Unbeknownst to Awlaki, his e-mails were being intercepted and read, and his blog was being combed over for clues about his contacts. On December 17, 2008, the FBI intercepted an e-mail Awlaki received from Nidal Hasan, the army major whose parents had been members of Awlaki’s mosque in Virginia in 2001. The last contact Awlaki had with Hasan was before he left the United States for Yemen—and then it was only to speak with him at the request of his parents. In retrospect, the e-mail is ominous. “There are many soldiers in the us armed forces that have converted to Islam while in the service. There are also many Muslims who join the armed forces for a myriad of different reasons,” Hasan wrote Awlaki. “Some appear to have internal conflicts and have even killed or tried to kill other [US] soldiers in the name of Islam i.e. Hasan Akbar [a US soldier who was convicted of murdering two fellow soldiers in Kuwait], etc. Others feel that there is no conflict. Previous Fatwas seem vague and not very definitive.” He then asked Awlaki, “Can you make some general comments about Muslims in the [US] military. Would you consider someone like Hasan Akbar or other soldiers that have committed such acts with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam (Lets just assume this for now) fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds [martyrs]. I realize that these are difficult questions but you seem to be one of the only ones that has lived in the [US who] has a good understanding of the Qur’an and Sunna and is not afraid of being direct.” Awlaki did not reply to that e-mail, but for months Hasan kept writing him.
Although federal investigators took no action against Hasan after that e-mail, a year later, after Hasan gunned down thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, Hasan’s e-mails would help form part of the narrative that Awlaki was a terrorist. “Al-Awlaki condenses the Al Qaeda philosophy into digestible, well-written treatises,” Evan Kohlmann, a self-proclaimed al Qaeda scholar and popular “expert witness” at terror trials, told the New York Times. “They may not tell people how to build a bomb or shoot a gun. But he tells them who to kill, and why, and stresses the urgency of the mission.” Kohlmann was frequently brought in to brief the US government on al Qaeda—even though he did not speak Arabic and had done little traveling in any countries with a strong al Qaeda presence. Kohlmann briefed the US Justice Department and said he warned them of what he described as Awlaki’s increasing ability to incite young Westerners to join foreign jihads or to conduct terror attacks in their own countries. Kohlmann alleged that there should be “little surprise that Anwar al-Awlaki’s name and his sermon on ‘Constants on the Path of Jihad’ seem to surface in every single homegrown terrorism investigation, whether in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, or beyond.” He labeled “Constants” a “lecture that over time has become the ‘virtual bible’ for lone wolf Muslim extremists.”
Although Awlaki was undoubtedly grabbing the attention of an increasing number of counterterrorism officers and analysts in the United States, some within the intelligence community believed his importance was being inflated. Awlaki’s sermons were indeed popping up in a variety of terror investigations, but he was a virtual nobody in the world of actual al Qaeda cells. Outside of English-speaking Western Muslims, he was not influential in most parts of the Muslim world. “I think the reason we tend to focus on him so much, is because he preaches in English. And because of that, we have more exposure to what he says and because we have more exposure to what he says, we assume that he has more influence than he really does,” said Joshua Foust, who at the time was a Yemen analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Foust said he was concerned about Awlaki’s sermons influencing young Western Muslims, but he believed that some within the intelligence community were elevating the role his sermons played in terror plots. “I don’t see any evidence whatsoever that [Awlaki] poses some kind of ideological threat against the United States. I would say that 99.99 percent of the all the people who either listen to, or believe in Awlaki’s ideology, never act on it,” Foust told me. “So if you’re going to argue that ideology is what caused someone to do something, you need to actually—to me at least—to be intellectually honest and analytically rigorous. You need to explain why that ideology compelled that person to act, but it didn’t compel everyone who didn’t act to not act. And to me, I don’t think its possible to really explain that. I haven’t ever seen an argument that actually does that. So from the start, I think a lot of the focus on Awlaki doesn’t make any sense, because we assign him a kind of importance and influence that he doesn’t really have.”
From Awlaki’s perspective, he had been preaching a similar message for years before 9/11 and doing so in the United States. US Muslim “organizations used to support the Jihad in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Chechnya, and in Palestine. I was there, in America, at that time,” Awlaki recalled. “We used to call from the pulpits...for Jihad for the sake of Allah, the establishment of the Caliphate. Allegiance and Disavowal. We could speak freely. The freedom in America allowed us to say these things, and we had much more freedom than in many of the countries of the Islamic world.” Awlaki believed his message had not fundamentally changed, but the target of the jihad he advocated had. Lectures Awlaki had given advocating jihad in Chechnya or Afghanistan or Bosnia in the 1990s were on-message with US policy goals. A decade later, the same teachings—applied against the United States—took on a new meaning and cast Awlaki as a traitor to the country of his birth.
