Killing Machine (27 page)

Those questions will continue to be debated, but it is certain that Awlaki became almost as much of an obsession to policy makers as Osama bin Laden had been. The
Times
reporters quoted General Jones to the effect that Awlaki had gone beyond inspirational activities to “operational” plotting with his Nigerian protégé Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” who attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet with three hundred passengers over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. The crude bomb he hoped to set off by injecting a syringe into a chemical package hidden in his
underwear failed to explode. But it set him afire, badly burning his groin area. An FBI interrogator quipped that the bomb may have failed to explode because Abdulmutallab had not changed his underwear for three weeks so that he could feel secure in wearing the package.
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The attempt was anything but a joke to Obama administration figures. “Had that plane gone down, that would have been their version of 9/11.” The “their” in this sentence referred to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” John Brennan said at a White House briefing two weeks after the failed attack, before investigators were willing to single out Awlaki as the sole culprit. What made matters worse was that it soon became apparent that American intelligence actually had had enough information to have prevented Abdulmutallab from boarding that flight—had all the dots been connected properly.
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The Christmas Day attack, the
Times
article said, was the tipping point: Awlaki was put on the kill list. It appeared there was some ex post facto tampering with the actual chronology here to make it fit a narrative more suited to careful consideration of constitutional issues concerning the targeting of an American citizen without “normal” judicial process; as news reporters noted, a missile strike aimed at an al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula that included Awlaki occurred on the same day as the attempted effort to down the airliner over Detroit.
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The cleric admitted that he had met with the Nigerian, indeed called him his student, but said he had not ordered Abdulmutallab to use a bomb. “Brother mujahed Umar Farouk—may God relieve him—is one of my students, yes,” the cleric told the Al Jazeera news service. “We had kept in contact, but I didn’t issue a fatwa to Umar Farouk for this operation.” Investigators said, however, that the Nigerian youth admitted during questioning that Awlaki had introduced him to a bomb maker during a visit to Yemen in the summer of 2009 and told him “to get on a U.S. airliner and detonate his explosives over the United States.” The FBI had not been entirely convinced by the Nigerian’s confession. “He’s saying all this,” commented one agent, “but we haven’t
determined all of it is true; whether [Awlaki] blessed it or gave the green light or was the impetus behind it . . . it’s very possible and it’s being investigated. But it’s also possible he’s saying it to give himself credibility among militants who look up to Awlaki.” There were other questions about Abdulmutallab’s confession as well. He told his whole story after his father and uncle arrived in the United States and spoke with him. Perhaps the advice they gave him was to claim he was under Awlaki’s spell as part of a plea bargain. We will never know, for he could not be called as a witness in a trial that would never be held, as Awlaki was killed in a drone strike.
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But in each retelling of the sequence of events, what stands out is the care with which the administration talked about Awlaki to make a strong case, bringing together the Fort Hood massacre and the would-be bomber as Awlaki’s “inventions” as parts of a string of “plots,” highlighting treasonable acts to satisfy the Constitution’s definition of that crime. In fact, however, there had been at least one effort to kill Awlaki—on December 24, 2009, the day
before
the Nigerian tried to set off his bomb. And Obama had come into office at the beginning of 2009 fully briefed by aides about Awlaki’s ability to inspire followers within the United States. If a
Washington Post
reporter, Susan Schmidt, had been told about Canadian and American intelligence discoveries of private computer files and audio files of lectures by Awlaki promoting the strategies of a “key al-Qaeda military commander, the late Ysef al-Ayeri, a Saudi known as ‘Swift Sword,’ ” and if CBS News obtained information about how in December 2008 U.S. Customs agents “intercepted a computer disk full of lectures that his wife sent to an Islamic publishing house in Denver,” then the president-elect had certainly known what the agencies had collected. Awlaki was a dangerous man because he inspired people to act. An intelligence document obtained by the Associated Press noted ominously that about 11 percent of visitors to the cleric’s website were in the United States.
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Rumors about Awlaki’s contacts with some of the 9/11 hijackers had been circulating almost from the day of the attacks. But the FBI told both the commission investigating the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and Congress that it did not have reason to
detain the cleric. Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, believed that the FBI had bungled the investigation, and that information showed Awlaki had met with two of the perpetrators, who “shared their terrorist intentions and plans.” Again, we will never know more about any role Awlaki may have played in those events.
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We do know that the first acknowledged (or semi-acknowledged) attack aimed at killing Awlaki was launched on December 24, 2009, and was therefore based on no overt act the cleric had committed, only assumptions about his influence. The
Washington Post
report emphasized that American officials knew Awlaki had been scheduled to be in a particular place at a particular time, and believed he had been killed. This attack and one a week earlier demonstrated the administration’s “greater willingness . . . to use military force in confronting terrorists outside the traditional war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Whether or not American “support” went beyond providing intelligence about the meeting, the
Post
article said, was not clear.
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And then came bad news. The number of “civilian casualties” in the Yemen drone strike, over a hundred, belied claims that only militants had been killed. Awlaki survived the attack, moreover, and quipped that apparently someone was angry with him. While rumors connected Awlaki to various terrorist plots, the raids increased fury about the Yemeni dictator’s ability to take advantage of Awlaki’s presence in his country to press for increased aid in the supposed fight with al Qaeda, while receiving large sums of military aid to preserve his government against opposition forces.

