Abdulrahman al Awlaki crossed the front yard past potted plants and a carnival ride graveyard — Dumbo, Donald Duck, an arched seal balancing a beach ball — debris from his uncle Omar’s failed business venture to install rides in local shopping malls.
The family’s guard saw the grade nine student with a mop of curly hair leave the front gate at about 6:30 a.m. that morning on Sept. 4. Abdulrahman then made his way to the gates of Bab al-Yemen to catch a bus to a cousin’s house in Shabwa province in the south.
As he crossed the desert on his six-hour journey, his family awoke to news of his disappearance.
“He wrote to his mother, ‘I am sorry for leaving in this kind of way. Forgive me. I miss my father and want to see if I can go and talk to him,’ ” said the boy’s grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, as he sipped tea in his lavish home. “ ‘I will be coming back in a few days.’ ”
“He was very obedient to everybody in the house,” said Awlaki, “and that’s why it was a surprise that he would make that kind of decision.”
Nine days later, Abdulrahman turned 16.
He never found his father, the radical online preacher Anwar al Awlaki, who a U.S. congresswoman had called “Terrorist Number One.”
The teen wasn’t even in the right part of the country.
On Sept. 30, CIA-directed hellfire missiles blasted a target in northern Yemen, killing his father and ending the two-year manhunt for the cleric whose preaching encouraged plots in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.
Anwar al Awlaki was born in the United States, having grown up in the West after his father, Nasser, moved his family there to study.
Few mourned Awlaki’s death, but there was concern about the precedent. How could U.S. President Barack Obama order an American killed without any review?
There has been considerably less talk about what happened two weeks later.
On Oct. 14, U.S. drones pounded targets again, this time hundreds of kilometres away in the southeastern region of Azzan.
Abdulrahman, also born in the U.S., and his 17-year-old cousin were among the seven killed. They were apparently having a barbecue.
At first, media outlets reported that Abdulrahman was five years older than his actual age, had been militant like his father and, that a high-value Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) target was also among the dead.
But his grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, a Fulbright scholar, former agricultural minister and prominent figure in Yemen, said Abdulrahman had nothing to do with his father since he had gone into hiding in 2009.
Nasser al Awlaki has never apologized for his son’s radical views, but said he had also worked hard to insulate his grandchildren from the controversy. He attempted, he said, to give them a “normal life.”
Furious at the inaccurate reporting, he released his grandson’s birth certificate. It reads: “Abdulrahman Anwar al-Aulaqi (another English spelling of the last name). Born: Denver, Colorado. Sept. 13, 1995.”
It later emerged, but was not widely reported, that the strike did not kill its purported target, AQAP’s media chief, Egyptian Ibrahim al Bana.
The U.S. administration has refused comment.
It is unclear whether Abdulrahman was the target or if the U.S. had bad information and was going after Bana, or someone else. Either way, Awlaki said he wants answers.
So do the student demonstrators who forced former president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, many of whom knew Abdulrahman. They carried posters in Change Square with his picture last year and the words: “The Assassination of Childhood.”
“We just don’t know why they did that,” Awlaki said of the U.S. strike. “Is it because Abdulrahman was there? It’s very possible, but I cannot claim with certainty what happened. Is it a blunder on their side?
“They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.”
DRONES and U.S. directed missions have killed hundreds in Yemen in the past four years, some hitting AQAP targets, many more striking civilians.
Aside from the moral and legal implications, analysts in Yemen and the U.S. question their effectiveness against terrorism.
Take, for instance, a strike in Abyan province in December 2009 that killed 55. Among the dead were 14 women and 21 children.
The U.S. refused to acknowledge the botched mission. Compare this to the reaction last month when 17 Afghan citizens were slaughtered, allegedly by U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Obama released a statement promising to “establish the facts as quickly as possible and to hold fully accountable anyone responsible.” The families of the dead were reportedly offered $50,000 each in “condolence payments.”
These are not perfect comparisons. But, whether by gun or missile, to the grieving families the United States murdered their children.
