Deep Politics Forum

Islamist cleric Anwar Awlaki 'killed in Yemen'

Awlaki is said to be on a US hit list

US-born radical Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a key al-Qaeda leader, has been killed in Yemen, the country's defence ministry said.

Unnamed US officials confirmed the reports, but have not provided details.

Awlaki, of Yemeni descent, has been on the run in Yemen since December 2007.

The US had named him a "specially designated global terrorist" for his alleged role in a number of attacks and US President Barack Obama is said to have personally ordered his killing.

The defence ministry statement said only that he died "along with some of his companions".

It gave no further details of his death.

But tribal sources told AFP news agency Awlaki was killed in an air strike in the eastern Marib province, said to be an al-Qaeda stronghold.

An unnamed US official told the Associated Press he was killed by US drone strike. However, the cleric's body was said to be in Yemeni hands

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera says the killing, if confirmed, is significant, because Awlaki is able to reach out to people susceptible to radicalisation through his use of the media.

The reported death comes amid concerns in Washington about the impact of Yemen's political crisis on its ability to go after al-Qaeda militants.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh is facing a widespread protest movement, along with an armed insurrection by renegade army units and tribal fighters.

Mr Saleh, who was injured three months ago when his residence was shelled, returned last week after treatment in Saudi Arabia.

He said in an interview published on Thursday that he will not stand down, as promised in a deal brokered by Gulf States, if his opponents are allowed to stand in elections to succeed him.
Targeted before

Awlaki is described by US officials as a key leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)

He has been implicated in the US army base killings in Fort Hood, Texas, the Christmas 2009 Detroit airline bomb attempt, and a failed bombing in New York's Times Square.

AQAP also claimed to have been behind a plot which sent two bombs in printer cartridges on US-bound cargo planes. They were intercepted in the UK and Dubai.

When he was imam of a San Diego mosque in the 1990s, his sermons were attended by two future 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

He also lived in the UK from 2002-04, where he spent several months giving lectures to Muslim youth.

In a video posted in November last year he called for the killing of Americans, saying they were from the "party of devils".

Weeks later, he survived an air strike in Shabwa province in which at least 30 militants were killed.

He has been reported dead in the past following US air strikes on southern Yemen in December 2009 and November 2010. He was the target of a US drone attack that killed two al Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen on 5 May.

The new OBL. I bet he will be resurrected for many outing yet to come. He could die many times over before they finally give him his traditional Muslim burial at sea.

Magda Hassan Wrote:The new OBL. I bet he will be resurrected for many outing yet to come. He could die many times over before they finally give him his traditional Muslim burial at sea.

The fact he is American is MOST significant, as Obama [not Bush] put him on a kill list, so it is not theoretical any more that an American citizen (born there...schooled there through university...not an immigrant[!], met with Obama and his staff after 911 in civil discussion) can be murdered without trial or due process....making all Americans as vulnerable as much outsiders as everyone else....it is very significant escalation. Now, they only have to do so and admit to it [they have done so and not admitted to it] on American soil...then there will be NO taboos left and anyone can be killed anytime without due process.....911 changed everything, or so they say and want us to swallow.....

JUAN GONZALEZ: Shortly before we went on the air this morning, senior U.S. administration officials confirm the killing of the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in northern Yemen. The United States says Awlaki is one of the most influential Al Qaeda operatives on its most wanted list. News of the death was first announced by Yemen's Defense Ministry in a text message sent to journalists the ministry wrote, "The terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed along with some of his companions," but did not provide further details. In a separate email statement, the Yemeni government reported Awlaki was targeted and killed about 90 miles east of the capital Sanaa. The statement said the attack was launched at 9:55 a.m. local time. Despite the Yemeni government's claims its forces successfully targeted Awlaki in a raid near the capital, sources on the ground say he was likely killed in a U.S. air-strike. Awlaki was previously targeted in U.S. bombing of Yemen earlier this year. Well, for more, we turn to Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for salon.com. He joins us via Democracy Now! video-stream from Brazil. He first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom it had ordered assassinated without any due process. One of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki, despite substantial doubt among the Yemen experts about whether he had an operational role in Al Qaeda Glenn Greenwald, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!

