Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Back in Yemen, the Awlaki family received word of the strike in Jawf. At first they doubted the official reports, as so many before had been false, but then they confirmed that this time they were accurate. As they mourned the death of their son Anwar, the Awlakis’ attention turned to their grandson, Abdulrahman. He had gone to Shabwah to find his father, and now his father was dead.

  After Abdulrahman heard the news of Anwar’s death, he called home for the first time and spoke to his mother and his grandmother. “That’s enough, Abdulrahman. You have to come back,” his grandmother, Saleha, told him. “That’s it, you didn’t see your father.” Abdulrahman, she recalled, sounded devastated, yet still tried to comfort her. “Be patient. Be strong,” Abdulrahman told her. “Allah chose him.” The conversation was brief. Abdulrahman said he would return home soon but that he wanted to wait for the roads to clear. “At the time, the roads were not very safe. The revolution was at its maybe highest point,” Saleha added. There were police checkpoints and fighting on the route. Abdulrahman did not want to be detained or caught up in any violence. So the boy said he would remain with his cousins in Shabwah and return to Sana’a when things calmed down.

  IN NORTH CAROLINA, Sarah Khan woke up to the news from Yemen. “In the morning when I opened the computer, I saw that they had killed Anwar Awlaki,” she told me. There was no mention of her son, Samir, in the early reports. But then Sarah’s husband, Zafar, called her from his office and said he had seen some reports indicating that a “Samir Khan” had also been killed in the drone strikes. “I didn’t believe it,” Sarah told me. “Samir is a name that is pretty common in the Middle East—it could be any Samir. Doesn’t have to be my Samir. I was like, it’s not true. It cannot be Samir. It has to be somebody else. I didn’t want to believe in that.” As more reports trickled out, they began to accept the fact that their son was dead, killed by his own government. The Khans tried to contact the State Department for information, for answers. Why was Samir killed when the FBI had told his family that he had committed no crime? The grand jury that was convened to consider charges against him a year earlier, in August 2010, had produced no indictment. Why was he condemned to death without trial? Their inquiries were met with silence.

  The Khans—who had done everything they could to stay away from the media spotlight when their son became a known figure in Inspire magazine—decided to take their questions public. After the strike in Yemen, they wrote an open letter to the US government in a local newspaper. “It has been stated in the media that Samir was not the target of the attack; however no US official has contacted us with any news about the recovery of our son’s remains, nor offered us any condolences. As a result, we feel appalled by the indifference shown to us by our government,” the letter read. “Being a law abiding citizen of the United States our late son Samir Khan never broke any law and was never implicated of any crime. The Fifth Amendment states that no citizen shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,’ yet our government assassinated two of its citizens. Was this style of execution the only solution? Why couldn’t there have been a capture and trial? Where is the justice? As we mourn our son, we must ask these questions.”

  Days later, Zafar Khan received a phone call from the US State Department. The official on the line expressed the US government’s “condolences” for Samir’s death. “They said that they were sorry and that Samir wasn’t the target,” Sarah Khan told me. “They said Sammy did not do anything wrong. They said he was not the target.” That only raised more questions for her. “If they knew that Samir was there, in that vehicle, then how could they do something like that?” she asked. Obama administration officials later told reporters that Khan was “collateral damage” in a strike aimed at Awlaki, but Representative Michael McCaul from Texas had another word for it. “Samir Khan was a bonus. It was a twofer,” McCaul said. “It’s a pretty good hit.”

  As word of Awlaki’s death spread, politicians in the United States from both political parties hailed the assassination of one of their own citizens. “This is an extraordinary victory, a great moment for the United States,” gloated Republican congressman Peter King, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. Awlaki, he said, had become “more dangerous than bin Laden”—indeed, he was “the No. 1 terrorist in the world.” Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, celebrated Awlaki’s killing, saying in a joint statement with Republican senator Saxby Chambliss that he “posed a significant and imminent threat to the United States” and had “declared war on the United States and inspired and planned attacks against us. We commend the agencies and individuals who found him and eliminated this dangerous threat.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Like Osama bin Laden and so many other terrorist leaders who have been killed or captured in recent years, [Awlaki] can no longer threaten America, our allies, or peace-loving people anywhere in the world. Today we are all safer.”

  “I’m glad they did it,” said Republican senator John McCain. Former vice president Dick Cheney praised Obama for killing Awlaki, saying, “I do think this was a good strike. I think the president ought to have that kind of authority to order that kind of strike, even when it involves an American citizen.” CIA director Leon Panetta echoed those sentiments, declaring, “This individual was clearly a terrorist and yes, he was a citizen, but if you’re a terrorist, you’re a terrorist.”

