SANA, Yemen - Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US-born cleric who was a leading figure in Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate and was considered its most dangerous English-speaking propagandist and plotter, was killed in a US drone strike on his vehicle yesterday, officials in Washington and Yemen said.
The same one that had lunch at the Pentagon?
The "CIA-Duh" propagandist who is again dead?
The one that was living in the US in 2002 when a warrant for his arrest was inexplicably rescinded by the US Attorney in Denver?
They said the strike also killed a radical US colleague who was an editor of Al Qaeda’s online jihadist magazine.
I didn't know Obama was missiling CIA studios at Langley, did you?
Many details of the strike were unclear, but one US official said that Awlaki, whom the United States had been hunting in Yemen for more than two years, had been identified as the target in advance and was killed with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The official said it was the first CIA strike in Yemen since 2002. Yemen’s Defense Ministry confirmed Awlaki’s death.
The strike appeared to be the first time in the US-led war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that an American had been deliberately killed by US forces, a step that has raised contentious constitutional issues in the United States. It was also the second high-profile killing of an Al Qaeda leader in the past five months under the Obama administration, which ordered the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May.
And if they lied about that one..... (sigh).
Awlaki was an important member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, regarded by some antiterrorism experts as the most dangerous branch in the Al Qaeda network. He was considered the inspirational or operational force behind a number of major plots to kill Americans in the United States in recent years, most notably the deadly assault at a US Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, and attempts to bomb Times Square and a Detroit-bound jetliner.
See:
Holding Down the Fort in Texas
Times Square
Underwear Bomber
It is now clear propaganda organs have no clothes.
“The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,’’ President Obama said. He said the cleric had taken “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans.’’
Obama also called Awlaki “the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’’ - the first time the United States has used that description of him.
Yemen’s official news agency, Saba, reported that the attack also killed Samir Khan, a US citizen of Pakistani origin who was an editor of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language Internet magazine.
Related: Intelligence Agencies Inspire Hacking
A US official said the government believed Khan had been killed as well. It was not clear whether Khan, who proclaimed in the magazine last year that he was “proud to be a traitor to America,’’ was also a deliberate target of the strike.
A Yemeni Defense Ministry statement said several of Awlaki’s bodyguards were also killed.
Neither the Americans nor the Yemenis explained precisely how they knew that Awlaki, 40, had been confirmed dead.
The strike came in the midst of a deepening political crisis in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been resisting repeated calls to relinquish power - including from the United States. Saleh has argued that he is critical to the intensifying US efforts to battle Al Qaeda here....
While US leaders welcomed news of his death, it could also play into the tangled politics of Yemen and Saleh’s efforts to remain in power.
In early September, the Obama administration’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, said recent cooperation with Yemen was better than it had ever been despite the prolonged absence of Saleh, who returned recently after four months in Saudi Arabia recovering from wounds he suffered in an attack on his palace.
A senior US military official in Washington said Awlaki’s death would send an important message to the surviving leaders and foot soldiers in Al Qaeda.
“It’s critically important,’’ the senior official said. “It sets a sense of doom for the rest of them. Getting Awlaki, given his tight operational security, increases the sense of fear. You take out someone like this, it sends a message. Bottom line, they’ve taken a severe impact.’’
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Message received:
"Awlaki assassination triggers legal debate" by Peter Finn The Washington Post / October 1, 2011
WASHINGTON - The killing of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and another citizen by an American drone strike in Yemen yesterday violently punctuates a legal debate about the limits of executive power to kill the nation’s own citizens as a counterterrorism measure.
As far as I can tell, there are no limits.
The Obama administration has spoken in broad terms about its authority to use military force against Al Qaeda and associated forces beyond traditional battlefields such as Iraq or Afghanistan. But it will not reveal its exact legal analysis for targeting Awlaki and last year invoked the state-secrets privilege to argue successfully that a lawsuit brought by Awlaki’s father should be dismissed.