GLENN GREENWALD: Good to be here.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well Glenn, your reaction, first of all, to this news and what it means in terms of any new precedence now set by this administration in the targeting of U.S. citizens?

GLENN GREENWALD: Let's begin with the fact Anwar al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen. He was ordered assassinated by the President of the United States without presenting any evidence of any kind as to his guilt, without attempting to indict him in any way or comply with any of the requirements of the Constitution that say that you can't deprive someone of life without due process of law. The president ordered him killed wherever he was found, including far away from a battle field, no matter what it was he was doing at the time. And if you're somebody who believes that the president of the United States has the power to order your fellow citizens murdered, assassinated, killed without even a shred of due process, without having to have charged him with a crimes or indict him and prove in a court he's actually guilty, then you're really declaring yourself to be as pure of an authoritarian as it gets. Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversations without warrants. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process, and yet many Democrats and progressives, because it's President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it. To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the constitution and to tear it up into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, for those in the audience not familiar with him, give us the sketch of who Al-Awlaki is and what the alleged terrorist plots that he was involved with are.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, he, as I said, was born in the United States and went to college in the United States and, for a long time, was considered by the U.S. government and the media to be a moderate Muslim cleric. In fact the Pentagon invited him to a lunch in the wake of 9/11 in order to talk to him and other Muslim leaders about how to root out extremism in the Muslim community. The Washington Post had him host his own chat about the meaning of various Muslim holidays and the like. So, for a long time he was viewed as this, sort of, moderate figure. He became increasingly radicalized, like a lot of people have, over the last decade, as the United States has continued to slaughter Muslim men, women and children in multiple countries around the world, and he definitely became much more hostile in his sermons to the United States, and began arguing that it wasn't just the duty but the right of Muslims to not just be passive receivers of violence by the U.S., but also to begin to attack the United States back as a means of deterring further violence. And so, he definitely became a great concern to the U.S. because he was so effective in communicating these ideas in English to large parts of the English speaking Muslim world. And, of course, expressing those ideas that the United States is engaged in aggression against the Muslim world and that Muslims have the right or even the duty to fight back rather than getting passively slaughtered, whether you agree with those ideas are not, or think they're horrible ideas, they're obviously rights you have to express under the First Amendment of the Constitution. The government began claiming that it wasn't just his messages and his ideas that were bothering them and making them want to kill him, but the fact he started to have an operational role in various plots, such as the attempt by Abdulmutallab to detonate a bomb in a jet over Detroit over Christmas. They claim that he was involved in the attack by Nidal Hasan on the Fort Hood base that killed 14 American service members. The problem with that is that, there's been no evidence presented that he's actually been involved in any of those plots. He is not been indicted or charged. If he has been involved in those plots, then the solution is to charge him with those crimes, bring him before a court of justice, and prove his guilt; not simply to order him killed as though the President is judge, jury, and executioner.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, his father had attempted, or started a court proceeding to try to enjoin the Obama administration from carrying out any attack on his son. Could you talk about that and where that is?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure, well, Awlaki, himself, was incapable of suing to vindicate his rights because, had he popped his head up at any time, as we proved today, he would have been killed by the Unites States government, which sought on several occasions before today to kill him. So, his father brought suit on his behalf, represented by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, asking a court to enjoin the President from murdering his son without due process, and in response the Obama administration made numerous claims, mostly arguing courts have no right to interfere in the decisions the president makes about who is an enemy combatant using standard Bush-Cheney theories about how this is a military operation that the court shouldn't be involved in it. They argued that whom the president decides to assassinate is a state secret. And that courts have no business meddling in or judging or adjudicating the president's choices in that regard. A federal court, several months ago, accepted the argument that this was really a political and military number, and not a legal or constitutional or judicial question for courts to resolve. Although, the judge said there are very difficult questions raised because of what an extraordinary step this is for the president to order American citizens killed. He said it's really up to the Congress to stop it or for the president to make decisions on his own. That, I believe that is being appealed; the appeal is pending, but, obviously, it's now it is too late. There's no point in trying to obtain an injunction now that Awlaki has been killed by President Obama.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the Bizarre irony of the government in Yemen which is clearly illegitimate by any international standards, facing a huge popular rebellion among its own people, being involved, to some degree or other, with the United States in this killing?