by Scott Shane
So it is entirely plausible, though the details are difficult to reconstruct, that Abdulrahman and his cousin were with a group that included Al Qaeda members when they were killed. But al-Banna, the Egyptian whom JSOC was purportedly targeting, was not among the dead—the United States would still be offering a reward for information on his location three years later—and the Al Qaeda connections of others killed in the strike remained uncertain. In part that reflects the difficulty of assessing where an individual is on a spectrum of “Al Qaeda ties.” In the context of Yemen’s tribal provinces, that vague term can include dedicated fighters who have sworn allegiance to the leader of AQAP, but it can also include men with brothers or cousins in Al Qaeda who themselves take no active part.
Abdulrahman, said one administration official who was briefed on the strike, “was certainly with people who we believed to be AQAP.” That did not justify the killing of the sixteen-year-old, he said, but it explained how it happened.
A number of initial news reports of the strike, based on interviews with anonymous Yemeni and American officials, mistakenly gave Abdulrahman’s age as twenty-one. Outraged, Nasser al-Awlaki countered the false reports by giving reporters copies of Abdulrahman’s birth certificate, showing he had been born in Colorado in 1995. The incorrect age raised a possibility that American targeters somehow had bogus information and really believed that Abdulrahman was a twenty-one-year-old Al Qaeda member. But several officials said the incorrect age was either an honest error or a clumsy after-the-fact falsehood intended to minimize the blunder. “That’s a ‘shit happens’ kind of story,” said another American official deeply involved in the counterterrorism campaign in Yemen about the strike. “We didn’t know he was there.”
It was a damning excuse. In two weeks, the United States had killed three Americans in Yemen. By its own account, only one of the killings had been intentional. It undercut claims that the Predators, with their telephoto lenses and high-tech optics, allowed drone operators to examine and identify the faces of those on the ground. They were killing people whose identity they didn’t know, often on the basis of sketchy intelligence, hunches, and guesswork.
If there was an explanation for what to most Yemenis looked like the deliberate murder of an innocent teenager, the Obama administration failed to offer it. Instead, officials hid behind the usual shield of secrecy, offering the family no apology and the world no explanation to counter the worst possible assumptions: that the United States had killed Abdulrahman deliberately to eliminate the possibility that he would grow up and take his father’s path—a favored theory in tribal Yemen—or that the United States simply didn’t care whom it killed. In its official “Report of Death of an American Citizen Abroad,” Form DS-2060, the State Department had the gall to say that the cause of Abdulrahman’s death was “unknown,” a falsehood refuted by thousands of news reports.
The killing of his son and especially his grandson, by his own account, threw Nasser al-Awlaki into months of depression. In an emotional audio statement to British Muslims six weeks after the strike, using religious language that was not typical for him, he called for the spread of Anwar’s message, which he suggested was simply a call to Islam. “Anwar was assassinated because of his teachings,” he said. “No evidence was ever presented against him.” As for Abdulrahman, he “was having dinner with his teenage friends in our homeland, Shabwah province” when he was killed. “He was not traveling with any high-value target, as the Obama administration continues to lie.” He called the United States “a state gone mad” and personally attacked “the so-called Nobel Peace Prize laureate” Obama.
“My son Anwar was intelligent, sharp, eloquent, educated, charismatic and brave,” he said. “He had qualities and traits that could have taken him places in this world. But he chose this path, and gave it his best—the path of Allah. It is the job of all of us to spread his knowledge and keep it alive.”
