved with any
criminal activity, make it public." And the head of the Awlak tribe
said, "If Anwar is guilty of anything, we’ll execute him ourselves. But
we want to see the evidence, because we don’t think that the United
States has the right to simply say someone should be given the death
penalty without ever giving them a trial."
And,
I mean, they understood something that barely registered a blip on the
radar of the U.S. Congress. When they—when we learned that Awlaki was on
the kill list, Congressman Dennis Kucinich put forward a bill that
simply stated—didn’t even mention Awlaki—that Americans have the right
to due process and that the government does not have a right to execute
or assassinate American citizens without having tried them or presented
evidence. And only six members of Congress signed onto it with Dennis
Kucinich, and no senators, which is interesting because then years
later, Rand Paul does this filibuster, and all these tea party and
Republican people are all up in arms about, you know, "Is President
Obama going to hunt them down and kill them in the United States?" when
at the time none of them ever said—none of them said anything about it.
It was basically just Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, who at the time was
waging an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for
president, that said anything about this. And, you know, so it’s sort of
how times change.
So,
Awlaki is on the run, and the U.S., by my count, tried to kill him more
than a dozen times. And I write in the book about one incident in May
of 2011 where Awlaki very nearly was killed. He was in Shabwa. He was
driving in a two-car convoy. And the U.S. had drones and other special
ops aircraft, and they were doing this sort of bee swarm on him to try
to get him. And they—there was a misfire, and the drone—the drone missed
Awlaki’s vehicle. And they were driving in a car, in a vehicle that had
gasoline canisters, which is common in a lot of countries where there’s
not just gas stations everywhere you travel. So if it had hit it, it
would have just, you know, blown. So Awlaki and his cohorts believed
that they’re being ambushed. They don’t know that it’s a drone strike.
They feel an explosion; they think someone maybe has launched an RPGat
them. So they try to do some evasive maneuvers. Meanwhile, the U.S.
aircraft are circling back around, and they shoot—they fire another
missile, and it misses again. And now there’s this huge dust up. Awlaki
calls for backup.
These
two brothers, the Harad brothers, come to the rescue. And
there’s—they’re in the—there’s a chaotic scene. There’s all of this
smoke and clouds. And the Harad brothers get into Awlaki’s truck, Awlaki
gets into their Suzuki, and then they—it’s something like out of—out of
like, you know, some Hollywood movie. They drive in opposite directions
away from the smoke. And I talked to a JSOC planner who saw the after
action reports. He said, "We only had the top-down imagery. It looks
like ants. So we didn’t know." And they had to make a decision which
truck to follow. So they follow the original one, and they blow that one
up. But, of course, Awlaki wasn’t in it, and Awlaki watched his car
with the two brothers in it blow up while he was on a sort of cliff in
the mountains. And then he slept overnight there, and then he made his
way to the home of a friend of his. And he said that night, you know,
that he counted 11 missiles, and he said they all missed their target,
but the next one could be a direct hit.
