10/2/14, "Disclosures Pried From Government Strongly Suggest Terrorist Awlaki Was an Informant," pj media, Andrew C. McCarthy
"New evidence pried from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) proves the point I have posited here at Ordered Liberty: The federal government willfully intervened on behalf of al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki on October 10, 2002, undoing his arrest on felony fraud charges when he was detained at JFK International Airport in New York, and allowing him to walk away with a Saudi handler. As I argued over two years ago, the government’s story to the contrary – viz., that it was moved by sheer coincidence on the eve of Awlaki’s arrival to pull the plug on a weak case – does not pass the laugh test.
Twelve years ago, when the FBI intervened to “un-arrest” Awlaki despite the pendency of a valid felony warrant, he was a suspect – or, at the very least, a highly material witness – in the 9/11 conspiracy that resulted in the killing of nearly 3000 Americans. He went on to become one of al Qaeda’s most effective operatives. Awlaki is suspected of involvement in or incitement of the 2009 Fort Hood jihadist attack in which 13 U.S. soldiers were killed and many others wounded; the attempt to bomb a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009; the attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010; and the modernization of al Qaeda’s international recruitment practices.
In 2011, he was finally killed as an enemy-combatant by an American drone strike in Yemen.
Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, who in 2012 broke the news about Awlaki’s mysterious un-arrest a decade earlier, has stayed on the case. So has Judicial Watch, thanks to whose FOIA lawsuit, the government has been compelled to turn over 900 pages of documents about its investigations of, and communications with, the jihadist. As Ms. Herridge’s new reporting elaborates, the FOIA disclosures show that Awlaki had numerous contacts with the FBI well into 2004 – when the 9/11 Commission was trying to locate him for an interview based on mounting evidence of his likely knowledge of, if not complicity in, the 9/11 conspiracy.
Consistent with our government’s seemingly incorrigible penchant to dismiss extremist Islamic incitement as harmless rhetoric, and to perceive Islamic supremacists as “moderate Islamists” with whom it can collaborate, law enforcement officials knew about Awlaki’s extensive contacts with some of the 9/11 suicide-hijackers but excused them as “random [and] the inevitable consequence of living in the small world of Islam in America.” Years later, law enforcement and military officials knew about but ignored startling jihadist communications between Awlaki and eventual Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan.
The new information corroborates my suggestion here two years ago that, in letting Awlaki go rather than arresting him on the pending fraud charge, the government was “acting on the misguided hope of using him as an informant.” This is not only cause for potential embarrassment in its own right; it adds to the concerns over the circumstances of Awlaki’s death.
Though raised in Yemen, where he ultimately met his demise, Awlaki was born in the United States. Because he was thus an American citizen, many on the left and the libertarian right have condemned the Obama administration for killing him without any judicial process rather than capturing him and returning him to the U.S. for a civilian trial. The latter arrangement is one Obama has made for some of the worst alien terrorists, and would even make for the 9/11 plotters held at Guantanamo Bay if Congress would let him.
From a constitutional standpoint, this complaint is unavailing. Under World War II era precedents that the Supreme Court reaffirmed after 9/11, an American citizen who joins with the enemy in wartime may be treated like any other enemy combatant: attacked with lethal force, detained without trial, or tried by military commission. Wartime commanders-in-chief are responsible for prosecuting wars and do not need a judicial warrant to attack enemy operatives – certainly not overseas, outside the courts’ jurisdiction.
Critics claim the new disclosures suggest that President Obama authorized the extrajudicial killing of someone who was not only an American citizen but also a government informant. This dramatically overstates the case. Assuming Awlaki was an informant – or, more likely, a saboteur pretending to be an informant – that arrangement almost certainly ended several years before his killing. It has been over a decade since Awlaki left the United States and resettled in Yemen, where he overtly worked for al Qaeda and called for attacks against the West. There is every reason to believe this American citizen was an enemy combatant when he was killed in 2011; to date, even with the newly reported disclosures, there is no reason to believe Awlaki was an informant at that time.
