The Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in the Name of Fighting the 'War on Terror'

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http://www.alternet.org/books/secret-story-behind-obamas-assassination-two-americans-name-fighting-war-terror




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AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars, is being published today. Jeremy takes a deep look at America’s new covert wars operated by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Jeremy shines a light on America’s unregulated and increasingly unilateral global assassination program. Two central figures in the book are Anwar al-Awlaki and his Denver-born 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, two American citizens killed in separate U.S. drone strikes in Yemen in 2011.

Today, an exclusive hour with Jeremy Scahill. I began by asking him to talk about cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His father is quite an extraordinary guy. He, Dr. Nasser Aulaqi, had come as a very young student to the United States, and he studied English as a young man in Lawrence, Kansas, and ended up getting a number of degrees in the United States. In fact, he was the alum of the year in 2002 at New Mexico State University, where he got one of his degrees. Very distinguished person in Yemen. And as a young man growing up in—as he put it, in a country that didn’t have a name yet, growing up in the south of Yemen, he dreamt of going to the United States, and his dream came true as a young man.

And so, he was a college student in the United States when his young—when Anwar was born, in 1971. And he really wanted to raise Anwar as an American. He viewed America as the—you know, to quote Reagan, sort of a paraphrased Reagan—the shining city atop the hill. I mean, he really did view it that way. And I looked at his essays from when he first came to the United States, and all of the international students wrote essays about, you know, what it was they wanted to get out of it. And he said that "the progressivism of America was electric, and I wanted to be a part of that, and I wanted to take my education and go back to my very poor country and to make something of my life." And so he started to build this family, and they lived in Minneapolis. And they showed me pictures of Anwar pointing out Yemen on the globe in his classroom, and he couldn’t pronounce the teacher’s name, so he just called her "Mrs. M." And, you know, there were photos of him at Disney World and—or, Disneyland in California.

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1. Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill & Rick Rowley

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2. Inside America's Dirty Wars

http://www.thenation.com/article/173980/inside-americas-dirty-wars

Anwar al-Awlaki’s youngest brother, Ammar, was nothing like him. While Anwar embraced a radical interpretation of Islam and preached jihad against the United States, Ammar was pursuing a career at an oil company in Yemen. Ammar was Canadian-educated and politically well connected. He dressed in blue jeans, wore hip Armani eyeglasses and sported a goatee. His hair was slicked back, and he had the latest iPhone. In February 2011, Ammar told me, he was in Vienna on a business trip. He had just returned to his hotel after sampling some of the local cuisine with an Austrian colleague when the phone in his room rang. “Hello, Ammar?” said a man with an American accent. “My wife knows your wife, and I have a gift for her.”


Ammar went down to the lobby and saw a tall, thin white man in a crisp blue suit. They shook hands. “Can we talk a bit?” the man asked, and the two sat down in the lobby. “I don’t actually have a gift for your wife. I came from the States, and I need to talk to you about your brother.”

“I’m guessing you’re either FBI or CIA,” Ammar said. The man smiled. Ammar asked him for identification.

“Come on, we’re not FBI, we don’t have badges to identify us,” the man said. “The best I can do is, I can show you my diplomatic passport…. Call me Chris,” the American added.