Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

33. “The Americans Really Wanted to Kill Anwar”

YEMEN, LATE 2009–EARLY 2010—Nasser Awlaki had not heard from his son since May. On December 20, 2009, he received a call from President Saleh that caused his stomach to plummet. “He called me at three o’clock in the afternoon. He said, ‘Nasser, have you heard the news?’ I said, ‘What news?’ He said, ‘Four hours ago, your son was killed by an American airplane.’ I said, ‘What American airplane? Where?’” Saleh told him the location, a mountainous area of Shabwah. Nasser hung up and started calling tribal leaders in the area, desperate for any information. There had been no air strikes reported. “I don’t know why the president told me that,” Nasser later told me, adding that he believes the Americans had told Saleh they were going to hit Anwar on that day but that the operation had been called off for some reason. Regardless of the reason, it was now clear: “The Americans really wanted to kill Anwar.”

Four days after President Saleh called Nasser, on December 24, US forces carried out an air strike four hundred miles southeast of Sana’a in the Rafd mountain valley in Shabwah. According to official accounts, US and Yemeni intelligence indicated Awlaki was meeting with the two most important figures in the growing AQAP organization, Nasir al Wuhayshi, bin Laden’s former secretary, and AQAP leader Said Ali al Shihri. Yemeni officials charged they were “planning an attack on Yemeni and foreign oil targets.”

The air strikes killed thirty people, and media outlets began reporting that Awlaki was dead, along with the two al Qaeda figures. Former intelligence officials and Yemen “experts” appeared on news programs characterizing the killings as “a huge victory for the struggle against al-Qaida in Yemen.” An unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post that the Obama administration had no problems with targeting a US citizen who it believed had joined al Qaeda, saying, “It doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them” because “they are then part of the enemy.” The fact that the president had authorized an assassination strike against a US citizen went almost entirely unchallenged by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Although reports of the strikes being US operations made it onto major media outlets, primarily through leaks from US officials intent on showing they were hitting al Qaeda, there was no official ownership of the attacks by the White House or Pentagon. “While the U.S. has escaped the brunt of criticism to date, continued leaks from Washington and international media coverage of American involvement could stir up anti-American resentment in Yemen,” declared a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sana’a back to Washington.

Nasser watched the news reports that his son had been killed. He managed to reach a tribal figure who was in contact with Anwar. “I got information that day that my son was not there, and he was not killed,” he recalled. When a reporter for the Washington Post called Nasser to get a comment from him on Anwar’s death, Nasser told him Anwar was alive. Meanwhile, CBS News interviewed a source in Yemen who said that not only was Awlaki still alive, but the attacks were “far from his house and he had nothing to do with those killed.” Whether they were ever there or not, Wuhayshi and Shihri were not killed in the attack, either.

“They decided to kill [Anwar] at the end of 2009,” Nasser told me. “Is it legal for the United States to kill an American citizen, without a legal process, without due process? I want any decent American lawyer to tell me that it is right for the United States government to kill an American citizen, on the basis that he said something against the United States, or against American soldiers. I don’t understand 100 percent the American Constitution, but I don’t believe that the American Constitution, American law, will allow the killing of an American citizen because he said something against the United States.”

While the American government was hunting for Anwar Awlaki from the skies, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye managed to track him down for an exclusive interview, which was broadcast around the globe and translated into multiple languages. In the United States, it was reported by major US television networks and printed in newspapers. Far from coming off as sympathetic, Shaye’s interview was tough and seemed aimed at actually getting answers. Among the questions he asked Awlaki: How can you agree with what Nidal Hasan did as he betrayed his American nation? Why did you bless the acts of Nidal Hasan? Do you have any connection with the incident directly? Shaye also confronted Awlaki with inconsistencies from his previous interviews.

Under Shaye’s questioning, Awlaki went into great depth articulating his defense of Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, and he told Shaye he wanted to “clarify” his position on Hasan’s shooting spree. “I did not recruit Nidal Hasan, but America did with its crimes and injustice, and this is what America does not want to admit. America does not want to admit that what Nidal carried out, and what thousands of Muslims besides Nidal are doing in fighting against America, is because of its oppressive policies against the Islamic world,” Awlaki told the journalist. “Nidal Hasan, before he became an American, is a Muslim, and he is also from Palestine and he sees what the Jews are doing through oppressing his people under American cover and support. Yes, I may have a role in the intellectual direction of Nidal, but the matter does not exceed that, as I don’t try to disconnect myself with what Nidal has done because of disagreement with it, but it would be an honor to me if I had a bigger role in it.”