Even though the legal objection to Awlaki’s wartime killing is unpersuasive, there remain other considerations. Let’s focus on three of them.
1. Successfully prosecuting a war requires good intelligence. Its acquisition is undermined by a policy that favors lethal attacks when capture (and subsequent interrogation) might be a practical alternative – a policy the Obama administration, in its aversion to Guantanamo Bay and the Bush policy of detention under the laws of war, seems to prefer. Awlaki is said to have been a pivotal player in al Qaeda plots against the United States; it is very likely that capturing him – and detaining him as an enemy combatant rather than dallying with him as a duplicitous informant – would have yielded valuable actionable intelligence.
2. While American citizenship does not immunize an enemy operative from attack, neither is it irrelevant. Awlaki was not executing combat operations at the time he was killed. If he had been encountered in the United States under such circumstances, he would have been arrested, not fired on. So, should his American citizenship – wholly apart from his potential intelligence value – have militated in favor of capturing rather than killing him? That is difficult to say.
Yemen is dangerous place. We have few reliable assets there and it may well be that capturing Awlaki would have been impractical if not impossible. On the other hand, many terrorists have been apprehended in dangerous places, including Yemen. We do not know what the competing concerns were. If capturing Awlaki was a practical alternative and the government chose to kill him instead, that would be alarming – perhaps an abuse of power even if not a violation of law.
3. Finally, there is the matter of embarrassment. Had Awlaki been captured and returned to the United States for trial, it is virtually certain that he would have attempted to build his defense around any relationship he may have had with the government. It may have become painfully apparent that Awlaki had played government agents for fools while he collaborated with terrorists; and that the government had numerous opportunities to arrest and put an end to Awlaki’s jihad, but instead allowed him to flee and continue igniting atrocities like the Fort Hood massacre.
Having worked in the Justice Department for many years, I would be stunned if the desire to avoid embarrassment factored, even slightly, into the decision to kill Awlaki rather than capture him.
Irregularities and worse happen in many investigations; government often acts reprehensibly in stonewalling efforts to discover incompetence and misconduct, but it does not kill people for that purpose. In a trial situation, the embarrassing details are disclosed; defendants try to exploit them, but to little effect; and the terrorists get convicted.
Still, this government systematically and purposefully misleads Americans. Indeed, it has clearly not been forthright regarding Awlaki specifically. It is thus understandable that people would demand a thorough investigation rather than simply trust that this government targeted Awlaki for a drone strike solely because he was an enemy combatant plotting to mass-murder Americans.
I will close with what I closed with two years ago: Congress should be pressing hard for answers to the disturbing questions surrounding the government’s handling of Awlaki. Enough willful blindness." via Mark Levin twitter
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Comment: The larger point is that the Bush administration was just as criminal as the Obama administration is and that Bush people remain in charge of the criminal RNC apparatus. How about those 28 pages Bush blacked out in the 911 report which remain blacked out today? Obama has a pen and a phone and could un-redact the 28 pages if he wanted to. Separately, the author speaks of the US being at "war" around the time of Awlaki's activities. Likely he meant a US war against Islamic terrorists. However, this article makes clear--if it hasn't long since been obvious--the US Ruling Class is engaged in no such thing. It's pals with the swells in Islamic countries. The war being waged by the Ruling Class is against the United States. Many would say the war is technically over and the Ruling Class has won. Among other things, a country without a southern border isn't a country. There's no basis for even having a military.
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Among comments to above at pj media:
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"boiling frog
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If you doubt the possibility that the Arabist State Dept, and the 'Bush obstructing' CIA are compromised by moles bought with big Saudi, Qatar, and Iranian money, then you simply haven't been paying attention to fact patterns."