More Obama transparency, I see.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued on behalf of Awlaki’s father that that there is no “battlefield’’ in Yemen and that the administration should be forced to publicly articulate its legal standards for killing any citizen outside the United States who is suspected of terrorism.
Otherwise, the groups argued, such a killing would amount to an extrajudicial execution and would violate the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to due process.
“International human rights law dictates that you can’t unilaterally target someone and kill someone without that person posing an imminent threat to security interests,’’ said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“The information that we have, from the government’s own press releases, is that he is somehow loosely connected, but there is no specific evidence of things he actualized that would meet the legal threshold for making this killing justifiable as a matter of human rights law.’’
Then Obama's a war criminal, ain't he? He joins a long list of US presidents.
A White House official refused yesterday to discuss any legal findings that underpinned the targeting of Awlaki.
But the administration almost certainly concluded that the radical cleric was a legitimate military target who is not protected because of his citizenship.
Officials have designated Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as an associated force covered by the 2001 act of Congress authorizing military force. They have asserted that Awlaki is part of this enemy force and posed an imminent threat because of his operational role in the group.
The decision to place Awlaki on a capture-or-kill list was made in early 2010, after intelligence officials concluded that he played a direct role in the plot to blow up a civilian aircraft over Detroit.
Officials said Awlaki instructed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab not to detonate the bomb he had hidden in his underwear until the plane was over the United States. Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who goes on trial in Detroit next week, unsuccessfully attempted to explode the device seven minutes before landing.
Awlaki, who left the United States in 2002 and lived in the United Kingdom for two years before moving to Yemen, first acted as propagandist for Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, but officials insist he has become more and more involved in constructing and directing terrorist plots. And they described him yesterday as director of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
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Related:
The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law).
From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
"IF extrajudicial assassination can happen to this guy, no matter whatever he allegedly did, now this can happen to any American citizen; and folks, that means you and me.
With this, Obama has thrown the Constitution and Bill of Rights off a cliff, and under the proverbial bus. Now, the President can assassinate anyone he or she wants, at any time, and there is no recourse against it.
One has to wonder if the next round of "threats" will come from those in this country capable of thinking logically or differently, and who have sound, reasoned differences of opinion from those demonstrated through the US government's foreign and domestic policies.
I am a published sacred choral composer; the most radical thing I ever do is ask a singer to sing an augmented 4th. I am completely peaceful, and I eschew violence of any kind: but I do have many bones of contention with the current administration, both on domestic and foreign policy issues.
Do my peaceful, reasoned objections to what I see as absolute, barking-mad folly by this government, make me (and all those who read, and post on this site or other websites) the next "terrorist"?!?
I would certainly like to hope not; but given Obama's audacity of authoritarianism in this move, I shudder to think this may now be possible." -- Wake the Flock Up
Obama makes his case:
"Secret US memo made legal case to kill a citizen" October 09, 2011|By Charlie Savage, New York Times
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.
Also see: Civil War Door Opens For Amerika in Yemen
How about that, huh?
The memo, written last year, came after months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama - to move ahead with the killing of a US citizen without a trial.
The secret document was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of Americans in other circumstances.
The memo provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against killing, protections of the Bill of Rights, and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.
The legal analysis relied upon several factual premises offered by intelligence agencies to government lawyers, including that Awlaki was playing a direct role in terrorist operations against the United States, that he was affiliated with Al Qaeda’s terrorist network, and that he was beyond the reach of Yemen’s authorities.
As if US intelligence agencies dealt in facts.
The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Awlaki was killed in a drone strike last month, does not closely analyze the quality of the evidence for those assertions.
That's more like U.S. intelligence!
The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the strike, which technically remains a covert operation. It has also refused to release its legal reasoning. But the document that laid out its justification - a roughly 50-page memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010 - was described on the condition of anonymity by people who have read it.
The administration did not respond to requests for comment on this article and has resisted growing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of how it deemed the killing of a US citizen to be legal. The Obama team’s memorandum was written after months of deliberations that included meetings in the White House Situation Room involving top lawyers for the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council, and intelligence agencies.
