Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

44. “Anwar Awlaki… Definitely Has a Missile in His Future”

YEMEN, 2011—In January 2011, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye was convicted of terrorism-related charges by a Yemeni court and sentenced to five years in prison, followed by two years of restricted movement and government surveillance. Throughout his trial, Shaye refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court and declined to present a legal defense. Human Rights Watch said the specialized court where Shaye was tried “failed to meet international standards of due process,” and his lawyers argued that the little “evidence” that was presented against him relied overwhelmingly on fabricated documents. “What happened was a political not judicial decision. It has no legal basis,” said Abdulrahman Barman, Shaye’s lawyer, who boycotted the trial. “Having witnessed his trial I can say it was a complete farce,” said Iona Craig, the Times of London journalist.

Several international human rights groups condemned the trial as a sham and an injustice. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” said Amnesty International’s Philip Luther.

There is no doubt that Shaye was reporting on stories that both the Yemeni and US governments wanted to suppress. He was also interviewing people Washington was hunting, namely, Anwar Awlaki. Although the US and Yemeni governments alleged that he was a facilitator for al Qaeda propaganda, close observers of Yemen disagreed. “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of his work,” said Gregory Johnsen, the Yemen scholar at Princeton University who had been communicating with Shaye since 2008. He told me, “Without Shaye’s reports and interviews we would know much less about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than we do, and if one believes, as I do, that knowledge of the enemy is important to constructing a strategy to defeat them, then his arrest and continued detention has left a hole in our knowledge that has yet to be filled.”

After Shaye was convicted and sentenced, tribal leaders pressured President Saleh to issue a pardon. “Some prominent Yemenis and tribal sheikhs visited the president to mediate in the issue and Saleh agreed to release and pardon him,” recalled Barman. “We were waiting for the release of the pardon—it was printed out and prepared in a file for the president to sign and announce the next day.” Word of the impending pardon leaked in the Yemeni press. That day, February 2, 2011, President Saleh received a call from President Obama. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against AQAP. At the end of the call, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” In fact, Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have the pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the preceding decade, and Saleh had been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different: Abdulelah Haider Shaye was not an Islamist militant or an al Qaeda operative. He was a journalist. After the call from Obama, Saleh ripped up the pardon.

“Certainly Shaye’s reports were an embarrassment for the US and Yemeni government, because at a time when both governments were seeking and failing to kill key leaders within AQAP, this single journalist with his camera and computer was able to locate these same leaders and interview them,” Johnsen told me. “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job, and it remains unclear why the US or Yemeni government refuse to present the evidence they claim to possess.”

Shaye staged a brief hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, ending it after his family expressed concerns about his deteriorating health. While international media organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, called for Shaye’s release, his case received scant attention in the United States. Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers charged that he remained in jail at the request of the White House. State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told me the United States wanted him kept behind bars. “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin told me, “That is all we have to say about this case.”

When Times of London journalist Iona Craig questioned the US ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, about Shaye’s case, she said Feierstein laughed at the question before answering. “Shaye is in jail because he was facilitating al Qaeda and its planning for attacks on Americans and therefore we have a very direct interest in his case and his imprisonment,” Feierstein said. When Craig mentioned the shock waves it had sent through the journalism community in Yemen, Feierstein replied, “This isn’t anything to do with journalism, it is to do with the fact that he was assisting AQAP and if they [Yemeni journalists] are not doing that they don’t have anything to worry about from us.”

For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicated that simply interviewing al Qaeda–associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, was a crime in the view of the US government. “I think the worst thing about the whole case is that not only is an independent journalist being held in proxy detention by the US,” said Craig, “but that they’ve successfully [intimidated] other Yemeni journalists investigating air strikes against civilians and, most importantly, holding their own government to account. Shaye did both of those things.” She added, “With the huge increase in government air strikes and US drone attacks recently, Yemen needs journalists like Shaye to report on what’s really going on.”