  Although Awlaki’s killing did not inspire the same spontaneous carnival-like street celebrations in the streets of Washington, DC, and New York City that marked bin Laden’s death, some tabloid newspapers staged their own victory parades on their pages. “Another al Qaeda Bites the Dust; Blasted to Hell; CIA Drone Kills US-Born Terrorist al-Awlaki,” declared the New York Post. “Remote-Control Really Hits the Splat,” proclaimed another headline in the paper. “One Less Terror Big. Al Qaeda Loses Leader in Attack; Their violent hatred for US dies when a missile strike killed off an American-born monster militant,” announced the New York Daily News.

  The only voices of dissent that emanated from Washington in the immediate aftermath of Awlaki’s killing came from the fringes of the Democratic and Republican parties. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually, that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it’s sad,” Texas Republican Ron Paul said on the campaign trail as he waged an unsuccessful insurgent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. “Awlaki was born here, he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. To start assassinating American citizens without charges—we should think very seriously about this.” Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who tried to challenge the government’s assertion that it could kill US citizens without trial nearly two years before Awlaki’s death, said, “The Administration has a crossed a dangerous divide and set a dangerous precedent for how the United States handles terrorism cases. This dangerous legal precedent allows the government to target U.S. citizens abroad for being suspected of involvement in terrorism, in subversion of their most basic constitutional rights and due process of law. Their right to a trial is summarily and anonymously stripped from them.”

  Constitutional lawyer and syndicated columnist Glenn Greenwald was among the few US commentators to look askance at the celebrations of Awlaki’s killing, writing, “After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today.” He correctly predicted that few Americans would raise questions or express outrage at the killing. “What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. government.”

  In an interview the day Awlaki’s death was announced, Greenwald said, “Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process
or simply to eavesdrop on their conversation without warrant. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process. And yet many Democrats and progressives, because it’s President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it.” Greenwald added: “To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the Constitution and to tear it into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.”

  For some former senior members of the Bush administration, the killing of a US citizen by a Democratic president seemed to take the acceptable bounds of US conduct in the war on terror beyond their own lax standards. “Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel,” said former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden. “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on” Awlaki, he noted, “but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?”

  Even as the legal issues surrounding Awlaki’s killing received little attention in the US media and barely registered a blip on the radar of the general public in the United States, a few journalists and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill began seeking information about the process of authorizing the assassination of US citizens. Only a select few in Washington knew anything specific. “There’s a process that goes through the National Security Council, and then after that it goes to the president, and then the president then indicates that these individuals are on this list, and as a result of that process we followed it’s legal,” said Charles Albert “Dutch” Ruppersberger III, a Maryland Democrat who was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. “It’s legitimate, and we’re taking out someone who has attempted to attack us on numerous occasions, and he was on that list. It was pursuant to a process.”

  While the White House and some leading national security lawmakers assured journalists and the public that the process was lawful, the administration refused to make public its evidence. Some lawmakers—whose security clearances and committee assignments authorized them to review the kill process—alleged that they were not being sufficiently briefed by the White House. “It’s important for the American people to know when the president can kill an American citizen, and when they can’t,” Senator Ron Wyden told me. Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, had served on the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001 and often found himself at odds with the Bush administration over secrecy and transparency issues. Now, under a Democratic president, he was waging the same battles—and new ones. He said that he repeatedly asked the administration for its legal rationale for the government killing its own citizens without trial, calling his attempts to extract this information “an enormous struggle.” The American people, Wyden said, deserve “to know clearly when a president thinks an American citizen can be killed, and their life taken. These are substantial questions where I just don’t think there’s been a lot of detail, and the American people deserve more.” In the case of Awlaki, the target had not been indicted in any US court and faced no known charges. How would he have surrendered? To whom would he even surrender? “Those questions are clearly sort of hanging in suspended animation, without answers,” Wyden told me.

  Giraldi, the former CIA officer, labeled Awlaki’s killing an “assassination.” He had reviewed the publicly available information about Awlaki and what the administration had alleged Awlaki had done. “None of those things, to me, amounted to a death sentence. And they’re saying, ‘Well, we have other stuff, but it’s secret,’” Giraldi told me at the time. “And that’s of course the thing that’s always trotted out, and if there’s a challenge in the courts, you come up against the State Secrets Privilege, so that the challenge goes away. So we’re having a situation where people are being killed, you don’t know what the evidence is, and you have no way to redress the situation.”

  Nasser Awlaki believed that the US and Yemeni security forces could have arrested Anwar, but that they did not want to see him stand trial and be able to present a defense. It is also possible that the United States did not want to give Awlaki a platform to spread his message more widely. “I think that they wanted to kill him, without due process, because they thought he was a legitimate military target,” Nasser told me. “How is it that Umar Farouk, who tried to blow up the airplane, or Nidal Hasan, who actually killed those soldiers, how are they now having, let us say, a fair trial? My son did not get that fair trial.”

