Dirty Wars (148 page)

In 2001, Anwar Awlaki was the imam at a large mosque in Virginia. After 9/11, Awlaki was interviewed frequently by US media outlets and offered commentary on the experience of American Muslims. He was frequently described as a moderate voice. Awlaki said the 9/11 attackers had “perverted their religion.”

In early 2010, Awlaki was identified as being on the US kill list. His sermons had become increasingly radical, and he embraced the very identity he once professed to oppose. “I eventually came to the conclusion that Jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim,” Awlaki declared. Awlaki became the first known US citizen to be targeted for assassination by his own government.

CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot two Pakistanis in Lahore in 2011. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities but eventually freed after the victims' families were forced to accept a payment of “blood money.” Many Pakistanis rallied, calling for him to be executed.

Admiral William McRaven, who led the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, with President Barack Obama at Fort Campbell in Kentucky days after the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Since 2001, McRaven has been one of the key US officials running the targeted killing program.

Part of the US missile that hit the Yemeni village of al Majalah on December 17, 2009. In all, more than forty people were killed, including fourteen women and twenty-one children. The Yemeni government took responsibility for the strike, alleging it was a successful attack on an al Qaeda training camp.

Muqbal, a tribal leader from al Majalah, Yemen. “If they kill innocent children and call them al Qaeda, then we are all al Qaeda,” he said. “If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.”

Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye was imprisoned soon after he exposed the US cruise missile attack on al Majalah and interviewed Anwar Awlaki. After the Yemeni president decided to pardon him, President Obama personally intervened and the pardon was rescinded.

Posters demanding Shaye's release were hung throughout Sana'a. His trial was roundly condemned as a sham by human rights and media freedom groups.

Then-JSOC commander Admiral William McRaven with Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sana'a in October 2009.

Abdulrahman Awlaki's birth certificate, showing he was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1995. Anwar Awlaki's eldest son, he lived with his grandparents after his father went underground in 2009.

Abdulrahman Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old US citizen, was killed in a US drone strike on October 14, 2011. His father had been assassinated two weeks earlier. Abdulrahman was eating dinner with his teenage cousin and some friends when he was killed. The US government has never explained his death.