Awlaki provided his e-mail correspondence with Hasan to Shaye so the journalist could reach his own conclusions about its contents. “I gave it to you to publish it because the American administration has prohibited publishing it,” Awlaki told him. “Why do they not want it out? What is the reason? Do they want to cover their security failure? Or, do they not want to confess that Nidal Hasan was a man of principle and that he did what he did as a service to Islam? Do they [want] to show it as a sudden, individual act with no relation to the actions of the criminal American Army?” Awlaki pointed out that the US government had been intercepting his e-mails with Hasan, including the first one, sent a year before the Fort Hood shootings, in which Hasan “asked whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not.” Awlaki said the e-mails revealed the failure of US intelligence agencies. “I wonder where were the American security forces that one day claimed they can read the numbers of any license plate, anywhere in the world, from space.”

Shaye had caused trouble for the United States and the Yemeni government when he reported on the US role in the al Majalah bombing and other strikes. Now he was in contact with Anwar Awlaki, giving the preacher another opportunity to get his message out. Shaye was a serious journalist, chasing down important stories inside his own country. If anything, Shaye’s interviews provided the US intelligence community, politicians and the pro-assassination pundits with ammunition to support their campaign to kill Awlaki. Nonetheless, the United States perceived Shaye as a threat—and one that had to be dealt with.

Awlaki, meanwhile, was quickly becoming a household name. In the aftermath of the December strikes and raids, the media and Congress began to awaken to the reality that the United States seemed to be heading toward an undeclared war in Yemen. The events of Christmas Day in 2009 would shake the entire country.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA and his family were singing Christmas carols in Hawaii when one of the president’s aides interrupted the festivities, pulling Obama aside for an urgent phone call with John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser.

A few hours earlier, a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Three days before, he had turned twenty-three years old. At around 8:00 a.m. local time, he made his way down the aisle of the plane and settled into seat 19A. At 8:45 a.m., the plane was wheels up, headed across the Atlantic en route to Detroit. Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, was a retired businessman, former federal commissioner for economic development in Nigeria, and one of the wealthiest men on the African continent.

The path that led the wealthy young Nigerian to Flight 253 ran straight through Yemen. Abdulmutallab had attended elite private schools in Lomé, Togo, where he was known to be a devout Muslim and was described by one instructor as “every teacher’s dream.” In 2005, he spent part of the year studying Arabic in Sana’a and, like many figures being watched in Yemen by the US counterterrorism apparatus, attended lectures at Iman University. Later that year, Abdulmutallab moved to London, where he enrolled in college. There, he became president of the University College of London’s Islamic society and participated in nonviolent protests against the US-UK wars in Muslim countries. He organized a conference to protest the “war on terror.”

On at least two occasions, Abdulmutallab traveled to the United States for visits and, in 2008, was given a multiple-entry visa. In August 2008, he attended lectures at an Islamic institute in Texas before returning to Yemen to study Arabic. During that period, Abdulmutallab’s father described his son as growing increasingly radical, becoming obsessed with Sharia law and what he called “the real Islam.” Eventually, Abdulmutallab fell off the map. His father grew so concerned that on November 19, 2009, he went to the US Embassy in Nigeria and met with two US security officials, later identified as CIA, to tell them that his son had gone missing in Yemen. During the meeting, he described his son’s “extreme religious views.”

As Flight 253 began its descent into Detroit, Abdulmutallab complained that he had a stomachache and went into a bathroom, where he remained for about twenty minutes. When he returned to his seat, he covered himself with a blanket. Moments later, other passengers say they heard a noise that sounded like a firecracker. In a flash, Abdulmutallab’s pants leg was on fire, as was part of the plane’s inner wall. A nearby passenger jumped on him, and flight attendants scrambled to put out the fire. When a flight attendant asked Abdulmutallab what he had in his pants, he reportedly responded, “Explosive device.”

