Brian Williams - Predators

As if to hammer home the point that the Obama administration would kill those Americans deemed to be terrorists operating with the enemy abroad, in the month following Awlaki’s death a CIA drone also killed Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman, and a seventeen-year-old Yemeni cousin in a blitz of drone strikes on al Qaeda vehicles and safe houses in Yemen. 97Abdul Rahman Awlaki’s grandfather furiously denied the charges that his grandson was a terrorist and said, “To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense. They want to justify his killing, that’s all.” 98For their part, U.S. officials claimed they had “no idea” the son was traveling with a supposed Egyptian al Qaeda agent, and a senior Obama administration official added, “This was a military-aged male travelling with a high-value target.” 99

Ironically enough, postings on several Yemeni al Qaeda websites after the son’s death claimed that Abdul Rahman Awlaki, who had been dubbed “Usayyid” (the Lion’s Cub) by al Qaeda after his father’s death, had sworn that he wanted to be martyred just as his father had been before him. One al Qaeda site said, “His sadness reached its peak after the American planes assassinated his father…. But when he said to the Emir [al Qaeda leader] of the city of Azzam, ‘I hope to attain martyrdom as my father attained it,’ it did not come to his mind that this will happen, and just one day after he said it.” 100

OBAMA’S PERSONAL ROLE IN APPROVING A SECRET DRONE KILL LIST

On May 29, 2012, the New York Times published an extraordinary article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane titled “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” which reported that the president was intimately involved in the moral and targeting decisions made in the drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia. 101The article depicted a president who realized after several close terrorist calls (including the failed bombing of a flight to Detroit in 2009 by the underwear bomber) that if even one terrorist attack succeeded, his presidency would be marked by it. According to Becker and Shane,

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record….

While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen [Awlaki], a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”…

This secret “nominations” process [of names to add to the “kill list”] is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda…. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan [national security adviser], Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan—about a third of the total. Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

DRONES FOIL A MUMBAI-STYLE TERRORIST ATTACK IN EUROPE

For those who support Obama’s withering drone campaign, there is no better proof of drones’ success in foiling terror strikes than their role in killing several German and British Muslims in North Waziristan who were planning a mass-casualty terrorist strike in Europe based on the model of one carried out in Mumbai, India, in November 2008. During the infamous Mumbai attack, members of the Pakistani jihad group Lashkar e Toiba roamed the streets of Mumbai raiding restaurants, hotels, a cinema, a Jewish center, a train station, and a college. In all 168 people were gunned down in cold blood or blown up by hand grenades as the terrorists spread carnage through the heart of India’s largest city.

The Mumbai attack was praised by jihadists and terrorists throughout Pakistan and seemed to serve as inspiration for similar slaughters in Europe, according to Ahmed Siddiqui. Siddiqui was a thirty-six-year-old German of Afghan decent who was arrested in June 2010 as he attempted to fly out of Kabul International Airport to Germany. He was subsequently interrogated by the United States and its Coalition allies at Bagram Air Base. Coalition forces had previously noticed that a group of eleven radicals tied to the Al Quds Mosque in Hamburg, Germany (the same mosque attended by 9/11 suicide team commander Muhammad Atta), had mysteriously left the country in 2009. They then reappeared in training camps in North Waziristan. There the German-Muslim jihadists were filmed training with weapons and making threats against the West.

Initially, the German authorities thought the group of eleven extremists had traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to fight Coalition troops, but Siddiqui dropped a bombshell after his arrest. During interrogation he confessed to being a member of a terrorist team that was planning to attack civilian targets in Germany, France, and Britain. According to one U.S. official, “They were going to attack multiple centers in Europe over a few days. They were going to shoot the hell out of people, terrorize them.” 102Their aim was to punish these NATO countries for their role in the Afghan conflict, much as terrorists had punished the Spanish government for its role in Iraq with the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Bin Laden, Siddiqui claimed, had personally approved the plot. 103British Muslims of Pakistani descent who formed a group known as the Islamic Army of Great Britain would attack the British targets, and German Muslims who were members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan would carry out the attacks in Germany and France. A second German jihadist who was arrested and “other sources” verified Siddiqui’s claims. 104

Word of the plot was leaked in September 2010, and the British, German, and French governments went on high alert. Travel advisories were issued to Americans warning them not to travel to those countries. The Eiffel Tower was closed twice because of bomb scares, and even the British royal family was put under special protection.

By this time the CIA had learned that the British terrorists in North Waziristan were being led by a Pakistani-British Muslim named Abdul Jabbar. Jabbar had been selected to lead the Islamic Army of Great Britain in carrying out massacres against “soft targets” in the UK. 105He and his brother had supposedly been chosen to lead the group in a Taliban meeting. 106But before he could carry out his plans, Jabbar and three others were killed in a drone strike on September 8, 2010. 107In fact, that September saw the highest number of drone strikes thus far as the CIA unleashed a barrage of twenty-two strikes trying to disrupt the plot by killing the British and German terrorists. On October 4, 2010, the drones finally caught up with the German terrorists, who were of Pakistani, Turkish, and Arab origin, and killed eight of them in the Mir Ali region of North Waziristan. 108