Dirty Wars (94 page)

Although Awlaki's killing did not inspire the same spontaneous carnival-like street celebrations in the streets of Washington, DC, and New York City that marked bin Laden's death, some tabloid newspapers staged their own victory parades on their pages. “
Another al Qaeda Bites the Dust
; Blasted to Hell; CIA Drone Kills US-Born Terrorist al-Awlaki,” declared the
New York Post.
“
Remote-Control Really Hits the Splat
,” proclaimed another headline in the paper. “
One Less Terror Big
. Al Qaeda Loses Leader in Attack; Their violent hatred for US dies when a missile strike killed off an American-born monster militant,” announced the New York
Daily News.

The only voices of dissent that emanated from Washington in the immediate aftermath of Awlaki's killing came from the fringes of the Democratic and Republican parties. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually, that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad,” Texas Republican Ron Paul said on the campaign trail as he waged an unsuccessful insurgent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. “
Awlaki was born here
, he's an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. To start assassinating American citizens without charges—we
should think very seriously about this.” Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who tried to challenge the government's assertion that it could kill US citizens without trial nearly two years before Awlaki's death, said, “The Administration has a
crossed a dangerous divide
and set a dangerous precedent for how the United States handles terrorism cases. This dangerous legal precedent allows the government to target U.S. citizens abroad for being suspected of involvement in terrorism, in subversion of their most basic constitutional rights and due process of law. Their right to a trial is summarily and anonymously stripped from them.”

Constitutional lawyer and syndicated columnist Glenn Greenwald was among the few US commentators to look askance at the celebrations of Awlaki's killing, writing, “
After several unsuccessful efforts
to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today.” He correctly predicted that few Americans would raise questions or express outrage at the killing. “What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. government.”

In an interview the day Awlaki's death was announced, Greenwald said, “
Remember that there was great controversy
that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversation without warrant. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process. And yet many Democrats and progressives, because it's President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it.” Greenwald added: “To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the Constitution and to tear it into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.”

For some former senior members of the Bush administration, the killing of a US citizen by a Democratic president seemed to take the acceptable bounds of US conduct in the war on terror beyond their own lax standards. “Right now,
there isn't a government on the planet
that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel,” said former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden. “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on” Awlaki, he noted, “but we didn't need a court order to kill him. Isn't that something?”

Even as the legal issues surrounding Awlaki's killing received little attention in the US media and barely registered a blip on the radar of the general public in the United States, a few journalists and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill began seeking information about the process of authorizing
the assassination of US citizens. Only a select few in Washington knew anything specific. “
There's a process
that goes through the National Security Council, and then after that it goes to the president, and then the president then indicates that these individuals are on this list, and as a result of that process we followed it's legal,” said Charles Albert “Dutch” Ruppersberger III, a Maryland Democrat who was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. “It's legitimate, and we're taking out someone who has attempted to attack us on numerous occasions, and he was on that list. It was pursuant to a process.”

While the White House and some leading national security lawmakers assured journalists and the public that the process was lawful, the administration refused to make public its evidence. Some lawmakers—whose security clearances and committee assignments authorized them to review the kill process—alleged that they were not being sufficiently briefed by the White House. “
It's important for the American people to know
when the president can kill an American citizen, and when they can't,” Senator Ron Wyden told me. Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, had served on the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001 and often found himself at odds with the Bush administration over secrecy and transparency issues. Now, under a Democratic president, he was waging the same battles—and new ones. He said that he repeatedly asked the administration for its legal rationale for the government killing its own citizens without trial, calling his attempts to extract this information “an enormous struggle.” The American people, Wyden said, deserve “to know clearly when a president thinks an American citizen can be killed, and their life taken. These are substantial questions where I just don't think there's been a lot of detail, and the American people deserve more.” In the case of Awlaki, the target had not been indicted in any US court and faced no known charges. How would he have surrendered? To whom would he even surrender? “Those questions are clearly sort of hanging in suspended animation, without answers,” Wyden told me.

Giraldi, the former CIA officer, labeled Awlaki's killing an “assassination.” He had reviewed the publicly available information about Awlaki and what the administration had alleged Awlaki had done. “None of those things, to me, amounted to a death sentence. And they're saying, ‘Well, we have other stuff, but it's secret,'” Giraldi told me at the time. “And that's of course the thing that's always trotted out, and if there's a challenge in the courts, you come up against the State Secrets Privilege, so that the challenge goes away. So we're having a situation where people are being killed, you don't know what the evidence is, and you have no way to redress the situation.”

Nasser Awlaki believed that the US and Yemeni security forces could have arrested Anwar, but that they did not want to see him stand trial and be able to present a defense. It is also possible that the United States did not want to give Awlaki a platform to spread his message more widely. “I think that they wanted to kill him, without due process, because they thought he was a legitimate military target,” Nasser told me. “How is it that Umar Farouk, who tried to blow up the airplane, or Nidal Hasan, who actually killed those soldiers, how are they now having, let us say, a fair trial? My son did not get that fair trial.”

WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN,
2011—Abdulrahman Awlaki was mourning his father in Shabwah. The boy's family members there tried to comfort him and
encouraged him to get out with his cousins
—to go for walks or go outside for meals in the fresh air. That was what Abdulrahman was doing on the evening of October 14. He and his cousins had joined a group of friends outdoors to barbecue. The boy and his cousins had laid a blanket on the ground and were about to begin their meal. There were a few other people nearby doing the same. It was about 9:00 p.m. when the drones pierced the night sky. Moments later, Abdulrahman was dead. So, too, were several other teenage members of his family, including Abdulrahman's
seventeen-year-old cousin, Ahmed
.

Early the next morning, Nasser Awlaki received a phone call from his family in Shabwah. “
Some of our relatives went
to the place where [Abdulrahman] was killed, and they saw the area where he was killed. And they told us he was buried with the others in one grave because they were blown up to pieces by the drone. So they could not put them in separate graves,” Nasser told me. “They put three or four of them in one grave because they were cut into pieces. The people who were there could recognize only the back of Abdulrahman's hair. But they could not recognize his face or anything else.” As the horror was setting in that their eldest grandson had been killed just two weeks after the death of their eldest child, Nasser and Saleha watched in disbelief as numerous news reports identified Abdulrahman as being twenty-one years old, with anonymous US military officials referring to him as a “
military-aged
” male. Some reports intimated that he was an al Qaeda supporter and that he had been killed
while meeting with Ibrahim al Banna
, an Egyptian citizen described as the “media coordinator” for AQAP.

“
To kill a teenager is just unbelievable
, really, and they claim that he is an al Qaeda militant. It's nonsense,” said Nasser shortly after the strike. “They want to justify his killing, that's all.” When I visited Nasser after Abdulrahman was killed, he showed me the boy's Colorado birth certificate, showing that he was born in 1995 in Denver. “
When he was killed by the US government
,
he was a teenager, he wasn't twenty-one. He wouldn't have been able to enlist in the military in the US. He was sixteen,” he told me.

Days after the killing of Abdulrahman, the United States released a statement, as usual feigning ignorance about who was responsible for the strike, even though “unnamed officials” in the United States and Yemen had confirmed the strike to almost all media outlets that inquired. “
We have seen press reports
that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al Banna at the time,” National Security Council spokesman Thomas Vietor told the press, in a statement that strangely cast Abdulrahman as something between an al Qaeda associate and a hapless tourist. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged US citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

The Awlaki family members, who had declined to discuss the killing of Anwar, believed that they needed to speak out publicly about the killing of Abdulrahman. “
We watched with surprise and condemnation
how several prominent American newspapers and news channels twist the truth, calling Abdulrahman an Al Qaeda operative and falsely and misleadingly stating his age as 21 years old,” read a statement from the family. “Abdulrahman Anwar Awlaki was born on August 26, 1995 in Denver Colorado. He was an American citizen raised in the U.S. until 2002 when his father was forced to leave the U.S. and go back to Yemen.” They invited people to look up Abdulrahman's Facebook page—which revealed a teenager interested in music, video games and his friends—“to see the ‘lethal terrorist', ‘the 21 year old Qaeda operative' the U.S. government is claiming they killed. Look at his pictures, his friends and his hobbies. His Facebook page shows a typical kid, a teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”

For the Awlaki family, their private pain was overwhelming. After Anwar was killed, “
People flocked to our house
to pay condolences and show sympathy and I was in state of complete disbelief and denial,” recalled Anwar's sister, Abir. “They kept on coming for the next two weeks, when we were yet struck again by the murder of Anwar's oldest son, Abdulrahman. The skinny, smiling, curly-haired boy was murdered; and for what? What was he found guilty of?” she asked. “The shock of losing Abdulrahman only fourteen days after his father was unbearable. I can't wipe the picture of my father's reaction upon receiving the news. It is hard—hard for a father to lose his oldest son and then his first and favorite grandchild. The entire house was traumatized and hurt by every sense of the word.”

Abdulrahman's grandmother, Saleha, went into a severe depression after her son and grandson were killed. She had been extremely close to Abdulrahman. After he died, when guests would come to the house to pay respects, she would serve them tea or sweets. She later told me from her home in Sana'a, “
I look around the house
and see if anybody will take the dishes and take them and bring them back to the kitchen.” She would look for her grandson, remembering how he used to help her clean up, but he wasn't there. “I miss him a lot,” Saleha said, beginning to cry. “Abdulrahman was a different boy. I have never known anybody like Abdulrahman. He was a very, very gentle boy.” I asked her what her message would be to people in the United States. “Abdulrahman was not the only one killed that day. There were other children whose parents loved them very much. Just like the American people love their children,” she said. “I wonder if Obama lost one of his daughters, or Mrs. Clinton, would they be happy? Are they going to be happy if they lost one of their children like that? I was wondering if this will make the American people happier?”

While they opposed Anwar's killing and believed that the United States had exaggerated its claims about his involvement with al Qaeda, Nasser told me that his family understood why he was killed. “My son believed in what he did,” Nasser said, “but I am really distressed and disappointed by the killing, the brutal killing, of his son. He did nothing against the US. He was an American citizen. Maybe one day he would have gone to America to study and live there, and they killed him in cold blood.”