It was Christmas morning and families across the United States were opening presents and preparing for celebrations when the news broke that there had been an attempted attack on a US airliner. Abdulmutallab quickly became known as the “Underwear Bomber” after it was revealed that he had smuggled explosives in his undergarments. It didn’t take long before Abdulmutallab’s Yemen connection was out in the open, with intense focus on the possible involvement of AQAP. The fact that PETN was among the explosives in Abdulmutallab’s makeshift underwear bomb was cited as evidence of the involvement of Ibrahim Asiri, who made the pentaerythritol tetranitrate bomb his brother had used in the attempt to kill Prince bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia a few months earlier.

As the Obama administration scrambled to respond, the US intelligence community and congressional Republicans began to spring leaks. Before long, Abdulmutallab was presented as an AQAP operative who had been sent on a suicide mission by Anwar Awlaki. Yemeni intelligence officials told the United States that Abdulmutallab had traveled to Awlaki’s tribal area of Shabwah in October 2009. There, they say, he hooked up with members of AQAP. A US government source said that the National Security Agency had intercepted “voice-to-voice communication” between Abdulmutallab and Awlaki in the fall of 2009 and had determined that Awlaki “was in some way involved in facilitating this guy’s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things. I don’t think we know for sure,” the anonymous source told the Washington Post.

A local tribal leader from Shabwah, Mullah Zabara, later told me he had seen the young Nigerian at the farm of Fahd al Quso, the alleged USS Cole bombing conspirator. “He was watering trees,” Zabara told me. “When I saw [Abdulmutallab], I asked Fahd, ‘Who is he?’” Quso told Zabara the young man was from a different part of Yemen, which Zabara knew was a lie. “When I saw him on TV, then Fahd told me the truth.”

Awlaki’s role in the “underwear plot” was unclear. Awlaki later claimed that Abdulmutallab was one of his “students.” Tribal sources in Shabwah told me that al Qaeda operatives reached out to Awlaki to give religious counseling to Abdulmutallab, but that Awlaki was not involved in the plot. While praising the attack, Awlaki said he had not been involved with its conception or planning. “Yes, there was some contact between me and him, but I did not issue a fatwa allowing him to carry out this operation,” Awlaki told Abdulelah Haider Shaye in an interview for Al Jazeera a few weeks after the attempted attack: “I support what Umar Farouk has done after I have been seeing my brothers being killed in Palestine for more than sixty years, and others being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And in my tribe too, US missiles have killed” women and “children, so do not ask me if al-Qaeda has killed or blown up a US civil[ian] jet after all this. The 300 Americans are nothing comparing to the thousands of Muslims who have been killed.”

Shaye pressed Awlaki on his defense of the attempted downing of the plane, pointing out to Awlaki that it was a civilian airliner. “You have supported Nidal Malik Hasan and justified his act by saying that his target was a military not a civilian one. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s plane was a civilian one, which means the target was the US public?” Shaye pressed him. “It would have been better if the plane was a military one or if it was a US military target,” Awlaki replied. But, he added:

Soon after the attempted bombing, AQAP posted a web statement praising Abdulmutallab as a hero who had “penetrated all modern and sophisticated technology and devices and security barriers in airports of the world” and “reached his target.” The statement boasted that the “mujahedeen brothers in the manufacturing department” made the device and that it did not detonate due to a “technical error.” Four months after the attempted attack, AQAP released a video showing Abdulmutallab, armed with a Kalashnikov and wearing a keffiyeh, at a desert training camp in Yemen. In the video, masked men conducted live-ammunition training. One scene showed AQAP operatives firing at a drone flying overhead. At the end of the video, Abdulmutallab read a martyrdom statement in Arabic. “You brotherhood of Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula have the right to wage jihad because the enemy is in your land,” he said, sitting before a flag and a rifle and dressed in white. “God said if you do not fight back, he will punish you and replace you.”

The incident gave ammunition to Republicans and former Bush administration officials who accused President Obama and his national security team of missing repeated warning signs leading up to the incident, saying that Abdulmutallab’s father’s warning at the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, should have been taken more seriously. An intelligence official pushed back, telling Newsweek, “While this is the season for second-guessing and finger-pointing, I have not seen anything to come from the meeting in Abuja that suddenly would have rocketed Abdulmutallab to the no-fly list. You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family’s wealthy lifestyle. That alone makes him neither Saint Francis nor a dead-eyed killer. Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.”