And
sure enough, in—on September 30th, 2011, just a few months later,
Awlaki was in Jawf province in the north of Yemen, which was interesting
because the U.S. always was looking for him in the south, and he and
another American, Samir Khan, who is widely believed to have been the
editor of Inspire magazine, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula magazine, were getting into their car and driving, and then
the U.S. launched a drone strike and killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir
Khan in one strike. And U.S. officials said that Samir Khan wasn’t a
target, but one congressman said it was a "two-fer," you know, that they
got both of them at the same time. And I talked to the Khan family
also, Samir Khan’s family. They’re from North Carolina, Pakistani
Americans. And they said that the FBI had met with them repeatedly and
said that Samir is not—hasn’t committed any crimes. A grand jury did not
return an indictment against him. And they were trying to encourage the
family to get him to come home. So this U.S. citizen, whose family had
been told he hadn’t done anything criminal that they knew of, was
actually killed that day with Anwar al-Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: War correspondent Jeremy Scahill on his new book, out today, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. We’ll continue our conversation in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Lives in the Balance," sung by Richie Havens, who died on Monday at the age of 72. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with The Nation correspondent, Democracy Now! correspondent, premier war correspondent Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. We turn now to President Obama speaking September 30th, 2011, announcing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The
death of Awlaki is a major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational
affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the lead in planning and
directing efforts to murder innocent Americans. He directed the failed
attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the
failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly
called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill
innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to President Obama, Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well,
I mean, I think one of the things that we have to understand about
Anwar al-Awlaki is that no evidence was ever presented that he played an
operational role in any of these attacks. I’m not saying that I know
that he didn’t. Maybe he did. But under our legal system, American
citizens should have a right to respond to the evidence presented
against them. And Awlaki was never afforded that. Nidal Hasan is getting
a trial. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is in the justice system having, you
know, something resembling a trial. John Walker Lindh was given access
to the U.S. legal system and had—and if he had wanted to not take a plea
agreement, he could have fought the charges against him in court. Anwar
al-Awlaki, though, was sentenced to death by a president who served as
judge, jury and ultimately as executioner, and also prosecutor in
public. They litigated Anwar al-Awlaki’s death penalty case with leaks
to the media. They never gave him a chance to respond to it.
So,
I don’t know what his role was in the so-called underwear bomber, the
Abdulmutallab case. I know from my own reporting on the ground in Yemen
that Awlaki had met with [Umar] Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was a very, I
think, deranged young man, this Nigerian who came and tried to bring
down this airliner. But it cuts to the heart of something else
interesting: Was Anwar al-Awlaki a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula? He never claimed it himself. He referred to them as his
brothers. And Nasser Aulaqi said, "I know my son, and if he had been a
member of that organization, he would have said, ’I’m a member of that
organization.’" My sense, on the ground, is that Awlaki was around those
circles, that they respected him as someone who was definitely
preaching things that were in sync with their agenda. But when leaders
of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula tried to get Osama bin Laden to
name Awlaki as the head of AQAP, bin Laden basically said, "We need to
see his résumé. He’s untested. I don’t—I mean, I know who this guy is,
but I don’t know anything about him. So, you keep—you’re still the head
of the organization. Don’t try to—don’t try to bring this to me until
he’s tested on the battlefield." So my response to President Obama is,
if all of this is true, what would the harm be in presenting that
evidence to the American people or having presented that evidence to
Anwar al-Awlaki? Why—
AMY GOODMAN: That he couldn’t get him.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Why not seek an indictment against him?
AMY GOODMAN: That he couldn’t get him. That would be Obama’s, perhaps, his response.
JEREMY SCAHILL: But
why not seek an indictment against Anwar al-Awlaki, if he’s guilty of
all of these things, and then demand his extradition? And if Yemen is
not going to extradite him, then you could have sent in a team of Navy
SEALs to snatch him. Or you could have, I mean, probably had a much
easier time justifying his killing if you actually had presented
evidence against him. That title that Obama bestowed on Anwar Awlaki, no
one—I talked to—no one had ever heard of that before, that Awlaki was
the head of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
If Awlaki was anything within al-Qaeda, he would have been very
low-level management. We in the United States get obsessed with Inspire magazine
and Anwar al-Awlaki because they’re speaking in English, and so we can
get scared of their words because they’re in English. If you read in
Arabic what has been produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and
you study who is important in that organization, Anwar al-Awlaki is a
nobody, in terms of the actual Arabic-speaking jihadist population that
is sort of in the circle of AQAP. He was someone that was convenient
because he was preaching in English to a wider audience.
AMY GOODMAN: You quoted a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst about his role, about Awlaki’s role.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right,
just saying that, you know, he’s mid-level management and that he—that
he doesn’t do—he wouldn’t do anything without them telling him what to
do. He’s not a decider. He’s not making those decisions.