It was the statement of a father and grandfather blinded by grief; it belied Nasser’s own efforts, over many years, to steer Anwar into a more conventional career and away from militancy. Nasser al-Awlaki was on far more solid ground when he called for the United States to live up to its own principles. Many months later, he explained why he had gone to federal court in the United States for a second time. The first time, he had tried and failed to get Anwar off the kill list. Now, along with Sarah Khan, the mother of Samir Khan, he filed a second federal lawsuit, this time hoping to force the government to publicly acknowledge and explain what it had done and why. He told a story that showed why the American actions were particularly baffling to him. One night about a year before Abdulrahman’s death, Nasser said, he and his grandson were talking together by the light of a single candle—Sanaa’s power was out, as it so often was. “I told my grandson, ‘Look, I don’t want you to take any other path except the path of your grandfather. Which means I want you to go to America, and study in America, and come back and serve Yemen, or even stay in America.’ ” He didn’t mention Anwar’s choices, but it was clear that he did not want Abdulrahman to follow his father’s example. Nasser recalled urging the boy to pay attention. “ ‘Do you listen to me? Please study more English, be as good in English as your father, and I’ll take you to America to study after you finish high school.’ And he told me yes.”
Now he would not be sending Abdulrahman to America or to anywhere else. “I will continue being tormented with questions about why Abdulrahman was killed,” Nasser al-Awlaki told me early in 2014, “until the US authorities explain what happened in a court of law.” Though his first lawsuit, challenging the placement of Anwar on the kill list had been dismissed, he still believed that the court might give him satisfaction on his second lawsuit. I had covered a hearing on Nasser’s second lawsuit where Judge Rosemary Collyer repeatedly pressed Justice Department lawyers to explain why the court should not enforce the constitutional rights of Americans targeted overseas. “Are you saying that a US citizen targeted by the United States in a foreign country has no constitutional rights?” she asked Brian Hauck, a deputy assistant attorney general. “How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this?” Nasser had read my story about the hearing and taken heart. Most legal authorities still believed the lawsuit was a long shot, but the judge’s skeptical stance gave him hope that she would take his side.
A few months later, in April 2014, Judge Collyer dashed that hope. Because Abdulrahman and Samir Khan had not been deliberately targeted, their deaths were unintended and could not be challenged, she said. And as for Anwar al-Awlaki, whom the government admitted deliberately killing, she would not second-guess the executive branch’s judgment. “In this delicate area of warmaking, national security, and foreign relations, the judiciary has an exceedingly limited role,” she wrote. She called Awlaki “an active and exceedingly dangerous enemy of the United States” and “an AQAP leader who levied war against his birth country, as unambiguously revealed by his role in the Christmas Day bombing, as well as his video and writings.”
Nasser al-Awlaki would get no satisfaction from the justice system he had once revered. There would be no judicial condemnation of the strikes, and not even a requirement that the executive branch explain why it had killed his grandson. The lawsuit was dismissed. He felt that the country he had loved, and that had shaped him, had again slammed the courthouse door in his face.
13
A BIGGER BRAND
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab entered a federal courtroom in Detroit for sentencing on a chilly afternoon in February 2012, Anwar al-Awlaki had been dead for more than four months. But the young Nigerian, wearing a white prayer cap, stood up and declared that the martyrs of jihad were never dead: Awlaki, like Bin Laden, was “alive and shall be victorious by God’s grace,” he said.
Now twenty-five, Abdulmutallab had chosen to represent himself, demoting his flustered attorney to legal adviser, and had then flummoxed the attorney and pleased
prosecutors by insisting on pleading guilty to all eight counts in the lengthy indictment. His admission of guilt was no reflection of remorse; the underwear bomber had not changed his views. The testimony of five passengers who described their harrowing experience aboard the smoke-filled airliner seemed not to move him. Not even when Shama Chopra, a Canadian passenger, recounted emotionally from the witness stand how Abdulmutallab’s parents had called to apologize to her for their son’s crime did he seem to take much notice. Abdulmutallab stuck to the position that attempting to blow up Northwest Flight 253 to kill the 289 other people aboard was not just righteous but required by his religion, justified retaliation for the Americans’ killing of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond. He knew this, he said, from Awlaki, whom he described in a handwritten statement submitted in court as “my beloved teacher.” He did not repeat in court what he had told FBI agents about Awlaki’s role in directing the plot, but he declared, “I was greatly inspired to participate in jihad by the lectures of the great and rightly guided mujahideen who is alive, Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, may Allah preserve him and his family and give them victory.”