ANWAR AWLAKI’S BLOG had been shut down by the US government and the “Internet Imam” had no presence on the Web except for his essays in Inspire magazine. The one journalist who had dared to interview him was locked up. Now the White House wanted to finish the job. As it moved forward with its plans to assassinate Awlaki, the White House dispatched the US government’s top lawyer, Attorney General Eric Holder, for a high-profile television interview on ABC’s flagship morning show, Good Morning America. The interview was advertised as a “Blunt Warning on Terror Attacks,” with a banner proclaiming that the threat of “Home Grown Terror” was causing the attorney general “Sleepless Nights.” Holder said, “What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant.” He added, “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens—raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.” As images of Anwar Awlaki appeared, a headline flashed on screen: “New Top Terror Worry: Cleric Who Rivals Bin Laden.”

The reporter brought up the “Underwear Bomber” who tried to bring down the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day and the cargo plane bomb plots. Awlaki is “an extremely dangerous man. He has shown a desire to harm the United States, a desire to strike the homeland of the United States,” Holder said. “He is a person who—as an American citizen—is familiar with this country and he brings a dimension, because of that American familiarity, that others do not.” The danger Awlaki posed to the United States, Holder said, was an ability to incite potential terrorists to act. “The ability to go into your basement, turn on your computer, find a site that has this kind of hatred spewed…they have an ability to take somebody who is perhaps just interested, perhaps just on the edge, and take them over to the other side,” he said. Awlaki “would be on the same list with bin Laden.” The reporter asked Holder whether the United States preferred to capture Awlaki and put him on trial or to kill him outright. “Well, we certainly want to neutralize him. And we will do whatever we can in order to do that,” Holder replied.

Awlaki had now achieved epic status as the top US outlaw across the globe. The lawyers from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights who were fighting to stop the government from killing Awlaki were mystified that the government would present no evidence to back up the claims Holder and other officials were publicly making in the media and through leaks to a select group of journalists. “Even if what [Awlaki] is saying is criminal, charge him, try him. That’s still not a reason to send a drone into Yemen and kill him,” Pardiss Kebriaei, one of his lawyers, told me. “So whatever people may think, and whatever he may be saying, even if it has crossed the line, the point here is that the government cannot just determine, on the basis of some vague allegation of a threat, that he should be killed without due process.”

The Obama administration disagreed.

The time clock in the game of cat-and-mouse with US drones and Awlaki was running out. Obama was deploying teams from JSOC and the CIA to hunt him down and kill him. Former Navy Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance told me at the time that Awlaki was “dangerous on a strategic scale” and that he “definitely has a missile in his future. You cannot allow [him] to shape the battlefield ideologically and turn that into combat capacity.”

Soon after the cargo bomb plot was foiled, British media outlets reported that British SAS forces were operating in Yemen alongside JSOC and Yemen’s CTU “in missions to kill or capture” AQAP leaders. In February 2011, the National Counterterrorism Center’s director, Michael Leiter, briefed Congress on the top threats faced by the United States worldwide. “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization, is certainly the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland,” he declared before the House Homeland Security Committee. “Al-Awlaki is the most well-known English-speaking ideologue who is speaking directly to folks here in the homeland.”

The former DIA Yemen analyst Joshua Foust characterized Obama’s response at the time like this: “He immediately sent drones and special operations guys to Yemen. It was immediately, ‘Let’s send JSOC.’ Send in the Ninjas.” Without providing details, which he said were classified, Foust asserted that he had seen targeted killing operations conducted that he believed were warranted and that he did not believe such strikes were “theoretically a bad thing.” Foust, however, told me he was deeply concerned about the standards that were being used to determine who would be targeted for killing. “Frankly, most of the time when I was working on Yemen was spent arguing” with Special Operations Command-Yemen and other DIA analysts “about evidentiary standards,” he said. “The evidentiary standard for actually killing people off, to me, is frighteningly low. I think it’s like three separate corroborated HUMINT reports, and that’s it? In a court of law, that only amounts to hearsay. I don’t understand how people are that comfortable with killing people on evidence that thin.” He added, “If you are going to murder someone, you need to have a very good reason to do it, and you need to have absolutely unequivocal evidence that this is necessary, and will materially advance our interests. And that just doesn’t happen.” Eventually, Foust said, his branch chief at the DIA “told me to back off and shut up.”