So BUSHIAN, isn't it?
It was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, and was signed by Barron. The office may have given oral approval for an attack on Awlaki before completing its detailed memorandum....
Translation: they drew up the document AFTERWARDS!
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"US drones are said to kill 9 in Yemen, including son of previous victim" October 16, 2011|By Laura Kasinof, New York Times
ADEN, Yemen - Airstrikes believed to be carried out by US drones killed at least nine people in southern Yemen, including a senior official of the regional Al Qaeda branch and an American, the 17-year-old son of an Al Qaeda official killed by the United States last month, according to the government and local reports yesterday.
Fighting also escalated in the capital, Sana, where at least 12 antigovernment protesters were killed by security forces near the Foreign Ministry and at least four civilians were killed in a battle near the airport, opposition officials said.
The fighting was the deadliest since President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned to the country last month and coincided with rising political tensions as all sides await a statement expected by the UN Security Council in the coming weeks.
Yemen has been in turmoil for months as protesters demanding the ouster of Saleh, who has led Yemen for 33 years, have filled the streets and rival political factions have fought for power.
Saleh, despite tremendous domestic opposition, international pressure, and an assassination attempt that severely wounded him in June, has refused to cede power.
Islamic militant groups, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni branch of the terrorist organization, have exploited the chaos, especially in the southern provinces of Shabwa and Abyan.
The US drone strike that killed the Al Qaeda senior official, Anwar al-Awlaki, was particularly controversial in the United States because despite being a US citizen, he was killed without legal due process. The US government has argued that although he was known primarily as a propagandist, he had taken on an operational role in the organization, plotting attacks against Americans, making him a legitimate target.
Why does the newspaper instantly spring to mind when I read that?
It was unconfirmed if his son had been killed in the attack on Friday night, and it was not clear if he was the intended target of the strike.
Here we go again.
The Yemeni authorities said that there were two airstrikes in Shabwa province Friday night, and that Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian-born leader of the media wing of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed. Six others were wounded, according to a statement on the official Saba news agency.
Local reports said that nine people were killed in the airstrikes and that they were carried out by US drones. Neither Yemeni nor US officials confirmed the role of drones, whose use in Yemen is officially secret but widely known.
A member of the Awlaki family said that the dead included Anwar al-Awlaki’s son, Abdelrahman al-Awlaki, 17. The younger Awlaki lived in the capital and was visiting the family home in the Assan district of Shabwa Province after the death of his father.
Two other relatives of the Awlaki family were also killed, the family said.
It was not known whether any of them had any affiliation with Al Qaeda.
Then they were COMPLETELY INNOCENT, 'eh?
There were also two battles in the capital.
In the first, antigovernment protesters staged a large march yesterday morning outside the area of the city protected by troops loyal to a military commander, Major General Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, who defected to the opposition in March.
According to witnesses, thousands marched down a street and were fired upon once they reached the first government checkpoint just outside the Foreign Ministry.
Some protesters then retreated back to a sit-in area, while others marched on, only to be shot at again.
The attack ignited fighting between the troops loyal to Ahmar and the government forces in what has become the new front line of the battle, the neighborhood of Haeel. Artillery explosions were heard late into the evening.
The fighting also appeared to signal the end of an unofficial truce that had recently been brokered between the government and Ahmar.
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"Militant Saudi bomb maker believed dead in drone strike; US attack in Yemen also killed cleric" by Lee Keath Associated Press / October 2, 2011
CAIRO - A Saudi militant believed killed in the US drone strike in Yemen constructed the bombs for the Al Qaeda branch’s most notorious attempted attacks - including the underwear-borne explosives intended to a down a US aircraft and a bomb carried by his own brother intended to assassinate a Saudi prince.
The death of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri would make the Friday drone strikes on a convoy in the central deserts of Yemen one of the most effective single blows in the US campaign to take out Al Qaeda’s top figures.
The strike also killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric who had been key to recruiting for the militant group, and a Pakistani-American, Samir Khan, who was a top English-language propagandist.
