Jeremy Scahill - Dirty Wars

There is no doubt the United States was involved in Anwar’s imprisonment. “I believe that I was held at the request of the United States government,” Anwar said. “I was taken into custody without any explanation.” When he was first arrested, he said Yemeni intelligence agents “began asking me questions about my local Islamic activities here, and later on it was becoming clear that I was being held due to the request of the US government. That was what they were telling me here.” They also told Awlaki that the United States wanted its own agents to question him. A report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions alleged that Awlaki was arrested “at the request of the United States Government.”

The New York Times reported that John Negroponte, who at the time of Anwar’s arrest was the US director of national intelligence, “told Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention.” But it was more than simply not objecting. A Yemeni source with close ties to Awlaki and the Yemeni government told me about a meeting between Negroponte, Yemen’s ambassador to the United States and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. Bandar was extremely close to the Bush administration and President Bush in particular—so close, in fact, that his nickname was “Bandar Bush.” The source told me he spoke to the Yemeni ambassador, who told him that Negroponte had said something to this effect: “Oh, it is very nice that you locked Anwar in prison. It is good. Because what bothers us is [his] preaching, and his sermons, and we are afraid that he will influence young people in the West.” The Yemeni ambassador, according to the source, told Negroponte, “Look, if there is nothing, no case against Anwar, we cannot keep him indefinitely in prison. The tribal people in Yemen, [Anwar’s] friends, civil rights groups in America and in Britain, they write letters to Condoleezza Rice and to us, regarding the imprisonment of Anwar. And so we cannot keep him indefinitely.” Negroponte’s reply, my source said, was, “Well, but you have to.”

In November 2006, Nasser Awlaki ran into Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh at a development conference in London. “I asked him to release my son from prison,” Nasser recalled. “And he said, ‘there are some issues with the Americans, I will try to solve them and I will release your son.’” Saleh bin Fareed, Anwar’s uncle, with whom he stayed briefly in Britain, is one of the most powerful tribal sheikhs in Yemen. He is the head of the Aulaq tribe, Anwar’s tribe, which numbers some 750,000 people. In Yemen, it is the tribes, not the government, that hold the power and influence, and the Aulaqs were not going to stand for Anwar being in prison without charges. Bin Fareed told me he called President Saleh and asked him why he was holding Anwar in prison. “The Americans asked us to keep him in jail,” bin Fareed said the president told him. The Americans told Saleh, according to bin Fareed, “We want you to keep him for three, four years.” Saleh told him, “[Anwar is] well spoken—the reason they gave us is that he’s very well-spoken, many people listen to him in United States, especially young people. And all over the world. And we want him to be kept [locked up] for a few years, until people forget about him.”

When President Saleh visited Washington, DC, early on in Anwar’s imprisonment, he met with FBI director Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet and other US intelligence officials. Saleh told Nasser that he raised Anwar’s case with them. In fact, he said he asked President Bush directly about Anwar. “If you have anything against Anwar al-Awlaki, tell us,” he said Saleh told Bush. “If you don’t, we will release him from prison.” President Bush, he said, responded, “Give me two months, and then I will answer you.”

Two months passed and then Nasser received a call from the chief of Yemen’s Political Security Organization, General Galib al Qamish. “Dr. Nasser,” he said, “please ask your son to cooperate with the interrogators, who are coming from Washington to meet Anwar.” So Nasser went to the prison to appeal to Anwar. “I told my son ‘Please, you know, we want to settle this thing forever. Why don’t you be helpful, and meet these people?’ And [Anwar] said, ‘I am willing to meet them. I met them in America, and I am going to meet them in Yemen.’”

When the FBI agents arrived to interview Anwar, they stayed for two days. Awlaki “was summoned to an office and as he entered upon the Americans, he didn’t put himself into [an] accused position, rather he entered the office [and] acted like a boss,” recalled Shaykh Harith al Nadari, who was imprisoned with Awlaki. “He chose to sit on the most appropriate seat, ate from the fruits prepared by the Yemenis to host the Americans and poured a cup of tea for himself. I had asked him about the nature of the investigation. He told me that the whole thing was to find any tiny violation that would permit them to prosecute him back in an American court. It was an interrogation, he said. Nevertheless, they didn’t find what they were searching after.” Yemeni intelligence insisted on having its own people in the room. Awlaki said that when the US agents interrogated him for two days, “There was some pressure, which I refused to accept and that led to a conflict that occurred between me and them, because I felt that it was improper behavior from their behalf….That was solved however, later on, and they apologized.” Anwar, according to Nasser, cooperated with the interrogators. Still, days and weeks passed, and Anwar remained behind bars.

When the Awlaki family pressed the regime for answers, the Yemeni president made clear to them the stakes. Yemen’s vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, told Nasser that the Yemeni president had a grim choice for him: Do you want to keep Anwar locked up or do you want me to release him “to be killed by an American drone?” “So, this is the president of Yemen telling me, ‘Keep your son in prison rather than getting him out, because if he gets out he will be killed by an American drone,’” Nasser said, adding that at the time, he believed that “the only reason which made the United States targeting Anwar was because of his popularity among Muslims, English-speaking Muslims in the world.” He concluded, “I think Ali Abdullah Saleh must have known something.”

AS HIS FAMILY on the outside fought for his freedom, inside the prison, Anwar pored over books. Any books he could get. For the first two months, the only book he was permitted was the Koran. Awlaki later said he saw his “detention as a blessing,” saying it offered him “a chance to review Qur’an and to study and read in a way that was impossible out of jail. My time in detention was a vacation from this world.” He later said that “because they took everything away and gave the Qur’an, that is why the Qur’an had this different meaning,” adding, “It is because of the distractions that are going around us, that we don’t get the most benefit from Qur’an. But when a person is in that solitary environment, all of the distractions are taken away and his heart is fixed on the word of Allah,” and the words take on “a completely different meaning.”

Eventually, Awlaki got his hands on In the Shade of the Quran by Sayyid Qutb. There were some striking similarities between Awlaki’s life experience and those of Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian scholar and thinker whose writings and teachings later were credited with forming the intellectual basis for militant Islamist movements. He was a dissident in Egypt who advocated for an Islamic government. Like Awlaki, he spent time studying in Colorado, where he enrolled at Colorado State College of Education in 1949. After his time in the United States, Qutb railed against what he perceived as the excesses of American culture—scantily clad women, jazz music, wrestling and football, alcohol. He labeled America a “primitive” society, writing that its people were “numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether.” When he returned to Egypt, Qutb developed close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1954, he was arrested and put in jail, where he would remain for most of the rest of his life. While Qutb was tortured in prison, he also wrote his most influential texts, including the book Awlaki would read in his own prison cell a half century later. In 1966, Qutb was hanged after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government.