Dirty Wars (27 page)

Awlaki spoke frequently of the harassment and detention of Muslims across the globe, from Guantánamo to London to Virginia and beyond. He
implored his followers to see their struggles in the West as the same as those in Muslim countries.
“We are watching
one Muslim nation fall after another, and we are watching, sitting back, doing nothing. When Palestine was taken, we did nothing,” he boomed at a sermon in London as part of an event called “Stop Police Terror.” “The Ummah [the global Muslim community] is watching while Iraq is being devoured. It's not going to end there, because it will spill over to other countries like Syria and only Allah knows who is next.” He added, “When we allow a Muslim nation to fall down, we have allowed the same thing to happen to every and each one of us.”

The December 2003 lecture was organized as part of a series of events in Britain opposing what the Muslim community saw as a racist crackdown. Using antiterror laws similar to the PATRIOT Act in the United States, British security forces began a campaign of mass arrests of Muslims—many of them students—on suspicion of involvement with terror plots. “
We are arresting people
continuously,” Britain's top police official, John Stevens, declared. “It is part of this massive effort we have been having since 11th September. And it will continue.” It was against this backdrop that Awlaki told his audience, “Many Muslims have been arrested. You know when you talk about Guantánamo Bay and all that stuff;
there is a Guantánamo Bay
in this country. There were 524 Muslims who were arrested under the new laws and only 2 of them have been charged. You have over 520 Muslims who are locked up in jail, and are left to rot in there, and there's no crime—they have not committed anything and there are no charges brought against them. They are left there for months at end, to just rot in those prison cells. What have you done for them?” He called his followers to action. “We just sit there watching and doing nothing. Thinking by ducking down and by being quiet, we will be safe. If you don't stop it now, it's gonna happen to you, it might happen to your wife, it might happen to your own daughter. You need to stop it in its tracks before it grows.... So you need to do whatever you are capable of doing. This is a responsibility—it's hanging on your neck. It is something that you owe to your Muslim brothers, you owe it to the Ummah and you owe it to Allah.”

In London, Awlaki's sermons became more political, condemning the wars in Muslim countries and the detention of Muslims in the West. Guantánamo and the US torture program clearly had a major impact on him. “
He became a social figure
, you see,” recalled his father. Although many of his earlier sermons were apolitical and focused on the lives of the prophets and Koranic interpretation, Anwar had become a political activist. “Anwar, in all his lectures, tried to connect them with something modern that was happening,” Nasser said.

In his sermons, Awlaki would weave his theories about the United States being at war with Islam with condemnations of torture, at times
taking his theories into the realm of conspiracy, particularly in his denunciations of human rights organizations. “
The Jews and the Christians
will not be pleased until you become like them. How can we have trust in the leaders of
kufr
[disbelief] when today, today, right now, right now, there are Muslim brothers in jail?” Awlaki declared in a lecture in Britain, his voice shaking with passion. “Every sinister method of interrogation is used against them. They would use against them homosexuals to rape them. They would bring their mothers and sisters and wives and they would rape them in front of these brothers. Now it's true that this is not happening in the West, but the West knows about it. The United Nations knows about it. Amnesty International knows about it and they're doing nothing. In fact, sometimes they are encouraging it.”

Meleagrou-Hitchens has pointed out that in all of his time in Britain, Awlaki did not “make clear and public statements in support of violent jihad in a contemporary Western context,” adding that “although Awlaki sought to spark an Islamist political awakening within his audience, he was not openly calling for violent jihad against Western countries.” While Awlaki lectured on jihad and used historical Arab texts, such as
Book of Jihad,
authored by Ibn Nuhaas, a fourteenth-century scholar who died fighting against the Moguls and the Crusaders, he was careful in offering his rationale. “
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 a promotion of violence against an individual or society or a state,” Awlaki said in one lecture on the book. “We are studying a book that is 600 years old...so that is the extent of what we are doing. It's a purely academic study of an old traditional book.” It was clear that Awlaki was thinking of his next move, and Meleagrou-Hitchens believed that his “disclaimer” about not calling for violence “was likely made with the intention of avoiding the attention of British security authorities.”