But Christopher Boucek, a scholar who studies Yemen and Al Qaeda, said Asiri’s death would “overshadow’’ that of the two Americans due to his operational importance to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group that is considered the most active branch of the terrorist network.
Late Friday, two US officials said intelligence indicated that Asiri was among those killed in the strike.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Asiri’s death has not been officially confirmed.
Asiri, 29, was one of the first Saudis to join the Yemen-based Al Qaeda branch and became its key bomb maker, designing the explosives in two attempted attacks against the United States.
His fingerprint was found on the bomb hidden in the underwear of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, US counterterrorism officials said.
A Muslim Sandusky?
The attack failed because the would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab botched detonating the explosives, ending up only burning himself before being wrestled away by passengers.
The explosives used in that bomb were chemically identical to those hidden inside two printers that were shipped from Yemen last year, bound for Chicago and Philadelphia in a plot claimed by Al Qaeda. The bombs were intercepted in England and Dubai.
All this laughable crap propaganda that isn't really funny.
In perhaps his most ruthless operation, Asiri turned his younger brother, Abdullah, into a human bomb in a 2009 attempt to kill a Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, the kingdom’s top counterterrorism official and son of its interior minister.
Abdullah volunteered for the suicide mission, asking to replace another militant named to carry it out, according to an account in Sada al-Malahem, an Arabic-language Web magazine issued by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula....
Related: Al Qaeda 'Belly Bombs' Entirely Possible, Doctor Says
That is a BELLY FULL of BELLY LAUGHS!
Meanwhile, Yemeni officials yesterday provided more details about their role in the tracking and killing of Awlaki, while a government spokesman said the United States should show more appreciation to Yemen’s embattled president for his assistance in the case.
A high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Yemen had provided the United States with intelligence on the location of the cleric.
He said Yemeni security officials located Awlaki on Friday morning in a house in the village of Al Khasaf in Al Jawf Province. The remote village lies in a desert where the Yemeni state has no control and tribes with varying loyalties rule.
The United States said Awlaki, a propagandist for the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, had taken on an operational role in the organization, and last year the Obama administration placed him on a list of targets to kill or capture.
The killing came a week after the return to Yemen of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been recovering in Saudi Arabia from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt.
See: Slow Saturday Special: Saleh's Surprising Return
The timing of the airstrikes fueled speculation that Saleh, who has frequently portrayed himself as an essential bulwark against Al Qaeda, had handed over Awlaki in order to reduce US pressure on him to leave.
Whatever.
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"Yemeni warplane bombs army position; 30 soldiers of renegade unit killed in strike" by Ahmed al-Haj Associated Press / October 3, 2011
SANA, Yemen - A government warplane bombed an army position in southern Yemen, killing at least 30 soldiers involved in months of intense battles against Al Qaeda members, officials said yesterday.
Oooops!
The strike appeared to be a mistake, but the soldiers hit were from a unit that had defected to side with protesters seeking the president’s ouster in Yemen’s chapter of the Arab Spring, raising questions about whether the bombing might have been intentional.
Maybe not oooops!
Yemen’s government and the renegade military units both consider Yemen’s Al Qaeda branch an enemy. The president’s political opponents, however, accuse him of allowing the Islamic militants to seize control of several towns in southern Yemen earlier this year in a bid to spark fears in the West that without him in power, Al Qaeda would take over.
The airstrike, which took place on Saturday evening in Abyan Province, targeted an abandoned school used as a shelter by soldiers of the army’s 119th Brigade who were battling the Al Qaeda fighters, military and medical officials said. The brigade is thought to have received significant support from the US military to enable it to fight the militants in the south more effectively.
Ooooops!
After the airstrike, militants inspecting the site shot and killed soldiers who were wounded by the bombing, the military officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
Yemen’s turmoil is of deep concern to the United States and Europe in large part because of the possibility that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will benefit from it and carve out an even bigger haven from which to plot attacks on the West....
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