As 2008 drew to a close, Awlaki posted, “A New Year: Reality and Aspirations,” a blog in which he provided an analysis of various wars around the Islamic world and cited countries where Muslim mujahedeen were progressing against Western powers. In Iraq, Awlaki wrote, “The US has come to the conclusion that they cannot do the job alone and they must seek the assistance of the munafiqeen [hypocrites]. With all of the outside and inside forces combining efforts to fight the carriers of the truth in Iraq our brothers do not need to win in order to be victorious. All they need to do is hang on. If they succeed in that they are [winning]. The invader cannot stay there forever.” In Afghanistan, Awlaki asserted, “The mujahideen are winning, NATO are losing.... Obama is all hyped up about bringing an end to terrorism by focusing on Afghanistan. I pray the brothers teach him and his forces some good lessons this year.” Awlaki also celebrated al Shabab’s ascent in Somalia as “the best news of the year,” writing, “Al-Shabab are winning on all fronts. Insha Allah we should witness the announcement of the establishment of an Islamic emirate. Ethiopia is tired of fighting a proxy war on behalf of America.” Awlaki predicted that the United States would, once again, target Somalia, observing (presciently it would turn out), “The sea around Somalia is already occupied under the pretext of protection from piracy. This year could witness aerial bombardment with a renewed ground force invasion as a possibility.”
Globally, Awlaki asserted, “The separation of believers from hypocrites which precedes any Muslim victory is underway.” The “Jihad will carry on. And all of these are building stones for the ummah in its next stage. If Allah wants an end he prepares the means to it. Allah wants victory for this ummah and Allah is preparing the means for that. Let us not sit on the sidelines. Lets be part of that victory.” In some ways, Awlaki’s fixation on the Islamic players in an escalating global war of civilizations paralleled a different set of lists being secretly compiled by the Obama administration’s counterterrorist teams. On these lists were scores of al Qaeda leaders, as well as militants much further down the food chain: “facilitators,” “suspected militants,” “propagandists.” The administration was gearing up for a series of smaller wars in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a shift in strategy in Afghanistan that would seek to decapitate the Taliban leadership. At the center of Obama’s new strategy would be a targeted assassination program that fulfilled Rumsfeld’s vision of the world as a battlefield.
Awlaki predicted that the new US president would be a hawk against Islamic resistance movements. He was right. Obama would soon give carte blanche to JSOC and the CIA to wage a
global manhunt. Capture was option two. Killing those whom the president deemed a threat to the United States was the primary mission, despite public assertions otherwise by military and government spokespeople. JSOC would not just be tasked with killing al Qaeda’s top leadership, but with decimating its support infrastructure, killing its way down the chain. It was through this program that Awlaki would find himself in the new president’s cross-hairs. He would soon become an American citizen sentenced to death with no trial.
“Obama Is Set to Continue the Course Set by Bush”
UNITED STATES, 2002–2008 —Barack Obama is an Ivy League–educated constitutional law professor whose political career was carefully plotted. In October 2002, when he was a state senator in Illinois, Obama had staked out a position on the Iraq War that foreshadowed the foreign policy vision he would later articulate as a presidential candidate. “I don’t oppose all wars,” Obama declared. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by...armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Obama would often refer to that speech, but very few Americans heard it at the time. Obama burst onto the scene in 2004 when he delivered a widely praised, fiery keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, won a seat in the US Senate that year and then, three years later, announced his candidacy for president. “Let’s be the generation that never forgets what happened on that September day and confront the terrorists with everything we’ve got,” Obama said in his speech announcing his presidential run. “We can work together to track terrorists down with a stronger military, we can tighten the net around their finances, and we can improve our intelligence capabilities.”
In crafting his campaign strategy on foreign policy, Obama and his advisers needed to straddle a fence between criticizing the national security policies of the Bush era while also appearing tough on terrorism. Obama conducted a dual-track approach in attacking his Republican opponent, John McCain: linking McCain to the war in Iraq and the unaccountability and secrecy of the Bush era, and simultaneously pledging to wage a “smarter,” more focused war against al Qaeda.