The judge gave him the maximum possible sentence, which added up to four life terms plus fifty years. Abdulmutallab had the last word, shouting “Allahu akbar,” God is great, as he was led from the courtroom.
It may not have been what he had in mind, but there was something to the Nigerian’s insistence that Awlaki lived on. For many Americans, the drone strike in far-off Yemen that killed him was a fleeting good-riddance story—one more terrorist they didn’t have to worry about any more. But for Awlaki’s target audience, devout, young Muslims searching for a cause, his legacy in the form of lectures, sermons, and interviews preserved on the web was only magnified by his killing, as some Muslim activists had warned. Many fans compiled elaborate tribute videos, which they patched together from the years of material that Awlaki had left behind. Among them was an official video eulogy from AQAP itself, elevating Awlaki to a prophetic martyrdom and further burnishing his credentials—claiming inaccurately, for example, that he had fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan. “The sheikh employed his life, his mind, his wealth, his tongue, and his pen in waging a war against America, which is the leader of war against Islam,” said the main eulogist, Ibrahim al-Rubeish, a top AQAP ideologist. Rubeish had a personal motive for his anger at America: he had been imprisoned at Guantanamo for five years before being released to a Saudi rehabilitation program, which in his case had clearly proven ineffective. The thirty-three-minute eulogy video pulled together many threads of the AQAP argument that the United States was occupying Yemen, with clips of General David Petraeus meeting with the soon-to-be-ousted president, Ali Abdullah Saleh; American drones firing missiles; Yemeni demonstrators marching with large banners showing the youthful face of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki; and endless shots of Anwar al-Awlaki, some of them alongside the crumpled remains of his SUV after the missile hit it. Rubeish called on Awlaki’s “students in the West” to take revenge for his death and argued that Obama “wants to deceive the American people” by suggesting that killing a few prominent Al Qaeda leaders would end the group’s war. In fact, Rubeish said, it was “a war of a whole nation” of Islam, and Awlaki’s message was “planted in the hearts of millions of Muslims who had listened to him.”
On YouTube alone a search for “Awlaki” turned up tens of thousands of videos, a number that kept climbing in the years after his death. His unobjectionable homilies and stories were mixed randomly with his calls for violent jihad: Awlaki on the Antichrist, Awlaki on why American civilians were legitimate targets, Awlaki on the afterlife, Awlaki on never trusting non-Muslims, Awlaki on early Islamic figures, Awlaki on the American war on Islam, Awlaki on marriage, Awlaki on why American Muslims had a duty to join the jihad. Google, which owned YouTube, had acceded to congressional pressure in November 2010 and agreed to take down Awlaki’s inflammatory material. That promise turned out to be meaningless, as I discovered when I did a follow-up story five months later. Awlaki’s fans posted material faster than YouTube could take it down, even if the company wanted to try. Anyone who went on the Internet to satisfy his curiosity about Islam and global politics, or the religious legitimacy of terrorism, found Awlaki’s face and voice everywhere. “He’s a bigger brand now than when he was alive,” said Ahmed Younis, the American Muslim activist who had long battled Awlaki’s influence.
Some influential Muslims who had raised their voices against Awlaki’s calls for violence now denounced his killing. They argued that the drone strike was a betrayal of American values, a self-defeating surrender of the moral high ground. Yasir Qadhi, an American imam who preached a nonviolent variety of Salafi Islam, wrote in The New York Times after Awlaki’s death that “the accusations against him were very serious, but as a citizen, he deserved a fair trial and the chance to face his accusers in a court of law.” Killing Awlaki eroded the government’s “moral authority,” Qadhi said, since “America routinely criticizes (and justifiably so) such extrajudicial assassinations when they occur at the hands of another government. We most certainly don’t approve the regimes of Syria or Iran eliminating those whom they deem to be traitors.”
