Deep Politics Forum

The Murder Of Anwar Al-Awlaki
Mowing the Grass' in Yemen


By Eric Walberg

October 05, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, the victim of assassination by US forces 30 September, was born in New Mexico in 1971, educated at Colorado State University in engineering, and radicalised while preaching in US mosques and visiting Afghanistan in the 1990s. His sermons attracted a large following, first in Denver and then San Diego, where he completed a Masters in education.

Though in the FBI's sites from 1999, he became a media star after 9/11, interviewed by National Geographic and the New York Times as a moderate, articulate American Muslim. He condemned the attacks, stating "There is no way that the people who did this could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted their religion." On IslamOnline.netsix days after the 9/11 attacks, he suggested that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".

The US Secretary of the Army was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim as part of an outreach effort, and a Pentagon employee invited Al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. He became the first imam to conduct a prayer service at the US Capitol in 2002 for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association and officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

However, harassment by the FBI drove him to go to England in 2002, where he continued his preaching. He moved to Yemen in 2004, was arrested in 2006 on kidnapping and terrorism charges, imprisoned (and no doubt tortured), but released in December 2007. His sermons about Islamic ethics and the lives of the prophets became best-selling CDs and there were 1,910 Youtube videos of his lectures, though they have all been removed and his CDs are no longer for sale. It was only after his prison experience that he openly advocated jihad against the US.

The hardest evidence against him seems to be that Nidal Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, was in touch with him, and Faisal Shahzad, who was behind the New York Times Square car bomb attempt in May 2010, cited him as an inspiration. Obama, in a replay of his May announcement of the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, boasted that Al-Awlaki was killed in a drone attack in the northern Yemeni province of Mareb, home of Al-Awlaki clan, along with his protege, 25-year-old Pakistani-American Samir Khan.

Al-Awlaki tribal leaders insist the body was not Anwar's and demanded DNA analysis. However, assuming that he and Khan indeed died, this is the first case of the US government deliberately killing two American citizens. And their only proven crime was their eloquent Internet appeals to fight the US empire.

This new policy has shocked even mainstream politicians, such as Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and gives Al-Awlaki's "dangerous message a life and power of its own", according to US imam Yasir Qadhi, writing in the NTY. Claims that he was an Al-Qaeda leader or that he was directly involved in any terrorist action have never been substantiated. His murder was clearly just another feather in Obama's warrior headdress as he launches his re-election campaign this autumn.

Mainstream critics call the assassination "an act of futility" insisting he was not even part of Al-Qaeda. Virtually unknown in Yemen, Al-Awlaki will merely become another martyr in Yemen's ongoing struggle to free itself from American hegemony. Others left behind are far more skilled than Al-Awlaki, according to the US Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Centre.

The real reason he and Khan were targetted was because they were charismatic communicators of Islam to Western dissidents. As desperate American and European youth become radicalised by the conflicts of the post-2001 period and the endless economic crisis, they will increasingly look to the likes of Al-Awlaki who provide a simple, if deadly, solution for young people with nothing to lose.

Just as new recruits to the Taliban spring up daily, as the US kills Afghan resistance fighters in droves, so the US will have to kill more and more people in Yemen and who-knows-where in a never-ending campaign, what US troops in Afghanistan call "mowing the grass". And its victims will increasingly be Americans, disgusted with their own government and recognising it as the main cause of the world's troubles today.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly [URL="https://webmail.west.cox.net/do/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweekly.ahram.org.eg%2F"]http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
[/URL]You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/
HisPostmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html

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White House death panel, fully operational: Secret panel can put Americans on 'kill list'05 Oct 2011 American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged 'al Qaeda' connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

[size=12]http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news[/SIZE]

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CIA "Kill List" Panel Wears a Cloak of Invisibility

