Assassinations and the destruction of history
By Derek Henry Flood
Executive Order 11905: No employee of the United States Government shall engage
in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination
- President Gerald R Ford, February 18, 1976.
On the morning of September 30, 2011, the United States assassinated not one
but two of its own citizens without due process of law or any other pretense
outlined in the country's core values and legal codes.
The dead men were hyphenated Americans to be sure. A Yemeni-American from Las
Cruces, New Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki, and a
Pakistani-American from Queens, New York, Samir Khan. Their hyphenated
identities made it easier to mark them as traitors to the United States beyond
a shadow of a doubt.
The fact that these men were not "American"-Americans very likely made it
easier for the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to stalk
and kill them in northern Yemen's al-Jawf governorate, as far removed as one
could be from an American court of law.
Outrage over the incident will likely be relegated to the liberal "fringe" in
the American polity, while many have cheered the demise of these nefarious men
although assuredly unable to articulate precisely why they should have met
their deaths by hellfire missile rather than the legal system.
Anwar al-Awlaki was an imam turned radical Anglophone Salafi-jihadi
orator who had agglomerated himself onto what would become al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) after leaving the United States for good post-9/11.
Samir Khan volunteered his services to AQAP's Inspire magazine, giving the
publication a slick, sometimes flippant edge by a native English-speaker.
Neither al-Awlaki nor Khan was an AQAP "leader", even if they have been
reported to be. Their deaths, while blows to the organization, will not curtail
it in the end, particularly as neither was a founding member.
The above cited Executive Order, later updated by president Jimmy Carter with
Executive Order 12036 in 1978 and then overhauled when president Ronald Reagan
signed Executive Order 12333 in 1981, is ambiguous enough to have been worked
around by the limber legal teams of president Bill Clinton following the East
African Embassy bombings in 1998 and George W Bush after the 9/11 attacks in
2001.
The battle, in the view of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be
taken to the terrorists. A court of law had become irrelevant. It seemed only
the suppositions of intelligence analysts and their overseers mattered now. The
Church Committee that convened in the mid-1970s sought to turn back the dirty
Cold War practice of targeting undesirable post-colonial foreign leaders such
as the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.
These assassination policies were justified by an intense anti-communist fervor
permeating the American intelligence community that sought to eradicate, when
feasible, political actors abroad who were either tilting toward Moscow or
unabashedly pro-Soviet in their rhetoric.
In today's often convoluted intelligence environment, where the line between
policy aims and impersonal analyses can become blurred, terrorist leaders may
not be targets of "assassination plots" per se but can be killed in a much
broader yet ill-defined ever-ongoing war against [Islamic] terrorism.
Underneath the cameras of the Predator and the Reaper drones, and in front of
the night vision goggles and sniper scopes of the American military's special
operations troops, are men who could either be treasure troves of knowledge
about 9/11, like Osama bin Laden, or lynchpins in specific events that cry out
for clarification like al-Awlaki.
The entrance to masjid (mosque) ar-Ribat al-Islami at 7173 Saranac Street on
the border of the cities of San Diego and La Mesa California where radical
Yemeni-American al-Qaeda imam Anwar al-Awlaki once preached shortly before
9/11. Awlaki reportedly met with then future 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and
Khalid al-Mihdar, who crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Picture by Derek Henry Flood.
Rather than being captured alive, interrogated and tried, thereby possibly
setting at least some of the record straight in regard to 9/11, these men and
everything contained in their memories are simply being obliterated, often far
from any declared battlefield.
Washington, even under a supposed Democratic transformation with the ushering
in of the administration of President Barack Obama, has not lifted a finger to
shed new light on many of the still murky circumstances behind 9/11. The Obama
administration certainly has the power to do so; it simply chooses not to for
reasons that remain unclear to the public.
Remaining members of the al-Qaeda 1.0 plots still at large will very likely
face trial by drone rather than in the Southern District of New York.
Said Bahaji, a member of Mohammed Atta's Hamburg cell who co-signed the lease
on the Marienstrasse flat with Atta and is believed to be on the run in
Pakistan over a decade after 9/11, will be liquidated by the CIA rather than
handcuffed in the North Waziristan tribal area and extradited to the United
States.
Fahd al-Quso, a member of the plot on the USS Cole in Yemen and current
AQAP figure, will likely be preyed upon by a Predator in a remote region of
Yemen rather than be properly "brought to justice" as George W Bush was so fond
of repeating. These men, however loathsome, possess unique knowledge essential
to the historical record for those documenting the evolution of al-Qaeda's
early period.
The silencing of the enemies of the United States by remote-controlled assault
only continues to feed the nagging conspiracy theories and the conspiracy
theorists who propagate them.
Now over a decade after 9/11, a complex web of incommunicado makes captives
like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh wholly inaccessible to
journalists or historians, assassinated al-Qaeda leaders and ideologues like
Bin Laden and al-Awlaki whose memories have been physically eviscerated outside
of any justice system, and documents still heavily redacted coupled with a
Saudi Arabian regime beyond scrutiny will mean that the "unknown knowns"
surrounding the terrorist attacks on the US can never be satisfactorily
answered.
The expansion of executive power under the Obama administration has not only
not shrunk from its ballooning under his predecessor, but specifically in terms
of the clandestine drone strikes carried out in America's name has been greatly
emboldened. Anwar al-Awlaki was a fairly unimportant figure in and of himself.
This borderless conflict is less about specific individuals than the
self-replicating memes they evangelize. There was nothing so particular to
al-Awlaki or Khan that their presence in the realm of Salafi-jihadi ideology
cannot be duplicated.