At the same time, Republicans used the incident to portray Obama as a naïve peacenik. “The Obama administration came in and said, ‘We’re not going to use the word “terrorism” anymore. We’re going to call it “manmade disasters,”’ trying to, you know, I think, downplay the threat from terrorism,” quipped Representative Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, on Fox News two days after the failed attack. On December 30, former vice president Cheney launched another scathing public attack on Obama. “As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war,” declared Cheney. “He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war.” Cheney’s attack was bold, not least for its hypocrisy. When the so-called Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, tried to blow up a flight in a similar way, the Bush administration prosecuted him in civilian courts and Rumsfeld declared that the case was “a matter that’s in the hands of the law enforcement people.” Unlike Obama, who responded to the incident swiftly, it took President Bush six days to address Reid’s attempted attack.

Cheney further charged that Obama “seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.” Cheney’s statement was a phenomenal misrepresentation. Obama had already bombed Yemen more times in his first year in office than Bush and Cheney had in the entire eight years of their term in the White House. “A lot of the knuckleheads I’ve been listening to out there on the network shows don’t know what they’re talking about,” Brennan fumed to the New York Times. “When they say the administration’s not at war with Al Qaeda, that is just complete hogwash. What they’re doing is just playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort, which is to get us to battle among ourselves instead of focusing on them.” At his inauguration, Obama had declared, “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” When it came to Yemen, Obama certainly viewed the country’s al Qaeda presence as a priority target, despite Cheney’s very public allegations.

While the Obama administration was facing intense scrutiny over its handling of the incident, it was also ratcheting up US military action against AQAP. “We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence,” Senator Joe Lieberman asserted on Fox News. Lieberman, who had traveled to Yemen in August, said, “Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen: ‘Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.’ That’s the danger we face.” Like Cheney, Lieberman, it seemed, was late to the game. The war in Yemen was already well under way.

IN EARLY 2010, the Obama administration continued to downplay the US role in Yemen, with officials publicly repeating a version of the same line: the United States is only providing support to Yemen’s counterterrorism operations. “People ask me—the question comes up—Are we sending troops into Yemen?” Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, said in a lecture at the US Naval War College on January 8. “And the answer is we have no plans to do that and we shouldn’t forget this is a sovereign country. And sovereign countries get to vote on who comes in their country and who doesn’t.” Those comments were echoed two days later by the president himself. “We’ve known throughout this year that al-Qaeda in Yemen has become a more serious problem,” Obama said on January 10. “And as a consequence, we have partnered with the Yemeni government to go after those terrorist training camps and cells there in a much more deliberate and sustained fashion.” Obama said bluntly: “I have no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” in Yemen. It was an incredible statement from a commander in chief who, for a full year, had troops on the ground who were entrenched, operational and growing in ranks. While the US footprint was small, JSOC was on the ground with the president’s direct authorization.

In Sana’a, the State Department noted “steadily growing military elements based at the [US] embassy” as part of an expanding “U.S. military footprint.” Under National Security Decision Directive-38 (NSDD-38), issued in 1982, the US ambassador had authority to approve all personnel entering Yemen. In June 2010, the embassy reported that it was managing a “daily flow of proposals for engagement by the U.S. military” and requests for intelligence and military personnel to be granted “country clearances” for “temporary duty.” The Special Operations Command liaison to the embassy was Lieutenant Colonel Brad Treadway, who had served as a liaison for a team of SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Group in Iraq in the early stages of the US invasion. He was undoubtedly a busy man, as Special Operations teams began a substantial expansion. By late January, JSOC had been involved with more than two dozen ground raids and air strikes in Yemen since the December 17 bombing of al Majalah. Scores of people were killed in the raids and strikes, and others were taken prisoner. At the same time, JSOC began operating its own drones in the country. What started as a day of coordinated strikes was turning into a sustained targeted killing campaign in Yemen coordinated by JSOC.

“After the December thing with Abdulmutallab, [President Saleh] had to kind of show more support for our actions,” recalled Dr. Emile Nakhleh, the former senior CIA officer. “He would play the game, he would kind of look the other way when we would do certain kinds of military operations, kinetic operations against some radical groups there. When he was put under pressure, he would say it was his own operations. He played the game.”