Awlaki's stock among young, English-speaking Muslims on the street was rising by the day, but his solitary life in Britain, away from his wife and children, was not sustainable.

Ultimately, Awlaki decided to return to Sana'a. Nasser Awlaki said it was because Anwar had been
unable to afford
to live in the West and wanted to pursue business and educational opportunities in Yemen. But some of Anwar's associates in the United Kingdom had a different view. Usama Hasan, who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, suggested that Awlaki wanted to put his money where his mouth was. “
I've got a feeling
that he's always been yearning for it [to fight jihad], and our yearning was satiated in a way, but he never got that outlet,” he said. “Add to that his strong links to Yemen, which has extensive connections to al-Qaeda, and the pull to jihad was too strong.”

IRAQ,
2003-2005—Once the Iraq War was in full swing, Rumsfeld directed General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, to disband the separate High Value Task Forces JSOC was running in Afghanistan and Iraq, TF-5 and TF-20. Instead, JSOC would run one unified task force, TF-121, that would have jurisdiction to operate and hit in both countries. The logic was that “
tracking and then capturing
or killing Qaeda and Taliban leaders or fleeing members of the former Iraqi government required planning and missions not restricted by the lines on the map of a region where borders are porous.” It was a further blurring of the lines between “covert” and “clandestine” missions, but Rumsfeld had determined JSOC should forge ahead. In keeping with Rumsfeld's drive to make Special Operations Forces the lead agency in the “global manhunt,” the task force would be
run by McRaven
and overseen by McChrystal, and they would have at their disposal the full range of US intelligence assets, including what was needed from the CIA. In addition to McRaven's Navy SEALs and McChrystal's Rangers, as well as members of Delta Force, the team would also have command over paramilitaries from the CIA's Special
Activities Division and support
from the Activity, JSOC's signals intelligence wing.

The days of JSOC operatives being regularly put on loan to the CIA were over. Cambone's Strategic Support Branch and the Activity were coordinating the feeding of all-access intel to the task force. “This is
tightening the sensor-to-shooter loop
,” a senior defense official told the
Washington Times.
“You have your own intelligence right with the guys who do the shooting and grabbing. All the information under one roof.”

While TF-121 was
given a mission
to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein by the spring of 2004, Washington was increasingly focused on Iraq. Veteran intelligence officials identify this period as a turning point in the hunt for bin Laden. At a time when JSOC was asking for more resources and permissions to pursue targets inside of Pakistan and other countries, there was a tectonic shift toward making Iraq the number-one priority.

The heavy costs of that strategic redirection to the larger counterterrorism mission were of deep concern to Lieutenant Colonel Anthony
Shaffer, a senior military intelligence officer who was CIA trained and had worked for the DIA and JSOC. Shaffer ran a task force, Stratus Ivy, that was part of a program started in the late 1990s code-named
Able Danger
. Utilizing what was then cutting-edge “data mining” technology, the program was operated by military intelligence and the Special Operations Command and aimed at identifying al Qaeda cells globally. Shaffer and some of his Able Danger
colleagues claimed
that they had uncovered several of the 9/11 hijackers a year before the attacks but that no action was taken against them. He
told the 9/11 Commission
he felt frustrated when the program was shut down and believed it was one of the few effective tools the United States had in the fight against al Qaeda pre-9/11. After the attacks, Shaffer volunteered for active duty and became the commander of the DIA's Operating Base Alpha, which Shaffer said “
conducted clandestine
antiterrorist operations” in Africa. Shaffer was running the secret program, targeting al Qaeda figures who might flee Afghanistan and seek shelter in Somalia, Liberia and other African nations. It “was the first DIA covert action of the post-Cold War era, where my officers used an African national military proxy to hunt down and kill al Qaeda terrorists,” Shaffer recalled.

