by Scott Shane
The atmosphere was tense, as might have been expected given Obama’s unsparing language on the campaign trail about the CIA program and how it had violated American values. And there was another, more personal complication. Obama had let supporters know that he intended to nominate John Brennan, a CIA veteran who had been listed as a campaign adviser but had first met the president only after the election, to replace Hayden as CIA director. Hayden was distressed; he had wanted to keep the job, in part as a signal that the intelligence agencies were not part of the partisan political spoils system. But Brennan had come under attack from liberal bloggers and human rights advocates who believed that, as a senior CIA official in the early years of the Bush administration, he bore responsibility for torture. Brennan insisted that the interrogation program had not been part of his job and that he had opposed the brutal methods. But in late November he would withdraw from consideration for the CIA job. At the time of the briefing, Obama’s intentions for the job were uncertain.
When Hayden’s briefing moved on to the drone program in Pakistan, Obama’s demeanor changed. He leaned forward, listened intently, and began to ask more questions. Hayden recounted how, a few months before, Bush had approved the CIA’s proposal to radically step up the pace of strikes, when it became obvious that Pakistani authorities were tipping off some of the targets. Obama’s questions were practical: he wanted to understand how this program identified its targets, sought to minimize civilian deaths, and measured the effects of the strikes. They were not hostile questions. It was a bit of a surprise to the intelligence officials: here, at least, was a CIA program that the new president did not hold in contempt.
To anyone who had pondered the entirety of Obama’s 2002 “dumb war” speech, or read closely his endorsement of preemptive strikes against Al Qaeda in The Audacity of Hope, or understood Obama’s Pakistan comments in the 2007 speech—to anyone who had correctly pegged Obama as a pragmatist, not an ideologue—his interest in the drone program might not have been a surprise. To the former law professor, there was a distinction that meant a great deal: torture was always illegal, under both domestic and international law, and even the Bush Justice Department had ultimately withdrawn the legal opinions approving waterboarding. By contrast, targeted killing by a government, under specified conditions, could be legal. But for the intelligence officials, as for most Americans, such nuances were drowned in an ocean of political rhetoric—from Obama’s supporters, from his critics, and sometimes from Obama himself—that had created the impression that he was a liberal who would junk the whole Bush counterterrorism agenda.
When Hayden had finished explaining the “RDI” program—rendition, detention, and interrogation—Obama had told him curtly that Greg Craig, the incoming White House counsel, would be in touch. (A month later, Craig indeed would give Hayden advance notice of the first-day executive order ending the detention and interrogation program.) But when Hayden finished his briefing on the drone program, the CIA director said that it would continue to operate as described unless and until Obama directed otherwise.
The president-elect simply nodded.
PART THREE 2002–2009
8
THAT WAS THE TRANSFORMATION
Awlaki was in lecture mode, as he so often was in 2003. His wife and children were in Sanaa, and he had plenty of time to write and speak. He was offering a formal series of lectures in the basement of the East London Mosque and various other locations, occasionally on forays to other British cities. His renown in Britain’s Muslim community was growing, and his flirtation with violence was becoming more obvious. His topic was, as usual, Islamic history: a fourteenth-century work by Ibn Nuhaas, who died fighting in Egypt, popularly known as the Book of Jihad. To speak publicly about jihad, even in Britain, where radical rhetoric was far more common than in the United States, was to play with dynamite, Awlaki knew. So he began with a disclaimer: “Now, I want to state in the beginning and make it very clear, that our study of this book is not an exhortation or an invitation to violence or promotion of violence against an individual, or a society or a state—this is purely an academic study. We are studying a book that is 600 years old….It is purely an academic study of an old, traditional book.”
And then he was off into twelve lectures totaling sixteen hours, exploring the nuances of jihad, which he called a “very important part” of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. His young, male listeners stuck with him: these were stories of ancient Muslim heroes like Salamah Ibn al-Akwa, who could run faster than horses and whose exploits defending Islam were legendary. When confronted by four enemies of the Prophet Muhammad who had been sent to kill him, Ibn al-Akwa coolly told them, “I can kill any of you I like but none of you will be able to kill me,” to which one of the frightened would-be attackers replied: “I think he is right!” (At this line, Awlaki’s audience broke up in laughter.)