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, President Saleh, who, of course, has been slaughtering his own citizens by the dozens over the last several months, and is still, you know-has been a longtime ally of the United States. The State Department has issued some very meek statements, suggesting that there should be a democratic transition. But, we've continued to work with President Saleh, the U.S. government has, to try and kill those people that we want dead in Yemen, including Awlaki, and this is widely viewed as an attempt by President Saleh to, sort of, offer an olive branch to the United States; we will help to kill the American citizen within our borders whom you want dead in exchange for your continuing to support our regime. Of course, the United States has been trying to claim to the Arab world that it is on the right side of the Arab Spring, and yet just yesterday, of course, in Bahrain, numerous medical professionals, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, were imprisoned for the crime of treating protesters who were shot by government forces just two weeks after the U.S. government announced that it plans to ship to Bahrain huge amounts of new weapons. Here, our long time ally, President Saleh, is not only now slaughtering his own citizens, but helping the United States government murder its own. So, it's a pretty difficult sell to people in the Muslim world to claim that we're on the right side of the Arab Spring when we not only continue to embrace the people who kill their own citizens, but now kill our citizens as well.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to read to you a quote from the editor of The Yemeni Post, Hakim Al Masmari. He said, "The Yemeni government will face a lot of criticism, especially in the south, for allowing US drones to attack Yemeni civilians. But it will not be a blow to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from any perspective. We don't feel they will suffer, because Awlaki did not have any real role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right,well, one of the bizarre aspects of this is that media and government reports have tried to sell Awlaki is some kind of grand terrorist mastermind. There's even lots of articles you can find online and major publications describing him as the new Bin Laden. The United States government needs a terrorist mastermind to replace Bin Laden to justify this type of endless war that President Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is insisting on not just continuing, but escalating. And for a while, Awlaki was the person to going to serve that function. But, the problem is, if you the read experts in Yemen, like Gregory Johnson and others, they mock the idea Awlaki was some kind of a leader of Al Qaeda and even question whether he had any operational role at all in any of these plots. He was clearly a cleric who developed some audience and was popular, particularly among English-speaking Muslim youth because of his ability to communicate with them. But, the idea that he was some high up in Al Qaeda or this is a blow to the operational capability of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is absolutely ludicrous. And if you read Yemen experts, you'll see that that's true. The problem is that American political culture is such that evidence doesn't make a difference. Trials and due process are very pre-9/11. What we believe is that if the president stands up and says, someone is a terrorist, that's all we need to know; they are therefore there are guilty because the leader has accused him of being that, and as long as the Aides then go and leak to the media, which they have done, that he played a significant operational role and was a big Al Qaeda leader, we won't need to see evidence. We'll just stand up and blindly click our heels and accept it's true, and then cheered the fact he's been murdered based on as unproven claims.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Glenn, what can people who are concerned about this extraordinary extension of the powers of a president to basically ignore any kind of due process with our American citizens, what can they do?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, one thing that is obvious, is that voting for Democrats as opposed to Republicans doesn't help. In fact, if you read The New York Times article from 2010 confirming that Awlaki is on the hit list, it makes clear that there's been no instances where George Bush ordered American citizens targeted for assassination, that this is extraordinary and perhaps an unprecedented step under the Democratic president. What people in the Arab world did, when their leaders did things like imprison them, let alone kill them, and their fellow citizens without trials, is they went out into the streets and protested and demanded that it stop. It's hard to see how voting for one of these two parties is going to end these extraordinary excesses in violations of the constitution; it clearly doesn't. Something outside of that system is necessary to address it. That's been proven. So, I think if Americans cared about the constitutional rights the pretended to care about under George Bush, Democrats in particular, they would be very vocally protesting and objecting to this. But, the problem is that, the opportunity to use these issues as a means to undermine Republican politicians is now gone, and so, many people who, three years ago, were pretending to care about these things, no longer do. So, the question that American citizens have to ask themselves, is whether they believe in the principles of liberty and rights that they have learned were protected by the Constitution? That's just a piece of paper-the Constitution-it cannot protect those rights, only the citizenry can ensure that those rights are not trampled on; and the question is whether citizens actually believe in those.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Finally, Glenn Greenwald, we're getting reports that U.S. government confirming that it was a joint operation with the Yemeni government. Your sense of whether you believe this was a drone strike largely carried out by the United States?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there's no question I believe that the United States played a significant role. I mean, the United States have been wanting to kill Awlaki for a long time. The Yemeni government has not wanted to kill him, in part, because if it does, it will trigger lots of unrest and resentment, and that's the last thing, especially at this point, that it wants. So, I believe that this has been done by an air strike, certainly the Yemeni government would not have the ability to carry that out on its own. The fact U.S. government confirmed so quickly that he was dead and accepting responsibility, I think, is fairly definitive proof that the U.S. played a very significant role, if not the lead role, in extinguishing the life of its own citizen without due process.

