Dirty Wars (54 page)

Despite some initial hesitation, it became clear that Obama wanted to expand and codify the Bush-era order. “The Obama administration took the 2004 order and went above and beyond,” he told me. “The world is the battlefield. We've returned to that,” he added. “We were moving away from it for a little bit, but Cambone's ‘preparing the battlefield' is still alive and well. It's embraced by this administration.”

Under the Bush administration, JSOC and its then-commander Stanley McChrystal were coordinating much of their activity with Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Under the Obama administration, JSOC's relationship became more formalized with the administration as a whole. As the former aide told me, “It used to be the strategy was to
insulate the president
. Now they directly interface with these people regularly.”

On October 4, 2009, a few days after the execute order was signed and a month after Brennan's meeting with Saleh, Admiral McRaven made a
discreet trip to Yemen
to meet with President Saleh. McRaven was dressed in his naval uniform with yellow stripes on the sleeves. Saleh, in a perfectly tailored suit, sat in a gold-colored armchair. Saleh's government said the two men discussed “cooperation” in “combating terrorism.” The US Embassy in Sana'a said it had discussed “
cooperation between the U.S. and Yemen
against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” adding, “These discussions support the U.S. government's ongoing efforts to assist Yemen in eliminating the threat al-Qaeda poses to its security and stability.” Well-informed Yemeni sources, however, said that McRaven pressed Saleh to let at least three of JSOC's drones operate regularly in Yemen and to allow “the
implementation of some special operations
similar to what is happening in Pakistan and Somalia.” Saleh granted the requests, following through on the pledge he had made to Brennan to obtain the US military aid he needed.

On October 9, President Obama met with his national security team to discuss their primary foreign policy question, Afghanistan. During the meeting, Brennan suggested that there was a greater threat posed by al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia than in Afghanistan. “
We're developing geostrategic principles
here,” Brennan said, “and we're not going to have the resources to do what we're doing in Afghanistan in Somalia and Yemen.”

THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN
, 2001–2009—In retrospect, the path to Yemen's becoming a major counterterrorism concern for the Obama administration in late 2009 seems remarkably clear. By November, Yemen was all over the news and seemingly connected to every new alleged terror plot against the United States—with Anwar Awlaki's tentacles touching every incident. But for many Americans, it seemed to pop out of nowhere.

The Yemen media frenzy kicked off on November 5, 2009, when the young US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan—who had written a series of e-mails to Awlaki—walked into the
Soldier Readiness Processing Center
in Fort Hood, Texas, shouted, “Allah u Akbar,” and opened fire on his fellow soldiers, killing thirteen people and wounding forty-three others before being shot and paralyzed. By most accounts, Hasan was motivated by a combination of factors centering on his work in treating soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had reportedly sought to have some of the patients he saw
prosecuted for war crimes
after they disclosed their actions on the battlefield to him, but those requests were rejected. Hasan had
complained to friends
and relatives that fellow soldiers had harassed him because of his religion. They said he tried to get out of the military as he struggled increasingly to reconcile his faith with his work for an armed force waging war in Muslim lands.

In a 2007 PowerPoint presentation Hasan gave before a gathering of army doctors, he stated: “
It's getting harder
and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.” Hasan advocated for conscientious objector status for Muslims to ward off what he termed could be “adverse events.” At the time of the shooting, Hasan was facing an
imminent deployment
to Afghanistan. Soon after the shooting, the media began reporting that he had been in contact with Awlaki, adding that Hasan had attended Awlaki's Virginia mosque in 2001, though the fact that Awlaki had only met him once was not reported. That the two men exchanged at least eighteen e-mails beginning in December 2008 became a major focus of attention and hype from journalists and politicians. But when US counterterror officials
reviewed the e-mails, they determined them to be innocuous. According to the
New York Times
, “a counterterrorism analyst who examined the messages shortly after they were sent decided that they were consistent with authorized research Major Hasan was conducting and
did not alert
his military superiors.” Awlaki later told a Yemeni journalist that Hasan had reached out to him and primarily asked him religious questions. Awlaki claimed he neither “
ordered nor pressured
” Hasan to carry out any attacks, a contention supported by the e-mails once they were made public. But Awlaki's reaction to the shooting made such details irrelevant in the eyes of the US public and government.

A few days after the Fort Hood shootings, Awlaki published a blog post with the not-so-subtle title: “Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing.” Hasan, Awlaki wrote, “
is a hero
. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist.” Hasan “opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” Awlaki called on other Muslims within the US Army to carry out similar operations. “Nidal Hassan was
not recruited by Al-Qaida
,” Awlaki later said. “Nidal Hassan was recruited by American crimes, and this is what America refuses to admit.” It was the last blog post Awlaki would publish.

The morning after the shooting, President Obama met with his top military and intelligence commanders “and ordered them to
undertake a full review
of the sequence of events that led up to the shootings.” In his weekly address following the shooting, Obama said, “We must compile every piece of information that was known about the gunman, and we must learn what was done with that information. Once we have those facts, we must act upon them.” He added: “Our government must be able to act swiftly and surely when it has threatening information. And our troops must have the security that they deserve.”

Although there was no actual evidence presented to tie Awlaki to the planning of the Fort Hood shootings and investigators determined Hasan was not part of a broader terrorist conspiracy, the alleged connection to Awlaki became a major part of the story and became fodder for those agitating for more aggressive action by the Obama administration in Yemen. On November 18, Senator Joseph Lieberman called the shooting the “
most destructive terrorist attack
on America since 9/11.” A month later Lieberman would
call for preemptive strikes
against Yemen.