Yemeni analyst Abdul Ghani al-Iryani traces the emergence of a group aligned to AQAP, called Ansar al Sharia, to that 2009 attack.
“Of the thousands of Ansar al Sharia now fighting in Abyan, the majority were not Al Qaeda; they were angered by what they saw as American aggression,” Iryani said. “One event that radicalized an entire (province).”
Princeton scholar Gregory Johnsen, who has lived in Yemen and extensively studied the rise of AQAP, also challenges the effectiveness of drones, arguing that “body bags are not a good barometer of success.”
“The biggest problem is that the idea of decapitation strikes is based on two very shaky assumptions. The first assumption is that the U.S. actually knows all the key players within AQAP. The second assumption is that the terrorists who are killed can’t be replaced.”
The killing of Abdulrahman, his father and American citizen Samir Khan, the editor of AQAP’s English-language online magazine who was also killed in the September strike, offers an opportunity to challenge the drone program in American courts. The American Civil Liberties Union has led this fight for information, but has had little success.
“When we file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the CIA’s response is that the drone program is a state secret, that confirming its existence would jeopardize national security,” said ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer.
“And yet,” noted Jaffer, “The CIA, or administration more generally, routinely discloses information to the public, to the press, that is meant to make people feel comfortable, that the program is closely supervised, effective, necessary.”
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta responded to questions about drone use during a 2009 public appearance when he was the head of the CIA.
“I think it does suffice to say that these operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage,” he said.
Adding, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership.”
Last month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech at Northwestern University’s law school that did not mention Awlaki in particular, but was clearly intended to justify the targeted killing.
“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.”
Jaffer said he found these comments not only “indefensible but dangerous.”
“If there is one context in which judicial process is not just appropriate but necessary, it’s surely the situation in which a life is in stake,” he said.
“It has led to a situation where executive officials are entirely unaccountable for their use of lethal force even when lethal force is directed at 16-year-old Americans that nobody contends ever engaged in terrorism . . . surely there is a role for the courts to play at least after the fact.”
That may happen. New York Justice Colleen McMahon is presiding over a joint ACLU and New York Times FOIA case seeking the release of the government’s legal analysis for use of lethal force against U.S. citizens. On Monday, she granted a 10-day extension after government lawyers argued the “highly classified” nature of their response involves many agencies and has slowed the process.
“Okay, but don’t ask for any more time,” McMahon wrote on the request. “If government officials can give speeches about this matter without creating security problems, any involved agencies can.”
IT IS EASIER forNasser al Awlaki to talk about his grandson than his son, Anwar.
“(Anwar) made his own decision and he knew what he was doing and knew he was in danger. I tried my best to do whatever I could through legal means,” he said of the challenge he launched in District of Columbia courts before Anwar’s death, arguing it was illegal to include an American citizen on the CIA’s kill list.
“(Deposed Yemeni president) Saleh sent me a message through the former prime minister that said, ‘Tell Dr. Nasser I swear to God that I have nothing to do with the killing of his son,’ ” Nasser said.
“Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but I am sure some part of Yemen’s government, especially the national security organization that is headed by his nephew, had something to do (with the strike).”
“But with the boy,” he says. “It came out of nowhere.”
“It was really, really devastating for all of us.”
He described Abdulrahman, the eldest of Anwar’s five children, as an avid sports fan who had lived his early life in the U.S., moving back to Yemen when he seven. His grandfather said they had tried to encourage him to toughen up a bit, worried he was too shy and soft.
“We never thought he was the type of guy to do that because he always asked permission from his mother or me. You see, I used to talk to him: ‘I’d send you to America to study.’ Before his father was killed, I used to tell him: ‘I want you to go back to America when you’re 19 and study and all that.’ ”
He said Abdulrahman wanted that, too.
“I still have some faith in America,” he said. “I am only a university professor and I’m not the kind of guy who would enlist tribal people. My only chance now is to go to court and I hope as far as Abdulrahman at least, they will be fair to us. They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Michelle Shephard
No comments:
Post a Comment