AMY GOODMAN: So, September 30th, 2011, Awlaki is killed in a drone attack along with another American citizen, Samir Khan.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Then talk about what happened two weeks later.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
So, around the time a little bit before Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan
were killed, Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, who was living with his
grandparents and his mother in their house in Sana’a, he had just turned
16, and one morning he went into his mother’s purse before anyone had
gotten up, and he took the equivalent of $40 out of her purse and left a
small note saying, you know, "Please forgive me. I miss my father, and I
want to go and try to find him. I’m sorry that I took the money, and
I’ll pay it back." And then he climbed out the kitchen window. And I
went into their house and saw his bedroom, and I saw the kitchen, and I
sort of recreated what had happened. And he jumped out their kitchen
window, and the security guard in their family compound saw him leaving
early in the morning and didn’t think much of it at all. And so he goes
to Babel Yemen, in the old city in Sana’a, and he gets on a bus, and he
goes to Shabwa, where he believes his father is.
AMY GOODMAN: Hasn’t seen him for a few years.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And
hasn’t—hadn’t seen him since 2009. And, you know, this was a kid who
was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up—I mean, I saw these videos of
Anwar teaching his son how to ride a horse and playing at the beach with
him. And, I mean, the Awlakis showed me their family home movies. And
this kid clearly adored his father. And then, you know, his dad becomes
this outlaw and is on the run. And he’s sort of coming of age and
decides that he wants to go and find his father. And so he takes a bus
to Shabwa, where they have family, and was going to wait there and try
to connect with his father.
Anwar
al-Awlaki’s mother, Saleha, told me that she was in a panic when she
found out that he had left, because she thought that it was possible
that the CIA was trying to use Abdulrahman to find his father, that they
could have been tracking him via text messages if he had been involved,
you know, with finding his dad or emails and that they were being
monitored. In fact, when we went to the Awlaki home in Sana’a the first
time to film with them, Rick Rowley, the director of the film, couldn’t
find an open frequency on the—on our recording system, because all of
the radio waves were being used, so they’re just being monitored
intensely by all sorts of intelligence agencies. So, you know, I know
that every member of that family was being watched in some way or
another by intelligence.
So,
Abdulrahman Awlaki goes to Shabwa to wait for his father. And when he’s
there, his father is killed and—nowhere near Shabwa. He’s killed in the
north of Yemen. And then he calls back to speak to his grandparents,
and his grandmother, you know, said, "Abdulrahman, it’s finished. Your
father is dead. You have to come home." And at the time, it was the—you
know, the so-called Arab Spring. These uprisings were happening, and it
was happening in Yemen, too. The roads were all blocked, so he had to
stay in Shabwa for a couple of weeks while he waited for things to calm
down so he could safely travel back to Sana’a, which is a treacherous
sort of stretch of territory where there’s a lot of fighting. And, you
know, he’s depressed, and his family members there are encouraging him
to get out and to go out into the world and do stuff, and so he goes
with his teenage cousins to an outdoor restaurant to eat, and they’re
there on the night of October 14th when a drone appears above them and
launches a missile and blows up 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki and his
teenage cousins.
And,
you know, Nasser Aulaqi, Anwar’s father, loses his firstborn son, and
then, two weeks later, his eldest grandson is killed. And he said that
when they got the phone call the next day, that their relatives in
Shabwa told them that they—that they couldn’t identify the bodies
completely because they were all shredded and blown up to pieces and
that they only could find part of Abdulrahman’s head. And they knew it
was him because he had this very distinct afro. He had this very large
head of hair that his family had always—his mom and grandparents were
saying, "Cut your hair," and he was a rebellious teenager. And, you
know, on his Facebook page, which, you know, the family gave me all of
his Facebook posts, this was a kid who was into hip-hop music, who had
lots of pictures posing as a rapper with his friends, was into video
games; when the revolution was happening in Yemen, would go to the
Change Square to hang out and was a part of the—wanted to be a part of
that change in his country. And he was killed in this drone strike. And
the U.S., to this day, has never publicly said who they were going after
in that drone strike.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s
turn to Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Aulaqi, the grandfather of
Abdulrahman. In this video, made for the ACLU and the Center for
Constitutional Rights, he spoke about the U.S. killing of his
16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
NASSER AL-AULAQI: I
want Americans to know about my grandson, that he was very nice boy. He
was very caring boy for his family, for his mother, for his brothers.