[URL="http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?storyid=%7B45fafc4b-96af-4294-b7df-737b898fe9de%7DCIA"]http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?storyid=%7B45fafc4b-96af-4294-b7df-737b898fe9de%7D
CIA[/URL] DRONE STRIKES, DEATH WITHOUT TRIAL

Thursday, November 4, 2010

GS-13 Anwar Al Awlaki - Invited To Pentagon After 9/11 - Terrorist? Or Pentagon / CIA Employee? Same Thing!



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[B]Al-Qaeda Mastermind Invited To Pentagon After 9/11
Paul Joseph Watson | Thursday, October 21, 2010 | Al-Qaeda terror mastermind Anwar Al-Awlaki, the man who helped plot the aborted Christmas Day bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, the Times Square bombing attempt, brainwashed the 7/7 bombers, had pursued a Doctorate in Education from the CIA's favorite University, George Washington in DC and who also preached to the alleged September 11 hijackers, dined at the Pentagon just months after 9/11 documents obtained by Fox News show. [/B]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKyGD5TQF...r_embedded

American-born cleric Awlaki's role as a key figure in almost every recent terror plot targeting the United States and Canada, coupled with his visit to the Pentagon, only confirms our long stated position that Awlaki is a chief terrorist patsy-handler for the CIA he is the federal government's premier false flag agent.


[B]Whoops! Anwar al-Awlaki of the famed Toner Cartridge of Mass Destruction Died in '09

• http://newsbizarre.com/2009/12/anwar-al-...-dead.html
  
• http://www.foxnews.com/world/2009/12/24/...airstrike/
  
• http://theintelhub.com/2010/11/04/anwar-...d-in-2009/
  
• http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middle...30737.html
  

"Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military's outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks,"states the report.
Click here to read a portion of the documents.
Awlaki was vetted before he was invited to attend a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel. His appearance at the meeting was deliberately engineered despite Awlaki's ties to three of the alleged 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour who were identified as the suicide pilots that slammed Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hE2oJK8...r_embedded



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[TD="class: tr-caption"]Anwar Al-Awlaki[/TD]
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Following the Fort Hood shooting it was also revealed that shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan had been in contact with Awlaki before the rampage. Awlaki preached to both Hasan and the 9/11 hijackers at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia in 2001.
Awlaki also met with Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and acted as "the middle-man between the young Nigerian and the bombmaker." As we have thoroughly documented, the Delta Flight 253 incident was staged from start to finish. The US State Department allowed Abdulmutallab to board the plane, aided by a well-dressed Indian man, despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and had no passport.
The Christmas Day incident was a boon for companies linked with the military-industrial complex, as it greased the skids for the global introduction of naked body scanners in airports.
Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was also reported to have been directed by Awlakibefore his failed attack on May 1st.

"The Pentagon has offered no explanation of how a man, now on the CIA kills or capture list, ended up at a special lunch for Muslim outreach," states the Fox News report.
The explanation is quite simple Awlaki is the CIA's chief patsy handler for planning and staging false flag terror attacks through the dupes that he radicalizes.
The US Special Operations Command's Able Danger program identified the hijackers and their accomplices long before 9/11, and would undoubtedly have also picked up Awlaki.
As Webster Tarpley has documented, Awlaki is "an intelligence agency operative and patsy-minder" and "one of the premier terror impresarios of the age operating under Islamic fundamentalist cover" whose job it is to "motivate and encourage groups of mentally impaired and suggestible young dupes who were entrapped into "terrorist plots" by busy FBI and Canadian RCMP agents during recent years."
Tarpley points to Awlaki's role in the Toronto and Fort Dix, New Jersey, terror plots, which were both contrived by the feds, as proof of Awlaki's usefulness to the authorities in radicalizing terrorist patsies.
Lawyers in a case relating to the much vaunted 2007 terror plot to attack Fort Dix and kill "as many soldiers as possible" concluded that FBI informants were the key figures behind the operation and that the accused, six foreign-born Muslims, were merely bungling patsies.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgRJ9mW_h...r_embedded