The blogosphere and Twitterverse may artificially deem these two "un-American",
"not 'real' Americans", and makes jokes that Inspire should be changed to
Expire. These crudely expressed sentiments are, however, of no legal substance
and only obfuscate the very difficult questions the assassination of an
American citizen ordered by an American president pose.
Aside from all the ethical and legal questions al-Awlaki's assassination
brings, we can now never conclusively know the answers to some of the most
perplexing pre-9/11 enigmas that will now be impossible to debunk, chiefly what
was al-Awlaki's real relationship to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf
al-Hazmi? Both are believed to have visited the mosque on their arrival in San
Diego while al-Awlaki served as imam there.
In June 2010, Asia Times Online briefly visited al-Awlaki's mosque, called
ar-Ribat al-Islami, located on a quiet side street a short distance from San
Diego State University, while working on a forthcoming book on the 9/11 decade.
An unassuming creme-colored stucco building with a synthesis of cheap southern
California-style construction and Islamic motifs was the setting for the two
Saudi future hijackers' first encounter with al-Awlaki. The precise degree to
which al-Awlaki had contact with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and more importantly,
just what that contact consisted of, can now - with al-Awlaki dead -
definitively never be known.
Several other Saudis involved in the al-Awlaki, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar milieu at
the time have been back in the kingdom for many years now, out of reach of
journalists and investigators, including most notably Omar al-Bayoumi, a man
connected to both al-Awlaki and the hijackers who may have been an agent of the
Saudi regime, according to source material from that period.
As Asia Times Online reported in September 2010, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had
been tracked by the CIA via its local intelligence proxy, Malaysia's Special
Branch, during a summit in early January 2000 in a suburb south of Kuala Lumpur
before they left for Bangkok en route to Los Angeles and San Diego, where the
official narrative portrays the trail as having mysteriously gone cold.
The two young Saudis were reportedly warmly greeted by al-Awlaki at the Spartan
mosque where he presided before he migrated to a much more prominent pulpit at
a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, outside of Washington DC. Al-Hazmi and
another key hijacker, Hani Hanjoor, soon followed al-Awlaki to Falls Church.
A key part of al-Awlaki's importance was his ease with both American English
and Arabic, both Modern Standard and Koranic. Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the
first operatives to arrive in the United States for the "planes operation",
spoke little to no English. This language deficiency which would have required
an in-place support network to help them get situated on arrival may indicate
al-Awlaki's real place as a relatively minor yet key figure in the larger 9/11
plot.
As more and more of the older al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda affiliated figures are
simply killed off, it may in turn become more difficult to understand the
group's origins. With existing gaps in understanding, some seemingly small yet
important details on the linkages within al-Qaeda's first wave it may thereby
make it more difficult to undermine in the long term.
Al-Awlaki's precise role in AQAP and al-Qaeda generally will be hotly debated
in the near term. The Obama administration elevated him from a dangerous orator
ranting on Youtube to an "operational" leader in its assessment of him, an
assessment that was essentially an extrajudicial death sentence.
The problem with this elevation of his role is that no evidence to make the
administration's case was publicly presented. Nor was he ever alleged to have
personally committed an act of physical violence, something that generally
precedes those sentenced to death in an American courtroom.
His speech, however troublesome with its attribution to the cases of Nidal
Malik Hasan, Umarfarouk Abdelmutallab and Faisal Shahzad, apparently was
somehow arbitrarily deemed not protected by the First Amendment of the United
States constitution; al-Awlaki and Khan were killed irrespective of their US
nationality.
Many fear the US has crossed the Rubicon in assassinating its own citizenry
without adequate legal justification. The Bush administration killed a
Yemeni-American called Kamal Derwish from upstate New York in its first known
drone attack in Yemen in 2002.
But since Derwish was not the specific target of the strike, so we are told,
his death was downgraded to "collateral damage". This deadly "damage" somehow
vaguely justified the facts on the ground for Justice Department officials at
the time, and Derwish was retroactively labeled a legitimate target in the
proto drone wars of the era immediately after 9/11.
In that traumatic time, the constitutionality of many practices in the rapid
escalation of counter-terrorism were subsumed with notions of national shock in
the American psyche meshed with tailored neo-conservative jingoism designed to
maximize the crisis for political and ideological gain. The neo-conservatives
may be largely out of power, but their very questionable legal legacy lives on
in an Obama administration whose central figure ran on a platform of "hope" and
restoring America's international moral legitimacy.
The dumping of Bin Laden's corpse in the Arabian Sea and the elimination of
al-Awlaki in the vast expanses of northern Yemen will ultimately lead to more
questions than answers. The extrajudicial killings of these men greatly lessen
the possibility of factual closure on 9/11.
The two assassinations differed greatly but concluded similarly. Bin Laden had
been indicted in the American criminal justice system and was not an American
citizen. Al-Awlaki was never charged with any criminal offense and was an
American citizen - even in death.
Bin Laden had met most if not all of the hijackers. Al-Awlaki had met only
three of them. Bin Laden was shot at fairly close range and likely saw his
killers. Al-Awlaki was in a vehicle that was obliterated from the sky above
with no prior warning other than perhaps the high-pitched whistle of the
incoming ordinance.
What the two had in common was that they were both proselytizers of
Salafi-jihad. Both men were in intimate contact with multiple 9/11 hijackers
albeit obviously with widely varying degrees of involvement. And now, having
both been eliminated in the span of several months, they can never face their
accusers. In this context, 9/11 will remain an open wound for eternity.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle
East and South and Central Asia and is the editor of the Jamestown Foundation's
Militant Leadership Monitor. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on
Twiiter @DerekHenryFlood
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