Yemen’s Head of Al Qaeda Scrambles to Make Anwar al-Awlaki Al Qaeda’s #3

/in , /by

It’s now a perennial joke. Every time we kill the next Number Three in al Qaeda, we joke about how no one wants to take that guy’s place.

Which was my first impression when I read this bit from ProPublica’s review of what the intelligence from Osama bin Laden’s compound has thus far revealed.

Bin Laden also managed to retain authority over al Qaeda’s affiliates in Yemen, North Africa and Iraq, the U.S. official said.

“It was not the same degree of detailed involvement, but he played a huge role in leadership,” the U.S. official said.

[snip]

Intelligence gathered months before the raid revealed a tell-tale exchange with the al Qaeda leader in Yemen. The leader, a Yemeni, wrote to bin Laden with a surprising proposal: He suggested that he step down as chief of the affiliate in favor of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American ideologue. Awlaki’s influence has been revealed in a string of recent plots against the U.S., including the attempted Christmas bombing on a Detroit-bound flight in 2009.

The leader explained that naming Awlaki as his replacement would be a propaganda coup. It would take advantage of the cleric’s popularity among Westerners, especially Americans, and have a strong impact on recruitment, according to the counterterror official.

The leader in Pakistan rejected the proposal, however, according to the official. “Bin laden’s message was essentially, I know you. I trust you. Let’s keep things the way they are.” [my emphasis]

Note, though, that this intelligence didn’t come from the raid, though it appears to have been leaked by the same “US official” (who is not a counterterrorism official) leaking the findings of the raid.

The report is interesting for a number of reasons.

First, because, aside from the raid, where were we getting intelligence on OBL’s reported letter-based exchanges? Where were we getting both sides of written exchanges between Yemen and OBL “months before the raid”?

Then there’s this bit, from a “senior intelligence official” who rolled out the OBL home movies last week. After being asked, for a second time, whether the cache at OBL’s compound revealed anything about al-Awlaki, he made what I assume to be a very odd misstatement–or a remarkable truth.

Q: And is Awlaki a possible successor as part of that?

SR. INTEL OFFICIAL: I think we addressed Awlaki before, but–

(Cross talk.)

Q: — to bin Laden? Is that shown in the records?

SR. INTEL OFFICIAL: I can’t say specifically at this point whether that’s in the records, per se, or in the documents, but, you know, it would be highly unsurprising if bin Laden didn’t know about Anwar al-Awlaki.

Let’s unpack the grammar of this, the official transcript: It would be highly unsurprising (meaning, it would not be surprising, meaning it would be likely) if bin Laden didn’t (that’s “did not”) know about Anwar al-Awlaki. It would be likely that bin Laden did not know about al-Awlaki.

That can’t be right. That can’t be what the SIO meant to say. Obviously, OBL at least knew about al-Awlaki. I mean, we saw him watching the tellie, right? Al-Awlaki’s all over the tellie.

But of course, the ProPublica exchange, from intelligence collected months before the raid and offered in support of the assertion that “Bin Laden also managed to retain authority over al Qaeda’s affiliates in Yemen but without “the same degree of detailed involvement” shows that OBL doesn’t care all that much–or doesn’t trust–Anwar al-Awlaki. Indeed, elsewhere the ProPublica report describes OBL’s criticism of Inspire magazine, produced by an American in Yemen. That is, OBL made what ProPublica rightly suggests are rather incredible complaints about a magazine that filled the same niche al-Awlaki does: popularized outreach to English speakers.

It seems like OBL doesn’t care that much for the Americans waging jihad, in English, in Yemen.

All of which brings us to the reason so many journalists are asking these questions about al-Awlaki.

You know, the drone strike targeting an American citizen? The drone strike launched just days after OBL’s death, which led a lot of people to believe it was a direct response to something we found in OBL’s compound? The drone strike on a guy that this US official at least suggests OBL doesn’t trust all that much?

That drone strike?

But then there’s the final implication of all this. People within al Qaeda are feeding into the notoriety we’re according al-Awlaki for trying to bomb him so much. The insiders appear to not trust him. But they recognize that he’s a great figure for propaganda.

At least partly because we made him one.

There’s something very hinky with the intelligence on al-Awlaki we found–or didn’t find–in OBL’s compound. Charitably, this “US official” who spoke to ProPublica might just be feinting, discussing outdated information to lead al-Awlaki to let his guard down (though if that’s true, shouldn’t we assume everything else he said is propaganda, too?). More likely, he’s answering the umpteenth question about any ties between intelligence we found at OBL’s compound and our attempt to assassinate al-Awlaki last week, with no due process.

And the best explanation he can offer is months old intelligence, showing that OBL doesn’t trust al-Awlaki.

image_print
  1. donbacon says:

    There is little doubt that some U.S. PR firm has the responsibility of getting the message out that while OBL is (supposedly) dead the war goes on.

    So the “US official” is simply a taxpayer-paid talking head whose ambiguity merely reflects the shortcomings of a marketing firm in a new market.