Similarly, the "Toronto 18″ terrorists turned out to be "a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac". The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the RCMP who had radicalized the group.
Given the fact that Awlaki is a double operative, claiming to be an Al-Qaeda leader yet in fact working for U.S. intelligence, it's hardly surprising that he made an appearance at the Pentagon.
Awlaki has also appeared in video tapes purporting to be Al-Qaeda propaganda material released by the IntelCenter, which as we have documented is nothing more than a Pentagon front group that has been caught red-handed releasing fake Al-Qaeda videos to bolster support for the geopolitical agenda of the US government.
Confirmation that Awlaki met with Pentagon officials after having inspired the very 9/11 hijackers that are blamed for flying a commercial airliner into the Pentagon provides yet more startling evidence that the highest levels of Al-Qaeda are completely penetrated and run by the US military industrial complex, which via patsy handlers like Awlaki is staging false flag attacks to boost their own domestic and geopolitical agenda.

Anwar al-Awlaki and 'CIA Islam'

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C. | Jun-03-2010

(EUGENE, Ore.) - Anwar al-Awlaki received some press coverage recently when the U.S. Government declared that they had put out a hit on him. Al-Awlaki has documented connections to several 9/11 hijackers and to Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan. The "Times Square Unexplosive Device Planter" Faisal Shahad claims to have been inspired by him.

What is less covered in the media is that other so called "jihadis" have declared him to be a CIA agent.

SalafiMahaj, an organization of "mainstream" Muslim religious leaders in Britain, published a 130 page criticism of al-Awlaki entitle "Anwar al-Awlaki and His Errors in the Issue of Jihad." Most of the paper is debate on religious points, but it does include a few gems on al-Awlaki's past and the perception of him in the Muslim community, both jihadi and mainstream.

A Critique of the Methodology of Manhaj of Anwar al-'Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad

From that paper:

When one listens to the earlier lectures and khutab of 'Awlaki it is immediate noticeable that he was ... appealing to Middle-Class Muslim professional in the US."

"Awlaki can be seen in ... the PBS documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2003) giving a khutbah [religious speech] in an American Congress building at Capitol Hill (!!!?) [there emphasis]"

"Hence there has been a clear transition and methodological shift in the procedure of 'Awlaki"

"It is possible at this point [moving to Yemen] 'Awlaki reviewed his methodology to regain credibility after the likes of 'Abdullah Faisal al-Jamayki [Real name Trevor William Forest] in the late 1990s had actually condemned him for spreading 'CIA Islam' and being a 'Murji', 'spy', 'a plant of the government', 'an enemy of Islam' etc. See Faisal's lecture wherein he ... condemns 'Awlaki for being a CIA agent."

"Al-Awlaki is not known for having participated in any 'jihad' whatsoever and this is what has to be highlighted. For he calls to it and hypes up his audiences with it, yet the question has to be asked: upon which battlefield has he fought?"

On the connection between intelligence agencies and jihadis:

"The likes of Omar Bakri, Abu Qatadah al-Filistini, Abu Hamza and a whole host of other takfiri-jihadis [takfiris are muslims who accuse other muslims of being apostates or non-believers, in this context to justify killing them] are well-known for their meetings with not even the police, but with Intelligence Services! Some of them have even been protected and sheltered by them! As in the case of Abu Qatadah al-Filistini after 9/11 which is perhaps the most well-known example in the UK of being sheltered by intelligence services!"

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

George Washington University is known for having close ties to the intelligence community, the most public of which is that GWU maintains the National Security Archive.

The Washington Post has reported that George Washington University has CIA employees teaching courses on their campus, as part of the CIA's "Officers in Residence" program.