He was born in August 1995 in the state of Colorado, city of Denver. He
was raised in America, when he was a child until he was seven years old.
And I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be
killed by his own government.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Nasser al-Aulaqi, the grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
So, after he was killed, the story that we all know in the public now
is that U.S. officials leaked stories to the press saying that he was 21
years old. He wasn’t; he had just turned 16, and we have the birth
certificate to prove that. He was born in Colorado in 1995. Then they
said that he had been with Ibrahim al-Banna, who is an Egyptian member
of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And the dominant story that’s been
floated is that the U.S. was trying to kill al-Banna and that
Abdulrahman Awlaki just happened to be next to him, which is an
incredible coincidence that this 16-year-old kid, whose father was
killed two weeks earlier in a targeted assassination by the U.S.
government, is then killed himself while in the company of another
member of AQAP. The CIA said that al-Banna wasn’t even on their target
list, so opening up the speculation that it was a
unilateral JSOC operation, Joint Special Operations Command operation.
When I spoke to—I spoke to a JSOCguy who was in Yemen at the time
working on that strike, and he wouldn’t tell me any of the details, but
he said, "The guy we were trying to get, we didn’t get." And I said,
"Well, what—how did you feel when you saw that this teenage American
citizen had been killed?" And he goes, "Well, there’s a reason I’m not
doing this anymore." And so, we don’t know who it was. Was Ibrahim
al-Banna there? If he was, AQAP says he’s very much alive, and that it
was lies that he was killed, if that’s the claim.
Then
the U.S. said, "Well, it was an outrageous mistake." This is all
anonymous, though. They’ll never—they’ll never talk about it. President
Obama has never been asked about the killing of this teenager. My new
reporting, though, that I did very recently, suggests that there—this
was a great controversy within the White House. I understand from a
former senior official of the administration who worked on this program
at the time that when it became clear that Abdulrahman Awlaki had been
killed, that President Obama was furious and that John Brennan, who at
the time was the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism
adviser, the guy running all of these operations, that Brennan believed
or suspected that it was an intentional hit against Anwar Awlaki’s son,
this 16-year-old kid, and ordered a review. And I asked this former
senior official what happened with the review, and he said, "I don’t
know." And then when I got in touch with the White House recently and I
exchanged a series of emails with the National Security Council
spokesperson, she told me that she wouldn’t discuss any of the specifics
about this and said that they’re not going to talk about operational
details or any of the reviews, and then pasted a boilerplate response
about drone strikes into the email.
But
then, when I asked this former senior official, "So, if the narrative
on this is that it was a mistake, then why didn’t you say that? Why
didn’t you say, you know, this 16-year-old U.S. citizen was killed as
collateral damage, or, you know, we were intending to get someone else,
and we didn’t do it?" And he said, "Look, we had just killed three U.S.
citizens in a two-week period, two of whom weren’t even targets—Samir
Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. It doesn’t look good. It’s
embarrassing." That’s what this official said to me. So, what my
understanding is now is that they killed these three U.S. citizens, two
of whom weren’t targets, one of whom was a 16-year-old kid whose
Facebook page you can look at online and photos you can look at online
and see what kind of a person he was, and the best thing to come up with
is: "We haven’t said anything to his family because it was embarrassing
for us politically." And that says a lot about where we’re at with
these drone strikes.