On the morning of October 4, 2007, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page story detailing a 2005 Justice Department opinion granting “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” Under newly arrived attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the CIA was “for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” That morning Obama appeared on national television. “This is an example of what we’ve lost over the last six years and what we have to recapture,” Obama told MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski. “You know, all of us believe we’ve got to track down and capture or kill terrorists who threaten America, but we have to understand that torture is not going to either provide us with information, and it’s also going to create more enemies. And so as a strategy for creating a safer and secure America, I think it is wrongheaded, as well as immoral.” Obama added: “I think this administration basically viewed any tactic as acceptable, as long as it could spin it and keep it out of the public eye.”
As the presidential campaign rolled on, promises to reverse Bush-era policies became central to Obama’s agenda. Torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, wars without justification or accountability and the evisceration of US civil liberties would come to an end, Obama vowed. “We have been governed by fear for the last six years, and this president has used the fear of terrorism to launch a war that should have never been authorized,” Obama said in late October 2007. He argued that the political climate fostered by the Bush administration undermined the United States at home and abroad. “We haven’t even talked about civil liberties and the impact of that politics of fear, what that has done to us in terms of undermining basic civil liberties in this country, what it has done in terms of our reputation around the world,” Obama said.
But even as Obama won great praise and support from liberals and antiwar organizations in the United States, he articulated a foreign policy vision that, when it came to counterterrorism, made clear he intended to authorize covert and clandestine operations. “It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005,” Obama said. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.” McCain criticized Obama for his position that he would attack inside of Pakistan, calling it irresponsible. “You don’t broadcast and say that you’re going to bomb a country without their permission,” McCain said. Obama shot back that the Bush administration had done “exactly that,” declaring, “That is the position we should have taken in the first place...the fact is, it was the right strategy.”
In accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 in a massive football stadium in Denver, Colorado, Obama telegraphed a policy he intended to implement: escalating the war in Afghanistan and increasing US covert kill/capture operations globally. “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives,” Obama said, reiterating that if he were elected, the United States would act unilaterally in Pakistan or elsewhere to kill terrorists. “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.”
Obama’s stump speeches on the campaign trail often focused on ending the war in Iraq, but he also articulated a hawkish position on unilateral US attacks that would necessitate a significant role for JSOC and the CIA. After his inauguration, as Obama built his foreign policy team, he stacked the administration with hawkish Democrats, including his vice president, Joe Biden, and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Susan Rice would serve as UN ambassador, and Richard Holbrooke would head up the civilian side of Obama’s plan to expand the US war in Afghanistan. All of these figures had a track record of support for military interventions, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arc that stretched from George H. W. Bush’s time in office to the present. Obama also retained Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates; tapped CIA veteran John Brennan as his senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security; and named General James Jones as his national security adviser.
Conservative Republicans heaped praise on Obama’s picks. President Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, called Obama’s cabinet selections “reassuring,” and neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot beamed: “I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.” Boot added that Hillary Clinton would be a “powerful” voice “for ‘neoliberalism’ which is not so different in many respects from ‘neoconservativism.’” Boot’s colleague Michael Goldfarb wrote in the Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he saw “certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term.”
Within weeks of assuming office in early 2009, Obama would send a clear message that he intended to keep intact many of the most aggressive counterterrorism policies of the Bush era. Among these were targeted killings, warrantless wiretapping, the use of secret prisons, a crackdown on habeas corpus rights for prisoners, indefinite detention, CIA rendition flights, drone bombings, the deployment of mercenaries in US wars and reliance on the “State Secrets Privilege.” In some cases, Obama would expand Bush-era programs he had once blasted as hallmarks of an unaccountable executive branch.
Obama paid lip service on the campaign trail to holding Bush-era torturers accountable, but he later backed off such rhetoric, saying after his election that “w
e need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He said his job as president “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
Early on in Obama’s time in office, Dick Cheney charged that Obama was moving “to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.” Cheney was wrong. If anything, Obama would guarantee that many of those policies would become entrenched, bipartisan institutions in US national security policy for many years to come. Whether these policies have kept Americans safe—or have made them less safe—is another question.
Obama’s Signature Strikes
PAKISTAN AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009 —As he settled into the Oval Office and his new role as commander in chief, President Obama tweaked Bush’s expansive Global War on Terror rhetoric, rebranding it as a “war against al-Qaeda and its allies.” On his third day in office, Obama signed a series of executive orders that were portrayed as “dismantling” the Bushera torture and detention programs. “The message we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals,” Obama declared as he stood with sixteen retired military officers. “We intend to win this fight. We’re going to win it on our terms.” But, while dispensing with the Bushera labels and cowboy rhetoric that marked the previous eight years of US foreign policy, Obama simultaneously moved swiftly to expand the covert US wars that had marked his predecessor’s time in office.
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