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The Anwar al-Awlaki tale

On Thursday Brookings hosted a conversation with the national security reporter for the New York Times, Scott Shane on “Anwar al-Awlaki, Yemen, and American counterterrorism policy.” Shane discussed his new book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone, with Bruce Riedel, the director of the Intelligence Project at Brookings. An investigation of al-Awlaki’s path to becoming a charismatic English-language recruiter for al-Qaeda, the book deals with the important question of whether an executive authority should have the power to order the extrajudicial killing of its own citizens. The question of drones is especially relevant today, as Britain has also recently killed two of its citizens who were Islamic State combatants in Syria with a drone.

Riedel began by asking Shane why he became interested in al-Awlaki’s story. Shane highlighted how unexpected it seemed for al-Awlaki to become a conservative Salafi preacher and an ally of al-Qaeda, given his early background. The American-born son of a Yemeni minister who admired America, al-Awlaki studied engineering at Colorado State University. There he became attracted to Salafism, a puritanical, conservative form of Islam. He began preaching his new faith, surprising his roommates. He went on to become the most influential English-language recruiter for al-Qaeda, as well as an operational planner in Yemen. Even after he accepted Salafism, however, this role was not in any sense inevitable.

Shane became intrigued about this trajectory – what changed? He hoped he might shed light on the larger phenomenon of radicalization by investigating al-Awlaki’s story. Al-Awlaki attracted the FBI’s attention at various points, for suspicions of connections to known terrorists and, after 9/11, the hijackers involved in that attack. Shane determined in his research that at that point in his life, there was no real connection. Two of the 9/11 hijackers had attended the San Diego mosque at which he was imam, but al-Awlaki never had knowledge of the plot and soon after condemned the attacks to his younger brother.

What the FBI found, through following his movements on a daily basis, was that al-Awlaki habitually visited prostitutes. In Shane’s opinion, this is a fascinating part of his story that has not been highlighted enough. A well-regarded and even famous preacher on moral aspects of life, al-Awlaki appears a hypocrite when this aspect of his life is known. Though it is a small part of the larger story, it is information that the FBI and the administration could have used to discredit al-Awlaki publicly, reducing his effectiveness as a recruiter, Shane pointed out.

Riedel asked about al-Awlaki’s transition to Yemen, and how he began Inspire, which was a propaganda magazine for al-Qaeda, or as Riedel noted, from another perspective, public diplomacy. Once al-Awlaki was informed about the FBI’s file on him, and in the context of heightened tension about the treatment of Muslims in the US, he moved to the UK, with increasingly frequent trips to Yemen, where he eventually ended up. Al-Awlaki had always been a prolific preacher who was adept at using new media to disseminate his sermons – cassette tapes in the 90s, then box-sets of CDs, and finally Youtube, where there remain some 40,000 of his videos. Much of the content nevertheless concerned the banalities of everyday devout Muslim life, rather than incendiary calls for jihad or war with America. Shane said that for a few years al-Awlaki wavered about re-starting his life in the US. But after he was imprisoned in Sana’a and the US declined to intervene on his behalf, he began to get involved with al-Qaeda. Even while he was in Yemen, al-Awlaki’s path was not definite; he tried many different ventures, but he wanted to make his mark, according to Shane. Public diplomacy was something he excelled at.

It is from this point, as early as 2006 but certainly by 2008, that the US began noticing al-Awlaki’s presence in terrorism cases, in the searches suspects were making on line and the videos they were watching. After the case of the 2009 ‘Underwear Bomber’, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had gone to Yemen to find al-Awlaki and was guided by him in his attempt, Obama asked his lawyers to explore the legality of adding him to his ‘kill list’ with the objective of eliminating him with a drone strike. While propaganda alone wasn’t enough to take this step, in Abdulmutallab’s case, al-Awlaki had taken the role of an ‘operational’ terrorist, in connecting the bomber to the bomb-maker.

Al-Awlaki had become prominent and convincing for American Muslims. Shane argues he was effective in this role because of his duality: equally fluent in English and Arabic, equally at home in Yemen and the US. Having lived in the US as a Muslim, he understood the tensions that brought about and knew how to activate young American Muslims’ grievances. Like other transnational Islamists, al-Awlaki stressed the umma, the global community of believers, allegiance to which overrides allegiance to any country.

Riedel observed that al-Awlaki’s influence seems only to have grown since his death. In light of that, were there alternatives that could have been taken to deal with him as a threat? Shane thought so. He believes that Obama and his administration did not take the role of the internet into consideration, nor how death by drone would effectively turn al-Awlaki into a martyr, whose legacy would then become valued. There were other options – the FBI, in 2003, could have used its information on his sexual habits to get him to cooperate with them, or the US could have attempted a deal with al-Awlaki’s tribe to hand him over. The legal justification for using a drone centered on the claim that it would have been too dangerous, and near impossible, to enter Yemeni tribal lands to capture or kill him. Shane also pointed out that it was a political decision on Obama’s part, in order to represent himself as a decisive commander in chief who could protect Americans from external threats.

Al-Awlaki’s story highlights questions about US counterterrorism strategy and the projection of American power abroad. Questions from the audience focused on why the administration was reluctant to use information about al-Awlaki’s sexual habits to discredit him, as well as to provide information from several closed cases that Shane researched while writing this book. In Shane’s view, there is an option for the administration to amplify its soft power and create a counter-narrative to religious extremism through highlighting al-Awlaki’s moral hypocrisy. Though al-Awlaki’s videos remain in the public domain on the internet, the response shouldn’t necessarily be censorship, or removing the videos, but rather to counter bad speech with more speech.