Like many other experienced intelligence officers who had been tracking al Qaeda prior to 9/11, Shaffer believed that the focus was finally placed correctly on destroying the terror network and killing or capturing its leaders. But then all resources were repurposed for the Iraq invasion. “I saw the
Bush administration lunacy
up close and personal,” Shaffer said. After a year and a half of running the African ops, “I was forced to shut down Operating Base Alpha so that its resources could be used for the Iraq invasion.”

Shaffer was reassigned as an intelligence planner on the DIA team that helped feed information on possible Iraqi WMD sites to the advance JSOC teams that covertly entered Iraq ahead of the invasion. “It
yielded nothing
,” he alleged. “As we now know, no WMD were ever found.” He believed that shifting the focus and resources to Iraq was a grave error that allowed bin Laden to continue operating for nearly another decade. Shaffer was eventually sent to Afghanistan, where he would clash with US military leaders over his proposals to run operations into Pakistan to target the al Qaeda leaders who were hiding there.

Beginning in 2002 and into 2003, Special Ops and CIA units in Afghanistan began shifting their resources to Iraq. By the time it was disbanded in 2003, TF-5 in Afghanistan had already lost “
more than two-thirds
of its fighting strength,” from about 150 commandos to as few as thirty. By the winter of 2003, it was reported that “
nearly half
the US intelligence and commando agents who had been in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were reassigned to Iraq.” Saddam was code-named Black List One, and
McRaven's force intensified the hunt, scouring Iraq for him. They yanked family members, former bodyguards and aides of Saddam from their homes or hiding places and pressed them for information on his whereabouts. By late 2003, the US military's conventional commanders were growing concerned about the techniques they heard were being used by TF-121 to interrogate prisoners. It sounded a lot like the descriptions they had heard in whispers about what the CIA was doing at its black sites. “
Detainees captured by TF 121
have shown injuries that caused examining medical personnel to note that ‘detainee shows signs of having been beaten,'” according to a classified military report prepared for top US generals in Iraq at the time. One officer was quoted in the report as saying, “
Everyone knows
about it.” The report alleged that some of the treatment of detainees by TF-121 could “technically” be illegal and gravely warned that the mass detention of Iraqis could fan the flames of a brewing insurgency, adding that Iraqis could perceive the United States and its allies as “
gratuitous enemies
.”

But, just as the military was uncovering a potentially illegal and counterproductive detention program being run by TF-121, the task force achieved a major victory that would grab international headlines and win much internal praise in the Pentagon. A
former bodyguard
captured and interrogated by the task force had given up the location of a farm outside of Saddam's hometown, Tikrit, which he claimed the deposed Iraqi leader used as a hiding place. McRaven's men, backed by scores of troops from the 4th Infantry Division and local Iraqi militiamen, descended on the farm after cutting off all of its electricity, causing it to go completely dark. After searching the buildings on the property, they were just about to give up when a soldier spotted a crack in the floor, partially covered by a rug. Underneath, they found a styrofoam plate concealing a hole.

ON DECEMBER
14, 2003, it seemed to the Bush administration that the Iraq War had an end—and victory—in sight. That morning, Paul Bremer, flanked by General Ricardo Sanchez, walked up to a podium at a press conference in Baghdad. “
Ladies and gentlemen
, we got him,” Bremer said, barely able to contain his smile. The “him” in this case was none other than Saddam Hussein. The deposed Iraqi leader had been found hiding in a “spider hole” inside a mud brick hovel at the farm in Adwar, near Tikrit, with a pistol. They also recovered some AKs and
$750,000 in hundred-dollar bills
on the farm. When a member of Delta Force spotted Saddam hiding in the hole, the Iraqi leader told him: “
I am Saddam Hussein
. I am the president of Iraq. I want to negotiate.” The soldier reportedly shot back, “President Bush sends his regards.” Moments later, McRaven's men were whisking
him to a JSOC filtration site, a temporary holding facility, near the Baghdad Airport. It was called Camp NAMA. Ironically, the facility that would become
Saddam's temporary home
had once served as one of his torture chambers. The media was shown images of Saddam being given a medical exam at the facility, but JSOC had already been putting it to much darker uses that would never make it onto TV.