Justice and the Enemy

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Justice and the Enemy Page 16

by William Shawcross


  America’s monopoly on drones is already a thing of the past. Over forty countries are now developing or buying them and they are already in the hands not only of rivals to the West such as Russia and China, but also enemies like Iran and Hezbollah. Iran regularly flies small drones over and alongside U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf in order to monitor all U.S. naval activity and personnel. The U.S. has made a strategic decision not to fire upon them for fear of adverse international reactions.

  The implications of this leaping technology are revolutionary—and frightening. The Luftwaffe could not fly across the Atlantic in World War II but a seventy-seven-year-old, legally blind, model plane enthusiast man has already managed to dispatch his own handmade drone over that three-thousand-mile moat. 6 There is every reason to fear that Al Qaeda or its associates will be able to do the same thing. Indeed, in September 2011, a twenty-six-year-old American Muslim, Rezwan Ferdaus, was arrested by the FBI and indicted for allegedly supporting Al Qaeda and plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with model airplanes filled with plastic explosives.

  The ever-expanding range, intelligence, and firepower of drones raises myriad new questions of law and morality. They bring to the fore once again the Geneva Conventions whose interpretation has so dominated the waging of the War on Terror. Dr. Singer has pointed out, “The prevailing laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, were written in a year [1929] in which people listened to Al Jolson on 78 rpm records and the average house cost 7,400 dollars. Is it too much to ask them to regulate a twenty-first-century technology like a MQ-9 Reaper that is being used to target a modern-day insurgent who is intentionally violating those laws by hiding out in a civilian house?” 7

  To which the answer is Yes—it is indeed too much to expect Geneva, as written, to cope. The Conventions have been under immense strain in recent decades, particularly since bin Laden declared war on America. The development and proliferation of drones will provide yet another reason to revisit and rewrite them.

  For their own reasons, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights raised many such questions as they tried to issue injunctions against what they denounced as the “unlawful” use of drones. They also went to the law to protect the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki from being attacked from the sky above Yemen.

  Al-Awlaki featured in the last chapter as the imam who inspired Major Hasan on his murderous rampage in Fort Hood, who personally instructed Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an airliner over Detroit, and who motivated Faisal Shahzad to attempt carnage in Times Square.

  Al-Awlaki was an American citizen born of Yemeni parents in New Mexico in 1971. He lived with his parents in the U.S. until he was seven, moved to Yemen, and then returned to America and obtained degrees at both Colorado State and San Diego State universities. Not only well-educated, he was soft spoken and persuasive, and he quickly became an effective and radical preacher, working in Colorado, California, and the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. In 2001 he was in contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers as they prepared for their assault on America.

  Shortly after 9/11, the New York Times, ever optimistic in such matters, described al-Awlaki as part of “a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West.”8 This confidence was misplaced. Indeed, questions were later raised as to whether he was not “an overlooked key player” in the 9/11 plot. 9 In 2004 al-Awlaki moved, no doubt wisely from his point of view, to Yemen, an impoverished and divided tribal country of some 24 million directly south of Saudi Arabia and commanding the sea route from the Gulf to the Suez Canal. The country’s longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was seen in Washington as a crucial ally in the war against Al Qaeda but the government’s writ did not reach far into the wild provinces where Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a merger of the groups from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, had become one of the fastest growing Islamist groups in the world. Throughout the first decade of the new century, Yemen spiraled towards the grim vortex of failed statehood, even before the massive popular uprisings that swept the region in early 2011.

  Al-Awlaki became an important member of AQAP. At the request of the United States, he was arrested in 2006 but was released later that year. During his time in prison, he claimed later, he was not allowed to read Islamic texts; instead he dived into the novels of Charles Dickens and, unusually for an Islamist terrorist, became a literary critic. “What fascinated me with these novels,” he wrote later, “were the amazing characters Dickens created and the similarity of some of them to some people today.... For example: the thick and boastful Mr. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was similar to George W. Bush; Lucy’s father, Mr. Gradgrind, was similar to some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only Medicine and Engineering are worthy professions for their children . . . and Uriah Heep was similar to some pitiful Muslims today.” 10

  From his Yemeni base, al-Awlaki became the most successful Internet evangelist of the jihadi age. He could speak not only of Dickens but also of Michael Jackson and other heroes of popular culture. His lectures promoting hatred of infidels (“kuffar”) and especially his fellow Americans have been found in the computers of more and more terrorist suspects around the world. In his talks he expressed cleverly the call for a new global strategy for jihadism made by the Al Qaeda strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, who had argued that in the post–9/11 era Al Qaeda should become a much more diffuse movement where individuals waged their personal jihads against the Great Satan. 11 q

  That is what has come to pass. After 9/11 the U.S. succeeded in containing the original tight-knit hierarchy dominated by bin Laden. But his following grew and spread to include many affiliates including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), LeT in Pakistan, al Shabaab in Somalia (another failed state) and more. (Al Qaeda in Iraq murdered thousands of people after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and came close to defeating the United States and reducing Iraq to bloody chaos. But, as I have mentioned, U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency policies devised by General Jack Keane, General David Petraeus, and analysts such as Fred Kagan, and accepted by President Bush, eventually dealt the group a severe blow.)