It is generally safe to assume that the unofficial programs of intelligence are greater in scale than their official public programs, as the public programs are only set up in order to provide cover for the unofficial secret ones (i.e. if the press asks "are CIA agents on university campuses," they say, "yes of course, here is the brochure." Instead of making a false denial, which can be challenged, they reveal a partial truth, which is impossible to disprove.")

All of this information is in the end rumors and innuendo. However, the official press releases of the U.S. Government on this issue are rumors and innuendo themselves, so it advisable to take them in the context of this broader range of perspectives.



Source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/al-qaeda-mas...r-911.html
http://salem-news.com/articles/june03201...que-ew.php


http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2010/11...tagon.html



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[TD="class: contentheading"]Absence of Evidence: The Progressive Policy of Imperial Murder[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate, colspan: 2"]FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2011 15:46[/TD]
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[TD="colspan: 2"]The president of the United States murdered two American citizens this morning. He had some nameless functionary -- who was sitting comfortably and safely at a computer console somewhere on a well-guarded, probably secret military base -- push a button. A missile was then fired from a robot drone buzzing maleovently in the sky over Yemen. The missile then murdered two American citizens who -- let it be carefully noted -- had not even been charged with a crime, much less tried and convicted in a court of law of any offense.
The New York Times story on the murders relates a number of accusations against the chief target of the attack, Anwar al-Awlaki. Assertions are made, mostly by anonymous officials, that al-Awlaki was "operationally" involved in terrorist plots, although not a shred of evidence for this "operational" involvement has been offered. (Another American, Samir Khan, was also reported to have been killed in the drone hit. It goes without saying that Khan had also not been charged with any crime nor was there any evidence that he ever took part in a terrorist operation.)
It is true that the two American citizens murdered by the president did engage in a great deal of fiery rhetoric urging violent uprising against the American state. This might not be very nice -- but it does happen to be protected speech under the Constitution of the United States. Of course, that quaint document from the horse-and-buggy era has long since ceased to apply, even fitfully and imperfectly, to the operations of the United States government.
It may well be true that with their words Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan "inspired" someone to commit, or attempt to commit, heinous deeds. So has the Bible. So have The Beatles. But to inspire is not to command. Again, no evidence and certainly no proof has been offered that al-Awlaki or Khanordered anyone to do anything, or that they were in any "operational" role to do so. (Unlike, say, the Nobel Peace Laureate who holds the top "operational" role in the American war machine, which has killed vastly more innocent people than even the most inspired terrorist groups.) If such proof existed that al-Awlaki or Khan played such a role, they easily could have been charged.
But they were not charged -- and were never going to be charged -- with any crime that would have brought their cases into the judicial system. The whole point of these high-profile murders was to establish, yet again, the "right" -- and the power -- of the U.S. president to kill anyone on earth, including American citizens, at his arbitrary command.
The open assertion of this arbitrary power is not an innovation of Barack Obama, of course. He is merely faithfully following in the bloodsoaked footsteps of his imperial predecessors. As I noted in a piece in a piece five years ago:
Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" -- that mythical, ever-elastic construct ....

The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw -- as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
In an earlier piece, in 2005, I noted how the clackety bones of the Clinton Doctrine of Unrestrained Murder was given flesh and blood by George W. Bush after 9/11 (scroll down for 2005 extract, and links):
On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.
The existence of this universal death squad and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it's no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001. I first wrote of it in my Moscow Times column in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. [This was Kamal Derwish, born and raised in Buffalo, New York, who was killed in a drone attack targeting alleged al-Qaeda operative Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi.] ....
But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to…enter countries surreptitiously."
The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on "extrajudicial killings" noted in December 2004: " Empowering governments to identify and kill 'known terrorists' places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists… While it is portrayed as a limited 'exception' to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others."
Indeed, like the "inherent powers" of the "commander-in-chief," the definition of an "enemy" subject to arbitrary assassination is most elastic, as I noted in that 2006 article:
In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:

"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.

"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism -- and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
The murders of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan are simply more public confirmations of this firmly established truth. As I wrote back then, "it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler."
In the coming days, we are certain to hear loud, full-throated praise of Barack Obama's murder of uncharged, untried American citizens. And most of these encomiums will come from heartsworn, true-blue "progressives" -- the very people who savagagely denounced George W. Bush for his "murderous tyrannny" when he carried out the very same crimes, in the very same way, in the very same place.
And they will be telling us, yet again, why we must must must support Barack Obama in his quest to win one more term atop the greasy pole of power. They will tell us, yet again, that we must forget these murders -- and the killing of many hundreds of innocent people in similar robo-slaughters in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan -- and work hard to perpetuate and entrench our own slavery in a lawless system whose leaders can kill any one of us at the push of a button, at the pulse of a whim, without charges, without trial, without mercy.