For young British Muslims, many of whom felt marginalized or alienated, Awlaki brought to life an exotic world of camels ridden into battle, of victory feasts around desert campfires, of miraculous powers for the soldiers of Allah, and of jannah, the paradise that would be the reward of those who died defending the faith. It was a world of black-and-white moral judgments in which the Prophet and his companions, like superheroes in a Hollywood movie, ultimately vanquished those who plotted against them. Many of Britain’s most famous, or infamous, Muslim activists were screamers, drawing attention with their thundering denunciations of Western lifestyles, foreign interventions, and politicians. Awlaki’s style was completely different. He spoke in a low-key, scholarly manner, but with warmth, humor, and color.
On their face, his stories were not so different from the David-versus-Goliath tales of the Old Testament, in which the heroic Israelites, with God on their side, routinely smote their enemies. But of course, two years after 9/11, in a world turned upside down by Al Qaeda’s self-proclaimed jihad, Awlaki spoke in a charged political field. His very choice to spend sixteen hours talking about jihad’s place in the turbulent early years of Islam, analyzing the motives for violence and the rewards for martyrdom, was a clear-eyed political statement. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian ideologue who had been so disturbed in the late 1940s by American women, was credited with rescuing the Book of Jihad from obscurity. Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic Palestinian leader of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, whom Awlaki often quoted after his college visit there, was widely cited praising the book as a worthy guide.
Awlaki was using history as a kind of code, in which the heroic jihad of the past was used to teach and encourage the heroic jihad of the present, but in a way that would not get him in trouble with British authorities. Awlaki’s disclaimer that his words were not an exhortation to violence, like so many disclaimers in the commercial world, was pro forma: a technical, legal requirement not meant to be taken especially seriously. In context, according to those who heard him speak at the time, his disclaimer seemed to be delivered with a wink: You know I have to say this, but of course I don’t mean it, because my lectures are absolutely an exhortation to violence against the enemies of Islam.
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Certainly that was what many of those who listened to Awlaki’s talks in Britain, following him from city to city, came to believe. Among the audience at one of Awlaki’s lectures on the Book of Jihad in December 2003, it later turned out, were three of the four men who would later bomb three subway trains and a double-decker bus in London on July 7, 2005. The presence of the three future suicide bombers at the lecture in the town of Dudley, near Birmingham, would come to light because a counterterrorism informant working with British authorities was also in attendance. If Awlaki suspected he was being watched, he was right. Awlaki “was pretty clever in passing on his message,” said Shahidur Rahman, a British-born Muslim activist and self-described militant of Bangladeshi ancestry, who became a devotee of the cleric in 2003 at the age of twenty. Years later, Rahman spoke about his first meeting with Awlaki with undiminished awe and affection. “It was duri
ng the time of the evening prayer. I was standing next to him and I was quite happy that Awlaki was standing next to me and he was smiling. I was very proud….He was normal—he was so softly spoken and would sit with people.” Rahman and several friends decided to attend Awlaki’s December 2003 lecture series on Umar ibn al-Khattab, a beloved companion of the Prophet, about whom Muhammad said: “If there were to be another Prophet after me, it would have been Umar.” Awlaki delivered the lectures in the white-walled basement of the East London Mosque, dressed in a white thobe, a long-sleeved traditional robe, and a modest but elegant turban.