Ed Husain, a British-born writer whose 2007 book The Islamist described his own embrace and later rejection of militancy, agreed. “When America kills its own without a trial,” he wrote, “it not only demeans itself but it hands over a propaganda victory to its enemies.” Far more effective, Husain argued, would have been discrediting Awlaki by making public the documentation of his hypocritical dallying with prostitutes. Husain had no idea that in 2002 the FBI and Justice Department had actually prepared a criminal case on the prostitution issue before deciding not to pursue it. His argument nine years later underscored the paths the government had not taken.
In May 2012, word leaked to the Associated Press that a second underwear bomber, dispatched from Yemen by AQAP as Abdulmutallab had been with a highly sophisticated explosive device hidden in his clothes, had been thwarted by Western intelligence. It turned out that the would-be airliner bomber was in fact a Saudi-born double agent, working for British, Saudi, and American intelligence, who had infiltrated AQAP and volunteered for a suicide mission blowing up an America-bound plane. The double agent had left Yemen with the device and immediately turned it over to authorities, allowing FBI explosives experts to carry out a thorough assessment of Ibrahim al-Asiri’s latest attempt at building a bomb that could pass undetected through airport security. It was quite a coup for counterterrorism, of course, in part because it would fuel crippling paranoia inside the Al Qaeda branch about every new recruit. But in another way, the foiled plot was a troubling sign: it showed that eliminating Awlaki and Samir Khan had not diverted AQAP from its determination to attack the United States.
Nearly a year later came the first of what would be a series of shocking illustrations of Awlaki’s lasting influence. Two bombs left in backpacks near the Boston Marathon finish line killed three people and injured more than 260, reviving a sense of vulnerability many Americans had not felt since 9/11. Officials quickly identified the perpetrators as two Chechen immigrant brothers, one killed in a police shootout and the other caught hiding in a trailered boat in a suburban backyard. Within days, investigators learned that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had found his violent ideology in Awlaki’s YouTube pronouncements. Tamerlan had helped persuade his younger brother, Dzhokhar, that jihad was their obligation. They knew nothing about explosives, but Awlaki had that covered, too: the Tsarnaev brothers found everything they needed to know in Inspire magazine, including step-by-step instructions on turning a pressure cooker into a lethal weapon using the explosive powder found in ordinary fireworks and detonators fashioned from Christmas lights.
There was nothing magical about the videos and magazines that Awlaki had left behind. The Tsarnaev brothers, among the tiny number of Muslims prepared to carry out random murder for their beliefs, might have drawn the same ideology f
rom the writings of Osama bin Laden or Sayyid Qutb and found bomb-making instruction someplace else on the web. But Awlaki, with an assist from Samir Khan, had packaged in accessible, user-friendly form both a vicious interpretation of Islam that glorified mass murder and easy-to-follow directions on how to put it into practice. You could kill the man, but you could not kill his message. Martyrdom, courtesy of a CIA Hellfire missile, had only given Awlaki a more exalted pedestal.
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At the time of the marathon bombing, Obama and Ben Rhodes, who worked on most of his national security speeches, were drafting a long-planned speech on terrorism and the country’s response to it. Obama had been president for more than four years, and he could speak from visceral experience. He had listened to threat reports at countless meetings in the Oval Office and the Situation Room; he had comforted the families of those gunned down at Fort Hood and blown up in Boston; he had signed off on hundreds of strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. On occasion, he had learned that a strike had gone devastatingly wrong. He had heard the escalating arguments against targeted killings in general—that they killed civilians, that they drew aggrieved people to Al Qaeda, that they made killing too easy by making it risk-free to the drone operators. He had heard the particular arguments about targeting an American like Awlaki, whose advocacy of violence had not stripped him of his constitutional rights.