  Then there was the third tier of freelance cells and individuals, inspired and sometimes guided by the layers above them. By 2010 there were thousands, probably tens of thousands of such self-starting, “lone wolf” terrorists who imbibed their hatred from the Internet, made contacts who reinforced their prejudices, and awaited propitious moments to attack.

  In early 2010, the Internet’s chat rooms, You Tube videos, and social networking sites gave great impetus to the wave of popular demonstrations against autocratic governments in North Africa and the Middle East. Not for noth- ing was the upheaval in Egypt sometimes called the Facebook Revolution. But these same virtual meeting places were also fecund breeding grounds that inspired Islamic radicalism in individuals at their computers all over the world. r

  Almost no one was more skilled at arousing such people than al-Awlaki. In 2008, Charles Allen, then the chief intelligence official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, cited him as an example of Al Qaeda’s “reach into the United States.” 12 But, as we have seen, no alarm bells were raised by his email correspondence with Major Nidal Hasan before that man’s murderous assault on his comrades at Fort Hood in November 2009. Subsequently al-Awlaki mocked the U.S.: “I wondered how the American security agencies, who claim to be able to read car license plate numbers from space, everywhere in the world, I wondered how [they did not reveal this].” 13 He was correct: the F.B.I. and other agencies bungled all attempts to monitor and understand Hasan and thus allowed him to commit his terrible murders. Al-Awlaki also expressed his regret that his other disciple, Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underpants bomber,” had failed to blow up over three hundred people on board Flight 253 to Detroit. “Those who might be killed in a plane are merely a drop of water in a sea.” 14

  He and his comrades in Yemen published online a stylish English-language magazine called Inspire, desig
ned to incite individual Muslims to kill more “kuffar.” (This was edited by a Saudi-American jihadist in Yemen, Samir Khan. 15) One of its recurrent themes was that attacks did not have to be large-scale to be successful—they just had to make an impact and inspire other Muslims. In 2009 al-Awlaki wrote in Inspire, “Today the world turns upside down when one Muslim performs a martyrdom operation. Can you imagine what would happen if that is done by seven hundred Muslims on the same day?!”

  In a typical sermon, “Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad,” al-Awlaki instructed his listeners that “the hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed. We need to realize that Allah will not grant us victory as long as we still have some love towards his enemies in our hearts.... Jihad must be practiced by the child even if the parents refuse; by the wife even if the husband objects; and by the one in debt even if the lender disagrees. . . .The point needs to be stressed: Jihad today is obligatory on every capable Muslim.” 16

  In a talk broadcast from Yemen on the Internet in April 2010, al-Awlaki’s message to Muslims in America was stark: “How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful co-existence with the nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims . . . the war between Muslims and the West is escalating.” 17 He was determined to do everything to hasten that process. s

  The deadly threat from “lone-wolf” jihadists was brutally demonstrated in London in May 2010. A British member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, was stabbed in the stomach by a female constituent armed with a kitchen knife; he was fortunate not to die. His assailant, Roshonara Choudhry, a British Muslim, was an intelligent young woman of Bangladeshi heritage, studying at King’s College, London, one of Britain’s finest colleges. She had shown neither her parents nor her friends any signs of radicalization. After she was arrested, she claimed that watching over one hundred hours of al-Awlaki’s videos had inspired her to kill her MP because he had voted in favor of the war in Iraq. She was tried, found guilty of attempted murder, and jailed for life. Inspire magazine described her as model for Western Muslims for the way she “rushed to her obligation of jihad and answered the call of Allah.” 18

  Similarly in Baltimore, one Antonio Martinez was arrested after he concocted a one-man plan to commit murder outside a military recruitment center in Maryland. On his Facebook page he wrote, “I love Sheikh Anwar al-Awalki [sic] for the sake of ALLAH. A real insperation [sic] for the Ummah, I don’t care if he is on the terrorist list!” Al-Awlaki was also linked to a group of Canadian Muslims charged with plotting attacks on the Parliament building in Ottawa, to six men convicted of plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey, and to the 2005 London subway bombers. 19

  A February 2011 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington described the dangerous process of individual radicalization. “For ‘wannabe’ terrorists living in the United States and other Western coun tries, online content like an al-Awlaki lecture must very often supplant the counsel of a living, breathing cleric.” The Internet can radicalize and forge links between terrorists and recruits thousands of miles apart. “With radicalization, recruitment, and planning now possible in a virtual realm, Islamist extremists no longer must meet in person to enact their agenda.” 20

  Al-Awlaki’s rhetoric was dangerous but alone it would not have been enough for the administration to try to kill him. Officials told the New York Times that he had “shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them.” 21 His role in grooming the underpants bomber was one case in point.