With admiration, Rahman recalled what he perceived as Awlaki’s double game: “He would talk about the life of Umar al-Khattab and at the same time talk about the surrounding issues. So it would hit the audience automatically in their hearts and minds.” For example, Rahman said, “he would talk about the kuffar”—the pejorative term for non-Muslim, kafir singular, kuffar plural. “How could a kafir be your friend,” Rahman remembered Awlaki asking, “if Allah says in the Koran that Allah doesn’t like the unbelievers?” Indeed, Awlaki’s comments about the kuffar in the Umar al-Khattab lectures have had a long life on the Internet, usually with the title “Never Ever Trust the Kuffar.” After recounting a seventh-century story of betrayal and deception at the hands of a non-Muslim, Awlaki offered an extended twenty-first-century punch line for his young audience: “The important lesson to learn here is: Never, ever trust a kuffar. Do not trust them. Now, you might argue and say, ‘But my neighbor is such a nice person. My classmates are very nice. My co-workers—they’re just fabulous people, they’re so decent and honest. And you know the only problem is that we Muslims are giving Islam a bad name. If these terrorists would just stop what they’re doing….’ ”
Not so, Awlaki explained. You can’t judge the unbelievers on the basis of your non-Muslim friends and colleagues—“Joe Six Pack or Sally Soccer Mom,” he called them, showing off his colloquial American English. They might well be “decent and nice people,” he acknowledged, perhaps thinking of favorite American professors, or of non-Muslim neighbors like Lincoln Higgie, who lived across from the mosque in San Diego. But they, he said, are “not the ones pulling the strings.” The Koran warns that the leaders of the kuffar are those with power, and they are not to be trusted, he explained.
Rahman said he and his friends learned from Awlaki that they could have only two possible relationships with a non-Muslim. “We can give him dawah”—that is, proselytize him to try to convert him to Islam—“or we fight jihad against them,” Rahman said. “This is something that made sense to me at that time.” It still made sense to him in 2010, when my colleague Souad Mekhennet managed a rare feat by getting Rahman and two of his friends to speak candidly, on the record, about their still-radical views.
Awlaki was instructing his young, British followers, who lived in a country that was more than 95 percent non-Muslim and a city (London) that was about 88 percent non-Muslim, that the vast majority of their compatriots could not share their values and could never truly be their friends or allies. Unless the unbelievers could be taught to accept Islam, the only religiously sanctioned option was to fight them. A more pernicious message in a modern, multicultural society could hardly be imagined, but Awlaki embedded it in quiet, engaging, humorous tales from the seventh century.
Rahman remembered with contempt the “so-called scholars” who would not give straight answers at that time when young men asked about the legitimacy of suicide bombings, or what he called “sacrifice operations,” that they were seeing on news broadcasts from Iraq and elsewhere. “They would say, ‘You know what? This is disputed, and we cannot talk about this.’ ” Sheikh Anwar, by contrast, “was not afraid,” Rahman said. Using tales from the Koran to illustrate his points, Awlaki “said suicide is not allowed in Islam—but a self-sacrifice operation is different,” his follower recalled. Awlaki was careful never to mention Osama bin Laden by name, Rahman said, but his intent was clear. “He would never mention Sheikh Osama, but we would know that he would speak about the mujahedeen and he would tell us, ‘You know who the ulema are,’ ” referring to scholars with an authoritative interpretation of Islam.
Rahman marveled at Awlaki’s ability to convey an incendiary ideology without getting into trouble with British authorities. “I was wondering at that time, how was it possible that the Sheikh could pass on such a message?” Rahman said. “How could he be in a moderate masjid,” or mosque, “and say what he is saying, but at the same time do it in a way that he doesn’t get caught?” In fact, in a Britain increasingly polarized over the threat of extremism, Awlaki did not draw anything like the opprobrium heaped on other, openly militant preachers who shouted from stages and outdoor platforms in London or Birmingham. But his influence may have been just as subversive as theirs, undercutting mainstream clerics’ claims that Al Qaeda represented a distortion of Islam.
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Just two years earlier, speaking in the Washington Post’s Ramadan video, Awlaki had protested the dark accusations being lodged against his faith: “I mean, Islam is a religion of peace.” He had told his brother privately that the 9/11 attacks were “horrible.” In San Diego, he had been a warm and generous neighbor to non-Muslims like Lincoln Higgie. In Virginia, after 9/11, he had joined priests and rabbis at interfaith gatherings, calling for peace and brotherhood. Now he was blithely lecturing on jihad and explaining to impressionable young men the fine distinctions between suicide and self-sacrifice. He was casually denigrating all non-Muslims as kuffar, worthy of only conversion or attack. What had happened?