I
also think it’s possible that Abdulrahman Awlaki was killed in what’s
called a signature strike, which, to me, is the most egregious part of
the whole drone program. Because the United States doesn’t have any
actual intelligence on the ground in Yemen, they’ve taken to doing these
signature strikes where they develop a pattern of life, and they say,
if people are in a certain region of Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia—if
people are in a certain region and they’re of military age—they could be
anywhere from 15 to 70 years old—and they fit some kind of a pattern of
other people we believe to be terrorists, then they become legitimate
targets. So it’s the most horrific form of pre-crime. They don’t know
the identities of the people that they’re killing. They don’t know
whether they’ve been involved with any activity. They’re killed for who
they might be or they might one day become. And so, for whatever reason
Abdulrahman Awlaki was killed that day, the message that was sent is
that the U.S. will operate with impunity in pursuit of a small number of
people, and even U.S. citizens can be killed, with no explanation as to
why, by their own government.
AMY GOODMAN: Let
me play the clip of Attorney General Eric Holder, who offered the Obama
administration’s most spirited defense of its policy authorizing the
assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, speaking last March at Chicago’s
Northwestern University.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: It
is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that some of the threats that we
face come from a small number of United States citizens who have decided
to commit violent attacks against their own country from abroad. Based
on generations-old legal principles and Supreme Court decisions handed
down during World War II, as well as during this current conflict, it’s
clear that United States citizenship alone does not make—does not make
such individuals immune from being targeted.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Attorney General Eric Holder. Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah,
I mean, I also—I want to—I mean, we’ve talked a lot about U.S.
citizens, but I also feel it’s necessary to point out that the vast
majority of the people being killed in these operations are not in fact
U.S. citizens, they’re Pakistanis, they’re Yemenis, they’re Somalis and,
you know, others. I mean, I think it’s ironic that you have a president
that is a constitutional law expert and that you have, you know, this
attorney general who was very well respected in the field of law coming
forward to put together the defense of the—a defense of the stripping of
the most basic rights in our Constitution. I mean, the idea that you
can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret
declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated
without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a—we should
view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country.
The idea that you don’t give people the chance to respond to charges
against them or to see the evidence against them should be shocking to
all Americans.
When
Anwar Awlaki’s father tried to file a lawsuit before his son was
killed, before Anwar Awlaki was killed, challenging the government’s
right to assassinate him, CIADirector Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary
Gates, DNI—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper all submitted
briefs to the court saying that if the evidence was to be made public,
it would threaten the security of the United States, and they hid behind
the state secrets privilege. So their response to a U.S. citizen’s
petition to understand why they were put on the kill list was to say,
"We have evidence, but it’s too secret to—it’s too sensitive to be made
public." And that’s essentially what it’s come down to.
And,
you know, I’m a believer in societies being defined by how they treat
the least of their people or their most reprehensible members of their
society. Anwar Awlaki said things that I find utterly despicable and
disgraceful, and I think that there probably would have been grounds to
charge him with some form of a—with some kind of a crime. His lawyers
have never contended he’s an innocent man or he’s this noble figure that
should be held up. He called for the killing of cartoonists who had
drawn the Prophet Muhammad, listed specific names of people. He did
things that are offensive to me and should be offensive to all humans.
But that’s not—but that, itself, is not a death penalty case. You know,
you have to look at how you treat people that you despise and what
access do you give them and what rights do you give them in a society.
That defines who you are, just like when a president is in power who you
support, or maybe you voted for, or you think is a great guy, your
principles are tested by where you stand when they’re doing things or
implementing policies that you would have opposed if the other guy had
won. And so, you know, we have a crisis of conscience right now in our
country also, where people are—it’s like, you know, partisan lemmings
just going off the cliff. If McCain had won that election, there’s no
way that you’d see polls—70 percent of liberals supporting drone
strikes. No way. Obama has sold liberals a bill of goods and has
convinced them that this is a smarter, cleaner way to wage wars. And
it’s just not.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.
Tomorrow we’ll play highlights from today’s first-ever Senate drone
hearing and air part two of my interview with Jeremy on secret U.S.
operations across the globe, including Somalia and Pakistan.
Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
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