Awlaki monitored the news from his hideout in Shabwah. He scoured news reports and his “Google Alerts” on his name started pinging every few minutes. He may have been famous before among English-speaking Muslims, but now his name was truly global. Whether Awlaki had played any role in Hasan's murderous rampage became irrelevant in the United States. The fact that he had openly and gleefully praised it became a media obsession. Awlaki was presented in the media as the “9/11 Imam,” with new stories coming out every day examining his life history. The prostitution arrests, his alleged contacts with the 9/11 hijackers, his past speeches on jihad and his blog all were woven together to make it seem as though Awlaki had been plotting acts of terror against the United States his whole life. Terror “experts” on television opined on his ability to recruit Western jihadists for al Qaeda's cause.

Not long after the Fort Hood shootings, Awlaki's days as a blogger came to an abrupt end. The United States took down his website, whose URL was registered through
Wild West Domains
, a company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. “
They shut down my website
following Nidal Hasan's operation,” Awlaki recalled. “Then I read in the
Washington Post
that they were monitoring my communications. So I was forced to stop these communications.” Awlaki saw the media attention being focused on him as an ominous sign: he had to change locations and erase any digital trail that could lead the Americans to him. He knew they wanted him arrested—but now he feared that Obama wanted him dead.

IN OCTOBER
2009, a young Pakistani American named Samir Khan
landed in Sana'a
. Like hundreds of other Muslims from across the globe who come to Yemen each year, Khan was there to study Islam and Arabic at the country's famous ancient universities. At least that was what he told his family and friends back home. In the decade leading up to his flight into Yemen, Khan had grown increasingly militant in his politics and his interpretation of Islam. Like Awlaki, the events of 9/11 and the crackdown on Muslims in the United States had a profound impact on him. Khan was born in 1985 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Pakistani parents, one of whom was a US citizen. “
He's a Christmas child
,” recalled his mother Sarah Khan, “born on Christmas day.” When Samir was seven, they immigrated to the United States and settled into
Samir's grandparents' house
in Queens, New York. His relatives were conservative Muslims, but they also considered themselves patriotic Americans. “We actually wanted to have a better future for the children,” Sarah told me. “We had great hopes for this country.” Khan's high school
classmates recall
ed a slightly awkward boy in baggy jeans, a
junior varsity football player despite his shyness, with an enthusiasm for hip-hop and the school newspaper. “He was always interested in sports,” Samir's mom recalled. “He would always tell me that he wants to be in the NFL.”

Samir's interests began to change in August 2001, when at age fifteen, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, sponsored by IONA (Islamic Organization of North America), a prominent conservative Islamist organization tied to the Pakistani Tanzeem-e-Islami organization. In an interview years later, Khan said the camp was a formative experience for him and that he returned to school that year knowing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim,
a practicing Muslim
.” He ditched the baggy pants and the rap music, making an exception only for the now disbanded hip-hop group called Soldiers of Allah. He became involved with the
Islamic Thinkers Society
, a Jackson Heights-based group that used nonviolent activism such as “street
dawahs
(invitations)” to call for an Islamic Caliphate. When 9/11 happened, Khan made no effort to hide his new attitudes toward religion and politics from his friends and family. He refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and got into debates with classmates over his contention that Americans had deserved the attack.

“Before 9/11, people still saw his change but didn't make much of it,” said one classmate. “But afterwards, more people decided to question his ideology and be, like, ‘Is he trying to be like them [the September 11 terrorists]?
Does he think like them
?'” Another classmate said Khan would sometimes be the target of ethnic slurs. In tenth grade, Khan was wearing a kufi hat to school every day.

Samir Khan's father noticed that his son had begun to frequent jihadist websites, and staged the
first of several interventions
. In his high school yearbook, Khan referred to himself as a “mujahid” and wrote that his future plans included going “overseas [to] study Islamic Law and other subjects that dealt with Islam.” He also included a word of advice: “
If you give Satan an inch
, he'll be a ruler.”

By 2003, the year Khan graduated from high school and the United States invaded Iraq, he had taken up a staunchly radical view on US foreign policy. The family relocated to North Carolina, where Khan's father, Zafar, took a job as an information technology executive. Samir enrolled in a
community college
and had a job on the side selling kitchen knives and other household items. He attended a mosque and would get into
debates with fellow attendees
about what he perceived as the spinelessness of religious leaders in the face of America's spreading wars.

He also began spending much of his time on the Internet, seeking out like-minded Muslims. He blogged and aggregated news of the jihad abroad,
often writing under the tag “Inshallahshaheed,” or “a martyr if God wills.” Khan operated multiple blogs out of his parents' house, several times
retiring blogs
and switching servers when his vitriolic content came under attack or was taken down by server administrators.

Khan eventually found a home at
Muslimpad
, run by Islamic Network (one time employer of Daniel Maldonado, who was convicted for traveling to ICU training camps in Somalia). One of his blogs, also called Inshallahshaheed, was started in 2005 and had become wildly popular by 2007, ranking among the
top 1 percent
of 100 million websites in the world by the traffic counter
Alexa.com
. His other blogs went by names such as Human Liberation-An Islamic Renaissance and Revival. On his blogs, Khan would extol the victories and virtues of al Qaeda central and its affiliated militants, but his writings also helped to popularize a broader ideological movement that included radical sheikhs and scholars many Americans would not have known about. A later blog featured in its “About” section a list of men he described as “
scholars of Islam
...who we take knowledge from,” and included Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Abu Layth Libi, and Anwar Awlaki.