  Paying for the Sins of the Father

  WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2011 —Abdulrahman Awlaki was mourning his father in Shabwah. The boy’s family members there tried to comfort him and encouraged him to get out with his cousins—to go for walks or go outside for meals in the fresh air. That was what Abdulrahman was doing on the evening of October 14. He and his cousins had joined a group of friends outdoors to barbecue. The boy and his cousins had laid a blanket on the ground and were about to begin their meal. There were a few other people nearby doing the same. It was about 9:00 p.m. when the drones pierced the night sky. Moments later, Abdulrahman was dead. So, too, were several other teenage members of his family, including Abdulrahman’s seventeen-year-old cousin, Ahmed.

  Early the next morning, Nasser Awlaki received a phone call from his family in Shabwah. “Some of our relatives went to the place where [Abdulrahman] was killed, and they saw the area where he was killed. And they told us he was buried with the others in one grave because they were blown up to pieces by the drone. So they could not put them in separate graves,” Nasser told me. “They put three or four of them in one grave because they were cut into pieces. The people who were there could recognize only the back of Abdulrahman’s hair. But they could not recognize his face or anything else.” As the horror was setting in that their eldest grandson had been killed just two weeks after the death of their eldest child, Nasser and Saleha watched in disbelief as numerous news reports identified Abdulrahman as being twenty-one years old, with anonymous US military officials referring to him as a “military-aged” male. Some reports intimated that he was an al Qaeda supporter and that he had been killed while meeting with Ibrahim al Banna, an Egyptian citizen described as the “media coordinator” for AQAP.

  “To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser shortly after the strike. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.” When I visited Nasser after Abdulrahman was killed, he showed me the boy’s Colorado birth certificate, showing that he was born in 1995 in Denver. “When he was killed by the US government, he was a teenager, he wasn’t twenty-one. He wouldn’t have been able to enlist in the military in the US. He was sixteen,” he told me.

  Days after the killing of Abdulrahman, the United States released a statement, as usual feigning ignorance about who was responsible for the strike, even though “unnamed officials” in the United States and Yemen had confirmed the strike to almost all media outlets that inquired. “We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al Banna at the time,” National Security Council spokesman Thomas Vietor told the press, in a statement that strangely cast Abdulrahman as something between an al Qaeda associate and a hapless tourist. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged US citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

  The Awlaki family members, who had declined to discuss the killing of Anwar, believed that they needed to speak out publicly about the killing of Abdulrahman. “We watched with surprise and condemnation how several prominent American newspapers and news channels twist the truth, calling Abdulrahman an Al Qaeda operative and falsely and misleadingly stating his age as 21
years old,” read a statement from the family. “Abdulrahman Anwar Awlaki was born on August 26, 1995 in Denver Colorado. He was an American citizen raised in the U.S. until 2002 when his father was forced to leave the U.S. and go back to Yemen.” They invited people to look up Abdulrahman’s Facebook page—which revealed a teenager interested in music, video games and his friends—“to see the ‘lethal terrorist’, ‘the 21 year old Qaeda operative’ the U.S. government is claiming they killed. Look at his pictures, his friends and his hobbies. His Facebook page shows a typical kid, a teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”

  For the Awlaki family, their private pain was overwhelming. After Anwar was killed, “People flocked to our house to pay condolences and show sympathy and I was in state of complete disbelief and denial,” recalled Anwar’s sister, Abir. “They kept on coming for the next two weeks, when we were yet struck again by the murder of Anwar’s oldest son, Abdulrahman. The skinny, smiling, curly-haired boy was murdered; and for what? What was he found guilty of?” she asked. “The shock of losing Abdulrahman only fourteen days after his father was unbearable. I can’t wipe the picture of my father’s reaction upon receiving the news. It is hard—hard for a father to lose his oldest son and then his first and favorite grandchild. The entire house was traumatized and hurt by every sense of the word.”

  Abdulrahman’s grandmother, Saleha, went into a severe depression after her son and grandson were killed. She had been extremely close to Abdulrahman. After he died, when guests would come to the house to pay respects, she would serve them tea or sweets. She later told me from her home in Sana’a, “I look around the house and see if anybody will take the dishes and take them and bring them back to the kitchen.” She would look for her grandson, remembering how he used to help her clean up, but he wasn’t there. “I miss him a lot,” Saleha said, beginning to cry. “Abdulrahman was a different boy. I have never known anybody like Abdulrahman. He was a very, very gentle boy.” I asked her what her message would be to people in the United States. “Abdulrahman was not the only one killed that day. There were other children whose parents loved them very much. Just like the American people love their children,” she said. “I wonder if Obama lost one of his daughters, or Mrs. Clinton, would they be happy? Are they going to be happy if they lost one of their children like that? I was wondering if this will make the American people happier?”