U.S. Zeroes in on the Internet Imam
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, July 29 2010
According to a least one source, in Yemen, the U.S. CIA is now actively pursuing the so-called "Internet imam," raising the possibility, according to the source, that the imam will be killed before going to court or otherwise facing the justice system:
Last month, a handful of lawyers in the U.S. got a series of unexpected phone calls from Yemen. They came from an accomplished Yemeni academic and former government official, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki. He is the father of al-Qaida's most famous cleric, the Internet imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to both the Fort Hood shootings and an attempted bombing on a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.
The Awlaki pere was making the calls to key U.S. attorneys, NPR has learned, to see if he could mount a case on behalf of his American-born son against the U.S. government. By his account, the Obama administration has unfairly targeted the younger Awlaki by putting him on a CIA "capture or kill" list. By doing that, the administration has essentially green-lighted Anwar al-Awlaki's assassination — without filing any charges or having a court weigh the evidence in the case.
"This is an instance where the executive branch is claiming the power to go ahead and kill Awlaki without going through anything that resembles the traditional legal process," said New York University Law professor Sam Rascoff. "It essentially amounts to going right to the death penalty phase of a case without ever bringing it to a jury — and that ought to give us pause."
Awlaki has earned the name "Internet imam" for his work connecting with Muslims, often young Muslims, online -- selling them them on the idea of a combative, extremist vision of Islam while similtantously bringing them into the al-Qaeda orbit. American intelligence figures talk about him as a "talent spotter." For some time, U.S. authorities seemed somewhat underalarmed by just how much damage a religious figure could do armed only with a laptop and an Internet hookup. Part of the switch was no doubt motivated by the fact that Army Major Nidal Hasan exchanged several emails with Awlaki before he went on a shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.
(Apologies for the extremely slow posting today. Chewing on something big, and it seemed worth a bit of focused attention.)