Saleh’s cooperation was deemed essential to the process of bringing down Awlaki, and there was the rub. The United States risked causing further outrage across the Muslim world if it continued to ally itself too closely with the dictator, presenting an ugly dilemma in the murky world of post–9/11 alliances of convenience. In these circumstances, the United States did not want to admit publicly that cruise missile or drone strikes were its responsibility, only that Saleh had relied on intelligence help. But which was worse, to say the United States had been acting at Saleh’s behest or to accept responsibility for the civilian casualties? Neither option looked very
good as the casualty figures were revealed. The use of the CIA instead of the military offered a shade of deniability because the agency was less accountable for its doings under U.S. laws, but the cover was not opaque enough, it seemed.

In a conversation with General David Petraeus in January 2010, the problems American policy makers had let themselves in for were fully spelled out: “Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are ‘not very accurate’ and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. ‘We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.’ ” His preference was for drones and Hellfire missiles, which were thought less likely to cause “collateral damage.” His deputy “joked” that he had lied by telling parliament that the bombs were American-made but Yemeni-deployed.
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Four days after the attempt on the airliner, Obama made a public statement about American intentions that boxed him into a drone campaign in Yemen as the only alternative. “This [the airliner bomb] was a serious reminder of the dangers we face and of the nature of those who threaten our homeland. We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us.” White House lawyers, meanwhile, were mulling over the legality of “proposed attempts to kill an American citizen” believed to be part of the leadership of AQAP, Anwar al-Awlaki. One of the parties engaged in the internal debate told ABC News that opportunities to “take out” the subject “may have been missed,” suggesting, of course, that there had been other attempts
besides
the December 24 drone strike. “A spokesman said the White House declined to comment.” But reporters did not. Such a strike, said ABC News, aimed “to kill him would stretch current Presidential authority given to the CIA and the Pentagon to pursue terrorists anywhere in the world.” And that was what worried some inside the administration: “American officials fear the possibility of criminal prosecution without approval in advance from the White House for a targeted strike against Awlaki.”
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The question of what limits applied when it came to tracking down and killing an American, the report said, came as “hundreds of FBI and other federal agents . . . fan out this week as part of a
secret operation to pursue leads about Americans with connections to Yemen that were previously dismissed as not significant.” But there was a new twist to this manhunt story. Awlaki’s father had learned that his son had been put on a “kill list” and publicly appealed to President Obama not to kill his son, who he said was in hiding.

Aside from all the noise, however, there was a serious problem raised when the suspect’s father filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent President Obama from ordering his son’s death. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that there was no “battlefield” in Yemen and the administration could not hide behind state-secrets privileges to carry out an extrajudicial execution. The whole trial took on aspects of parody, with the government’s chief lawyer saying at one point that “as far as the allegations there is a kill list, et cetera, we’re not confirming or denying.” But he also observed that Awlaki would not be under any lethal threat if he “turned himself” in to Yemeni authorities—a strange comment that amounted to an acknowledgment of the list. The Justice Department invoked the state-secrets privilege to ask for the dismissal of the lawsuit in the U.S. district court in Washington. Judge John Bates agreed, saying that targeting was a “political question” to be decided by the executive branch. Bates also ruled, in Alice in Wonderland fashion, that Awlaki’s father had no legal standing to file a suit on his son’s behalf unless he was actually killed. The reasoning was similar to the administration’s insistence that signature strikes could not be challenged ahead of time, only after they had killed civilians.
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Obama had made a thicket of legal issues even denser than before. It took six months for the Office of Legal Counsel to find a way out with a fifty-page memorandum setting forth an opinion on whether the president had the right to kill an American citizen without a court trial. The authors did not like to put it so bluntly, but that was the subject of their deliberations. Actually, no one outside the executive branch knows even today what is written there, because the memo remains classified. From the usual anonymous sources came teasers about its contents, such as “What constitutes
due process
in this case
is a due process in war”—emphasis added for two reasons: first and most obvious, the debate was definitely about Awlaki; second, the memo set a precedent in what was sure to become “a legal debate over whether a president can order the killing of U.S.
citizens
overseas as a counterterrorism measure” (emphasis added for the same reason).
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During the time the memo was being written, Obama found himself questioning where the policy was leading. The targets he was being asked to approve for “direct” action too often came from a wing of AQAP that was not externally focused and was uninterested in attacking the United States. Was the United States being sucked into Yemen’s civil war? In a June 2010 meeting a military adviser referred to the ongoing “campaign” in Yemen. The president interrupted: “We’re not in Yemen to get involved in some domestic conflict. We’re going to continue to stay focused on threats to the homeland—that’s where the real priority is.”
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After bin Laden

“US intelligence had been tracking Anwar al-Awlaki for years, but in the wake of the bin Laden operation,” writes Daniel Klaidman, “Obama had become fixated on taking out the charismatic cleric.” He wanted him even more than he wanted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former al Qaeda number two who had been promoted to the top spot upon bin Laden’s death. Zawahiri had no charisma, and that made him less of a threat. “Awlaki had things on the stove that were ready to boil over,” an adviser said. “Zawahiri was still looking for ingredients in the cupboard.” And, Klaidman added, at the White House meetings on terror (where Obama chaired the sessions that selected targets), the president demanded updates from Brennan. “I want Awlaki,” the president said at one. “Don’t let up.” Lethal operations in Yemen had been handled by the military, but by the summer of 2011 Operation Awlaki was turned over to the CIA.
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A drone attack on September 30, 2011, finally killed Awlaki near where he had been hiding. It also killed Samar Khan, the key figure
behind
Inspire
, an English-language magazine produced by AQAP. His death was brushed aside as acceptable “collateral” damage. “An administration official said the CIA did not know Khan was with Aulaqi, but they also considered Khan a belligerent whose presence near the target would not have stopped the attack.” The White House swung into action mode immediately, with rapid-fire statements from the president and others, the gist of which were to promote Awlaki to “external operations” chief for AQAP.
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