Part of what had changed was Awlaki’s setting. In America, said Ahmed Younis, the American Muslim activist who had heard him preach in the United States, “he had to appeal to Americanism.” In the States Awlaki had often praised American freedoms and tolerance for minority religions like Islam. Surrounded by “Joe Six Pack and Sally Soccer Mom,” he had criticized some American policies but found it difficult to vilify the United States without reservation, while speaking via the media to a broad American audience.
But on the Muslim lecture circuit in London, Birmingham, Essex, Leicester, Glasgow, and other cities where he appeared in 2002 and 2003, hostility to America was unrestrained. The difference, in part, was explained by demographics. Muslim immigrants to America had been cherry-picked by immigration authorities over the decades, and most were well educated and reasonably well integrated into the larger community. Muslim Americans approximately matched the American average in income and education. In the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, the picture was quite different. Muslim immigrant families in Britain, most of whom had resettled under liberal rules from Pakistan, India, and other parts of the old British Empire, were a larger proportion of the population, and they often lived in more isolated ethnic communities. On average, they significantly lagged behind their non-Muslim neighbors in education and income. “The first time I went to London,” said Younis, a well-educated native of California, “I thought I was in Karachi.”
Awlaki’s ambitious nature, in this new setting, found a new channel. In the United States, his ambition had found its most successful expression as the middleman between America and Islam, a position that had drawn huge and friendly media attention and led to his preaching at the US Capitol and speaking at the Pentagon. Now, in Britain, Awlaki discovered that his exclusively Muslim audiences were often looking not for bridge building but for a justification of their sense of grievance. If they felt the sting of discrimination and disdain from the British majority, Awlaki provided a scholarly explanation: the world was divided into Muslim believers and the kuffar, the unbelievers who were misguided at best, sinister at worst.
Awlaki rarely drew on his own experience in his talks, preferring the more detached pose of the scholar. But he had been at the hub of a Muslim community outside Washington under intense and hostile scrutiny after 9/11, and he knew the FBI had followed him on his secret sexual escapades. He had abandoned a promi
sing PhD program and a flourishing career in the United States. There was a deeply personal side to his polarizing talk.
But another element in Awlaki’s shift, unquestionably, was the United States’ developing track record in response to 9/11. Awlaki’s disillusionment can be traced through a series of articles he wrote in 2002 for the Yemen Observer, an English-language newspaper in Sanaa, at the invitation of its editor, Mohammed al-Asaadi. Addressing the international expatriates and educated Yemenis who were the Observer’s small audience, Awlaki tried his hand at more explicit criticism of American policies. His first article, in May 2002, criticized American support for Israel, including what he called “the Israelicontrolled US media,” which he blamed for pressing Palestinian officials to condemn suicide bombings while giving Israel a pass. In July 2002, Awlaki wrote scathingly of the American war on terror, saying it had eroded civil liberties in the United States and given cover to the governments of India, Russia, and Israel for human rights abuses against Muslims. “The US has set an extremely dangerous precedent with its actions,” he wrote. He questioned whether the American campaign had accomplished anything, noting that Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were still at large. “Americans are less secure than ever before,” Awlaki wrote. He asserted that “thousands of innocent civilians have lost their lives” in Afghanistan and elsewhere, concluding with sarcasm: “The terrorizing of innocents everywhere has been the great success of America’s War on Terror.” The next month, in August 2002, he took on the escalating campaign of the Bush administration against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, declaring: “The US should not invade Iraq….Simply, the US should leave the whole Middle East alone.” Seven months later, American troops were in Baghdad, and Awlaki’s lectures were becoming less restrained in their contempt for those he saw as the enemies of Islam.