This is not just the usual partisan amnesia, this is not just moral blindness: it is active, open, undeniable complicity with evil.


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Assassination of U.S. Muslim Cleric is Illegal, Immoral and Unwise, by Bill Quigley CCR

Agents of the United States are openly trying to assassinate Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, while he is in hiding in Yemen. Despite what the apologists for assassination argue this is illegal, immoral and unwise.

Assassinating Awlaki in the US would be murder, a capital crime, punishable by life in prison or even the death penalty. Morally, few would argue that agents of the FBI or the CIA could murder the cleric in the US. If it is illegal and immoral to kill a Muslim cleric in the US why would it be legal, moral or wise to do so in Yemen?

The Imam, who lived in the US for more than two decades, is accused of using his powerful speaking and teaching skills on behalf of terrorism. Authorities say he was in e-mail contact with the Army Major arrested for killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. He is loosely linked to the Nigerian Christmas bomber. The Times Square SUV bomber is reported to have listened to the cleric's online lectures.

Assassination has been illegal since 1976.

In 1976 U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, Section 5(g) states "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." President Reagan followed up to make the ban clearer in Executive Order 12333. Section 2.11 of that Order states "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Section 2.12 further says "Indirect participation. No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order."

The reason for the ban on assassinations was that the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate national leaders opposed by the US. Among others, US forces sought to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

Since 2001, the US has returned to the assassination business. Along with its many other illegal actions, the Bush-Cheney administration revived the use of murder to eliminate political opponents across the world.

How can murder be allowed? The Congressional Research Service published a review of the ban on assassinations in 2002. The review weakly suggested "it might be sufficient" to interpret the War Power resolutions passed by Congress after September 11, 2001 as legal authority to allow assassinations outside the U.S. However, Congress authorized no war against Yemen, no military strikes against anyone in Yemen, nor authorized any assassination of anyone anywhere.

Defenders of assassination argue that murder is a legal part of the US strategy of "pre-emptive self-defense" authorized by Congress after 9-11. Under this argument, the US government is allowed to decide who represents a possible threat to our nation anywhere anytime and then exterminate them before they can damage the US. They also argue that the decision to target someone for assassination is legally secret. Because any threat to the US triggers these powers, under this line of argument, the US is in a permanent war state and has these powers forever.

This is perfect for the apologists for assassination because the government alone is thus investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. The public will never know because the government can do all this in secret. And since the war against terrorism is permanent, the government can murder people forever.

Thus the last traces of the rule of law evaporate. There is no transparency because no one gets to know. There is no accountability because the executive has unchecked authority.

Does anyone think the US would approve other nations acting like this? Would it be acceptable or even arguably legal for Iran or China or Israel or France to secretly decide who their enemies are and then execute them in the US if they find them here?

Apologists for assassination ease the way for the US to kill anyone anywhere anytime. What is then the logical next step in this argument? If we can secretly kill US citizens who we decide are our enemies outside the US, why not inside the US? And why not keep that secret as well?

The US cannot be allowed to continue to exercise secret authority to murder people. If the Bush administration was doing this as openly as the Obama administration is, people would be vocal about its illegality, immorality and its lack of wisdom.

Murdering anyone in the US is a criminal act that is prosecuted regularly in courts across this country. Why should secret cold-blooded murder by government forces outside the U.S. be treated any differently?

Wayne Madsen - Obama Setting Himself As Judge, Jury and Executioner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsgJJB4ac..._embedded#!

Uploaded by nwotaser on Feb 5, 2010
http://RT.com AND http://www.youtube.com/RussiaToday The Director of National Intelligence said the government has the right to kill Americans abroad if they present a direct threat to U.S. security. Blairs comments come on the heels of reports that Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bushs policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas. Blair said one needs "special permission" before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, but consider from whom that "permission" is obtained: the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch.
-rt.com-