Read more: http://technorati.com/politics/article/c...z1a9ITVydb

Obama's Very Real Death Panel: The CIA's Assassination Program

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=26984

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[TD="colspan: 2, align: left"]It's official. The American dystopia is here. Obama administration officials admit that the CIA assassination program that snuffed out Anwar al-Awlaki last Friday is guided by a secret panel that decides who lives and dies. According to Reuters:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Let that sink in. The U.S. presidency, supposed leader of the free world, has a clandestine committee that chooses American citizens to assassinate. This from the administration that promised unprecedented transparency and a ratcheting back of Bush-era civil liberties abuses. This from the president who vowed to restore habeas corpus and subject executive war powers to judicial scrutiny. This from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
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What's more striking, however, is the deafening silence. Sure, the ACLU opposes all this, as do a smattering of public voices. Yet it seems for everyone expressing proportional concern about this, there are a thousand leftist protesters whining about the top one percent, and a thousand conservatives whining about the leftist protesters.
How fitting that the presidency that Tea Partiers accused of planning to convene death panels to handle health care rationing has openly admitted to having created such a panel whose declared purpose is not simply to withhold socialized medical resources, but to direct the cold-blooded murder of citizens who are sufficiently bothersome enemies of the regime. Yet in a majestic irony, many of the conservatives who feared Obama's life-and-death bureaucracies are cheering on his most explicit and frightening seizure of dictatorial power in all his presidency, and perhaps one of the greatest of all presidential power grabs in the sweep of U.S. history.
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Meanwhile, Obama's millions of supporters still think the idea that this man is a fascist, a tyrant, a threat to liberty, is hysterical hate speech and itself a danger to American democracy. Yet Barack Obama appears dedicated to out-Bushing Bush when it comes to shredding the Bill of Rights and sticking his middle finger at the very idea that he ought to be accountable to anything but his own power.
Make no mistake. We are witnessing a defining moment in America's transformation into a totalitarian nation. Not because the murder of al-Alwaki, or even the death panel that sealed his fate, is some sort of anomaly in terms of morality or even presidential power. The U.S. presidency has already sentenced millions to death with its wars, its sanctions, its bombings, its terrorism, its covert ops, its torture chambers. The nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to take a couple of famous examples, long ago revealed the awesome and murderous power of the Oval Office, whether or not these bombings were as "illegal" as the offing of al-Alwaki. And the families of thousands of innocent Afghans and Pakistanis killed in drone strikes had no doubts about Obama's imperial touch, even before this latest atrocity.
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But the circumstances surrounding this particular hit job, and the death panel behind it, deserve more than a footnote. There is the brazenness of it all the audacity, as a younger Obama might say of the administration just coming clean about its mysterious council that serves as judge and jury behind closed doors. There is the frank admission of its existence with all else being kept secret. There is also the precision the fact that this program is one focused on offing political enemies, rather than just bombing neighborhoods in an ad hoc attempt to weaken another government in a war. There is also the open-ended nature of this conflict, a war on terrorism that can last even longer than the clash with the USSR, a war whose immortality seems even more possible now that Barack the law professor is in charge, rather than George the rancher.
Taken together, this is just the kind of creepy atmosphere befitting of a total state, a Communist or fascist government or a nightmarish bureaucracy contrived in the mind of a Cold War-era novelist imagining what America would look like in the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century after taking one too many wrong turns. It is almost as if the administration is trying to preempt the conspiracy-minded by giving them something that would be unbelievable only fifteen years ago, but is today easily taken for granted because of course the president has a secret death panel that deliberates on the secret, unchecked executions of American citizens, to be conducted by robots flying in the sky.
Needless to say, anyone who defends this, especially if given the opportunity to think through the implications, is surely no friend of liberty, whether they be fair-weather "civil libertarian" liberals who would rather cheer for their president than wake up and smell the fascism, or conservatives who claim to distrust government except when it exercises the most lethal powers in the most lawless way imaginable. We must recognize that the movement for freedom and against true oppression is clearly no majority, regardless of what Tea Party Republicans and Wall Street occupiers might say.
There is a more fundamental lesson to be learned, however, and one to remember for the ages: This is the nature of the state. It is, by its institutional nature, always and everywhere seeking to expand power in any way it can. To claim and practice the power to kill on its own unreviewable prerogative is simply the fulfillment of its very design. At times of crisis, especially concerning national security, states almost always tend toward aggrandizement toward their realization as totalitarian entities.
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For all who find Obama's death panel frightening and all of us should let us remember that this is simply what governments do when they can get away with it. We are only now seeing the American state achieving its maturity. At the founding of the Federal Government, the Framers unleashed a monster that could never easily be restrained, even creating a presidency with all too much power over military affairs. Then came Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Obama, each one building on the horrible precedents of past American despots, each reaching further toward the ideal of a completely unencumbered presidential hand, one that could snap its fingers and order death to anyone anywhere on the globe.
There is a silver lining, however, albeit one circumscribing a large and dark cloud indeed. A government can develop and come of age, but it is a mortal institution. As it grows it puts strain on the public ideology it requires to live, wrecks the economy it feeds on, and alienates the allies that allow it to be a global empire. To be a total state is the dream of all regimes, but it is an unsustainable reality, and certainly so at the size the U.S. government has become. The more the U.S. presidency and American nation-state morph into an Orwellian version of themselves, the closer they will come to finally expose themselves as being no different from the tyrannies that have enslaved mankind for millennia. For generations much of the world has been under the spell of the lie of American democracy, the propaganda that the brutality of power politics can be tempered through elections and an eloquent piece of parchment. We can hope that the day this great lie is universally seen as a tragic joke, the true significance of Obama's CIA death panel will be remembered.















Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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I think they had something similar during the Spanish Inquisition and in the Third Reich - as well as almost any dictatorship. We've made Progress? America is not America anymore. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and the enemy is U.S."

I just read http://www.adl.org/main_Terrorism/anwar_al-awlaki.htm which is a "profile" of al-Awlaki by the ADL.
I love especially the following:

Quote:In one post on his blog, al-Awlaki further criticized Israel and the Jews, claiming that the Jews "have a hidden agenda" and have infiltrated every government in the world. He has also promoted the conspiracy theory that contends that Israelis were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

What?!?
Last time we read in "Inspire" that Ahmadinejad should stop questioning 9/11 and now we learn that al-Awlaki blames it on the Israelis? :banghead:

No wonder that he had to die, together with the creator of "Inspire".

hock:hock:hock:

What were those crazy right-wing Republicans saying about "death panels" again?


Oh, I would love to see a revolution and Nuremberg tribunal where those CIA cowards were brought to trial and punished (democratically).

It has to noted that as soon as we declared Israel's and the US's causes were one in the same that this kind of Mossad assassination paradigm was enacted.

From [URL="http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=352561"]http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=352561
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[size=12]Al-Qaida cleric Awlaki 'was a sex pervert'
[/SIZE]Book: Snuffed out terrorist busted for vice, loitering around schools
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Ugly article about al-Awlaki frequenting prostitutes and how

Quote:Traditional Islam forbids the intermingling of the sexes. That means no dancing, and no mixed swimming or other mixed sports activities. Women and men, moreover, are separated during mosque worship. Marriages are arranged, and there is no dating. And women are required to veil themselves.
Such sexual repression can lead to perversion especially among men, explains Marc Sageman, a leading forensic psychiatrist and terror expert.
"They cannot have sex. They cannot think about it. They cannot even look at a woman and well, (then) you're going to have aberrant behavior," said Sageman, author of "Leadership Jihad."
"And then they blame the West for that," he added, "because the West is who put the temptation there."

and

Quote:Awlaki privately counseled the 9/11 hijackers and later, the Fort Hood terrorist. Before carrying out their attacks, interestingly, they patronized topless bars.

So he counseled the 9/11 hijackers and later thought, the Israelis had something to do with it?
And of course, killing perverts is OK obviously, no constitutional protection needed...angryfire