  Another, which became public only later, was the case of Rajib Karim, a Bangladeshi-born computer expert working for British Airways in Newcastle, England. To appear innocuous, Karim shaved his beard, played soccer, and never discussed politics. But he was a secret member of a terrorist organization, Jamaat ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). In early 2010—just after the failure of Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day bombing—he began to exchange highly encrypted email messages with al-Awlaki in Yemen and told him how much he hated living amongst the “kuffar.”

  Al-Awlaki asked him about his access to airports and his knowledge of “the limitations and cracks” in airport security systems. Karim replied that he could disrupt British Airways’ computer systems and he knew “two brothers”—one was a baggage handler at Heathrow and the other worked in airport security. “Both are good practicing brothers and sympathise towards the cause of the mujahideen and do not slander them.” 22

  Al-Awlaki urged Karim to transfer to British Airways’ flight crew: his new pupil applied to do just that but was turned down. “Our highest priority is the U.S.,” wrote al-Awlaki. “Anything there, even on a smaller scale compared with what we may do in the UK, would be our choice. So the question is: with the people you have, is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the U.S.?” Karim replied that he would “work with the bros to find out the possibilities.”

  Discovered only by chance by British intelligence, Karim was arrested in February 2010. Months were needed before the sophisticated encryption of his exchanges with al-Awlaki could be deciphered. He was tried on terrorism charges, convicted, and, in March 2011, sentenced to thirty years in prison. 23

  Al-Awlaki was at the heart of another such airline bombing plot at the end of 2010 when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula almost succeeded in sending two printers, their ink cartridges filled with PETN explosive, on flights into the United States. After a warning from Saudi intelligence, which had a double agent in the plot, the bombs were discovered (with difficulty) and disarmed at Dubai and at East Midlands airport in Britain. They were addressed to Jewish organizations in Chicago—this was apparently a morbid joke—and it seemed that they were intended to explode over North American cities. As another “joke,” al-Awlaki had included a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations in one parcel.

  An explosion on either or both planes would have been catastrophic. Even without that, AQAP claimed success: “The operation was to be based on two factors: The first is that the packages pass through the latest security equipment. The second, the spread of fear that would cause the West to invest billions of dollars in new security procedures.”24 By contrast, Inspire claimed, the plot had cost only $4,200 to mount; it was part of a new “strategy of a thousand cuts” designed to bleed the Western economies to death. 25

  The violence and intimidation of Islamism takes many forms. Consider the endless plight of the Danish cartoonists who drew pictures of Mohammed in 2005. (Some of the hadiths (sayings of and about Mohammed) forbid depictions of him, but the Koran does not.) Islamic anger at these representations of the Prophet (one of them had him with a bomb in his turban) was manufactured and manipulated by extremists around the world, in particular by Yusuf al Qaradawi, the most influential Islamic cleric in the Muslim Brotherhood. Danish embassies and other interests were attacked and over 100 people were killed in riots. The lives of the cartoonists were from then on under constant threat. In January 2010 a Somali terrorist almost succeeded in murdering one of them, Kurt Westergaard, by breaking into his Copenhagen home armed with an axe and a knife. Fortunately, he had already built himself a “safe room” into which he locked himself—this saved his life. His assailant was arrested.

  The intimidation never ended. Yale University commissioned a book on the whole controversy—but was frightened to reprint the cartoons in it, thereby rendering its publication somewhat pointless, and in 2010 the Metropolitan Museum of Art took down any representation of Mohammed from its walls, including precious Persian miniatures which had been on display for years, for fear of Islamist violence.

  Particularly poignant was the case of Molly Norris. In April 2010, Ms. Norris, a cartoonist on the Seattle Weekly, was appalled by the worldwide self censorship over images of Mohammed. She drew a poster advertising an event—“Everybody Draw M
ohammed Day”—on May 20, 2011. 26 Her intention was not to abuse Islam but to create safety in numbers and to defend freedom of speech. This was honorable but rash.

  To her horror, her idea went viral on Facebook with thousands of different sorts of drawings of Mohammed submitted. As worldwide arguments over her initiative began, she disassociated herself from it. Too late. Like some ghastly mythical fury lurking in faraway mountains, Anwar al-Awlaki immediately issued from his eyrie in Yemen a fatwa demanding the death of Molly Norris and everyone else who had drawn Mohammed. “The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved,” he said in Inspire magazine. “The large number of participants makes it easier for us because there are more targets to choose from.” He said it would be difficult for the authorities to protect them all. And there were indeed more than enough radicalized American Muslims to pose a real and perpetual threat to Molly Norris. The F.B.I. declared it would not defend her and the Seattle Weekly announced “there is no more Molly.” She became a non person, hiding in Washington State—or somewhere else.

  Molly Norris’s entire life, not just her freedom of speech, was ruined in the land of the First Amendment by a threat from an Islamist terrorist demanding the murder of yet more Americans. 27 This is the route down which freedom dies. We make fun of Christianity, mock (or malign) the Jews, laugh at the Dalai Lama, but we often maintain a respectful silence about Islam. Why is one religion being accorded so much more deference than all the others?

 

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