If you doubt the possibility that the Arabist State Dept, and the 'Bush obstructing' CIA are compromised by moles bought with big Saudi, Qatar, and Iranian money, then you simply haven't been paying attention to fact patterns."
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More about the 28 pages:
More about the 28 pages:
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12/9/13, "9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For Release," IB Times, Jamie Reno
12/9/13, "9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For Release," IB Times, Jamie Reno
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12/15/13, "Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup," NY Post, Paul Sperry
"After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.
But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.
It was kept secret and remains so today.
President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).
A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.
Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.
The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.
The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast:
LOS ANGELES: Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — as they arrived at LAX in 2000. One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.)
SAN DIEGO: Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.)
WASHINGTON: Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers. Though the Bandars claim the checks were “welfare” for Bassnan’s supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers’ hands.
Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy— so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client. The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar.
“Our investigations contributed to the ambassador’s departure,” an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for “personal reasons.”
FALLS CHURCH, VA.: In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again — this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy. Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon.
Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I’ve obtained show he also served as the official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites.
Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11.
As I first reported in my book, “Infiltration,” quoting from classified US documents, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a “Saudi representative.” A federal warrant for Awlaki’s arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
HERNDON, VA.: On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon. Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers’ hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he “feigned a seizure,” one agent recalled. (Hussayen’s name doesn’t appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.)
SARASOTA, FLA.: 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd. FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned. Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched.
Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.”
Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks.
Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks.
Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a “coverup beyond belief.” Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages.
Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history.
Granted, it’s not easy to do. It took a monthlong letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material.
But it’s critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn’t water under the bridge. The information is still relevant today. Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11.
As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report, “State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more lethal attacks within the United States.”
Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations. If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today.
Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them."
"Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”"
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12/15/13, "Murdoch’s NYPost Today Backs Michael Moore Bush-Saudi Claims from “Fahrenheit 911″," showbizz411, Roger Friedman
"UPDATE- Paul Sperry responds: “Unger and Moore have their own agendas. Mine aligns with the FBI WFO case agents and FCPD* detectives who say they’ll never forgive the Bush admin for throttling their investigation of leads back to Saudi Embassy and Bandar himself in McLean. They view the former POTUS as a traitor.”"
12/15/13, "Murdoch’s NYPost Today Backs Michael Moore Bush-Saudi Claims from “Fahrenheit 911″," showbizz411, Roger Friedman
"UPDATE- Paul Sperry responds: “Unger and Moore have their own agendas. Mine aligns with the FBI WFO case agents and FCPD* detectives who say they’ll never forgive the Bush admin for throttling their investigation of leads back to Saudi Embassy and Bandar himself in McLean. They view the former POTUS as a traitor.”"
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The US Ruling Class has long enabled Muslim terrorism:
10/20/11, "The Lost Decade," [2001-2011] Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute
"Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. (parag. 9)...It failed to ask the classic headwaters question:
what is the problem?...
That would have pointed to Middle East’s regimes, and to our ruling class’ relationship with them, as the problem’s ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that
demonize America.
Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect
spread that message
in religious terms
to Muslims in the West as well as at home.
That message indicts America, among other things,
for being weak.
.
And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world
by absolving the regimes
for their subjects’ actions.
For example, when Yasser Arafat's PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that
many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world."... (subhead, 'Whatever it takes')
.
The US Ruling Class has long enabled Muslim terrorism:
10/20/11, "The Lost Decade," [2001-2011] Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute
"Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. (parag. 9)...It failed to ask the classic headwaters question:
what is the problem?...
That would have pointed to Middle East’s regimes, and to our ruling class’ relationship with them, as the problem’s ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that
demonize America.
Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect
spread that message
in religious terms
to Muslims in the West as well as at home.
That message indicts America, among other things,
for being weak.
.
And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world
by absolving the regimes
for their subjects’ actions.
For example, when Yasser Arafat's PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that
many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world."... (subhead, 'Whatever it takes')
.
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