While US military and intelligence agencies began plotting more strikes in Yemen, General Petraeus traveled to Sana’a for another round of meetings with President Saleh and his top military and intelligence officers to ensure mission continuity after the December strikes and the failed Christmas Day bombing plot. On January 2, Petraeus kicked off the meeting by informing Saleh that the United States would be more than doubling “security assistance” to Yemen, including $45 million to train and equip Yemen’s special operations forces for aerial warfare against AQAP. Saleh asked Petraeus for twelve attack helicopters, saying that if the US “bureaucracy” held up the transfer of the choppers, Petraeus could strike a backdoor deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to handle the transfers for the United States. Petraeus told Saleh he had already discussed such an arrangement with the Saudis.

Saleh told Petraeus the United States could position fixed-wing aircraft around Yemen’s territory “out of sight” and authorized them to strike AQAP when “actionable intelligence” was available. Officially, Saleh told Petraeus, Yemen did not want US forces conducting operations on the ground in Yemen. “You cannot enter the operations area and you must stay in the joint operations center,” Saleh said. But everyone at the meeting must have understood that this “requirement” would not be enforced, as it had not been in the past.

While praising the December strikes, Saleh “lamented” the use of cruise missiles used to bomb al Majalah, according to a US diplomatic cable on the meeting, because they were “not very accurate.” In the meeting, Petraeus claimed “the only civilians killed were the wife and two children of an AQAP operative at the site,” which was blatantly false. Saleh told Petraeus he preferred “precision-guided bombs” fired from fixed-wing aircraft. Saleh even made Yemen’s deception explicit: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” he told Petraeus. Yemen’s deputy prime minister, Rashad al Alimi, then joked that he had just “lied” by telling the Yemeni parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan and Shabwah were American-made but deployed by Yemen.

Shortly after that meeting, Alimi told reporters in Yemen, “The operations that have been taken…are 100 percent Yemeni forces. The Yemeni security apparatus has taken support, information and technology that are not available here, and that’s mostly from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and other friendly countries.” But most Yemenis were not buying the story. Ahmed al Aswadi, a leader of the opposition Al Islah Party, said that “it is believed by most Yemenis” that the recent strikes had been “actually carried out by U.S. forces,” adding, “U.S. policy in this region of the world is no secret. If the government doesn’t comply with U.S. demands, then they bring in drones.” During his meeting with Saleh, Petraeus had complained, “Only four out of fifty planned U.S. Special Operations Forces Command training missions with the Yemeni Air Force had actually been executed in the past year.” In interviews, Special Forces operators with experience in Yemen characterized the special ops forces they were training there as not having the will to fight and told me they increasingly felt a need to take matters into their own hands.

In early 2010, the Obama administration canceled the scheduled repatriation of more than thirty Yemenis held at Guantánamo who had already been cleared for release. “Given the unsettled situation [in Yemen], I’ve spoken to the attorney general and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time,” President Obama said on January 5. Lawyers for some of the Yemeni prisoners called the decision “unconscionable,” saying it would “effectively prevent any meaningful progress towards closing Guantánamo, which President Obama has repeatedly argued will make our nation safer.” It was clear that for the Obama administration, the Guantánamo issue, a central pillar of the president’s election campaign, was far less pressing than its counterterrorism agenda in Yemen, which had more citizens at the prison than any other nation.

At the State Department, Hillary Clinton declared, “The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional stability and even global stability.” On January 15, more air strikes targeted suspected AQAP operatives, with missiles hitting two vehicles. Four days later, on January 19, the US government formally designated AQAP as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” That day, the UN Security Council, at the urging of US ambassador Susan Rice, took similar action. State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley said the moves “support the U.S. effort to degrade the capabilities of this group. We are determined to eliminate AQAP’s ability to execute violent attacks and to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their networks.”

On January 20, missile attacks once again targeted alleged AQAP operatives in Marib. As with the January 15 strikes, the Yemeni authorities claimed to have killed senior AQAP figures who would later prove to be alive, including Qasim al Rimi. The attacks, which included a strike on a convoy of vehicles, suggested that armed US drones were being used in Yemen. Both strikes seemed to be aimed at decapitating the AQAP leadership in Marib, centered on the suspected local leader Ayad al Shabwani. During the January 20 raids, the editor in chief of the Yemen Post, Hakim Almasmari, described sustained air strikes. “Today, there have been seventeen raids inside Marib, most of them trying to attack Shabwani and his friends,” he said. “Until now, there is only one al-Qaida leader killed. [Yemeni security forces] have troops on the ground, but doing nothing. Most of the attacks are from the air.” Eyewitnesses said that villagers were using antiaircraft guns to fire at menacing planes.