    Just as in Iraq when Hussein was captured he was replaced as a threat by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, so now the U.S. will replaced bin Laden with Ayman al-Zawahiri as a reason for mo’ war. The replacement of a Saudi with an Egyptian — how convenient that the U.S. was able to do something possibly benefiting the Saudis AKA the triumph of good over evil.

    And now the marketing experts have to fit Anwar al-Awlaki in somewhere. The constitutional courts, designed to get to the truth, have been replaced by propaganda professionals to tell us what to believe.

    It’s like the checkpoints we encounter on U.S. highways — we’re all guilty until proven innocent, and worldwide suspected terrorists can be killed no matter if they are Americans or not.

    Now let’s move on, to human rights in China, say.

  2. MadDog says:

    It sounds like one of the reasons that OBL didn’t trust al-Awlaki is that he is American-born.

    There may be other reasons as well, but al-Awlaki’s American citizenship would likely always trigger the thought of a “double” or CIA plant.

    And frankly, that same thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion in the past couple of years since al-Awlaki appeared in the limelight.

    I’m giving it a pretty low probability since the Yemeni Al Qaeda affiliate likely has some pretty onerous tests that someone like al-Awlaki would be subjected to, but unless al-Awlaki was required to show his true loyalties to Al Qaeda by personally killing Americans, would any other test suffice?

  3. MadDog says:

    Btw EW, I take it that you’ve also read AP’s OBL article referenced in the Pro Publica piece. From the AP article:

    …Navy SEALs hauled away roughly 100 flash memory drives after they killed bin Laden, and officials said they appear to archive the back-and-forth communication between bin Laden and his associates around the world.

    Al-Qaida operatives are known to change email addresses, so it’s unclear how many are still active since bin Laden’s death. But the long list of electronic addresses and phone numbers in the emails is expected to touch off a flurry of national security letters and subpoenas to Internet service providers. The Justice Department is already coming off a year in which it significantly increased the number of national security letters, which allow the FBI to quickly demand information from companies and others without asking a judge to formally issue a subpoena…

    • emptywheel says:

      Yup. I was joking on twitter yesterday that they’ll probably start using Section 215 of PATRIOT to develop lists of everyone who buys a lot of flash drives, just like they do on hydrogen peroxide.

      • MadDog says:

        Bill Gates will show up at the top of their NSL collection list. Microsoft buys them by the gross and hands them out like candy at meetings and conferences.

        Speaking of Microsoft, I’m guessing they’ll have some involvement in helping to decipher and scour the accumulated cache of stuff the Seals collected. OBL, if he was anything, was not a Mac kind of guy.

        And btw, from what I understand, thumb drives identify what computer they were plugged into, so if the AP story was correct, that Al Qaeda courier network of hand-transferred thumb drives is going to name a bunch of computers that, unlike OBL’s computers, were actually connected to the Internet.

        And additionally, thumb drives, like hard drives, unless wiped with military-grade overwrite programs, will provide IT forensic folks with a lot of the content that resided on those thumb drives even if OBL & Company thought they erased stuff.

        • xyno says:

          I don’t know about thumb drives identifying the computers they’ve been plugged into. That may be true in special circumstances, but in general it’s not.

          Regarding erasing thumb drives, even “military-grade overwrite programs” quite possibly won’t do the job unless used very carefully (overwriting the full address space multiple times,) since the drives do not have a fixed mapping from logical to physical addresses. See Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives (pdf) if interested.

  4. earlofhuntingdon says:

    The reporters and media that keep giving these officially authorized leakers and their leaks such prominence are not doing their jobs.

    Give us a name so that we can better judge the political interests of those doing the leaking. And do a little homework, MSM. Not just on the alleged substance of these leaks, but on who is doing the leaking and why. That’s the story. Oh, and if you simply want to regurgitate what some staffer slips you under the hotel room door or under the table at Starbucks or the Hay Adams, find another line of work.

  5. fatster says:

    O/T

    WikiLeaks: US opens grand jury hearing
    First session of process of deciding whether to prosecute website and founder Julian Assange for espionage

    LINK.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      A good prosecutor could get her grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. I hope Mr. Assange likes mustard and rye bread.

  7. harpie says:

    You are really good at unpacking the grammar, EW.

    I liked this part of the ProPublica piece:

    Bin Laden was bent on inflicting mass-casualty attacks on the West, the U.S. official said. At the same time, however, he criticized an online propaganda magazine edited by a young American in Yemen, saying the bloodthirsty tone of an article could harm al Qaeda’s image among Muslims, according to the U.S. counterterror official.

    The magazine, called Inspire, “apparently discussed using a tractor or farm vehicle in an attack outfitted with blades or swords as a fearsome killing machine,” the official said. “Bin Laden said this is something he did not endorse. He seems taken aback. He complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what al Qaeda does.”

    Awlaki is even more bloodthirsty than OBL!

    Anonymous Counter Terror Official [ACTO] to American Public:

    Be afraid!

    Be even more afraid!

    • prostratedragon says:

      Awlaki is even more bloodthirsty than OBL!

      And a fan of action movie mashups —Jackie Chan meets Ben-Hur!!! You’ll thrill-ll-ll to Jackie’s heroic entrance just as our Judaic hero seemed nearly ready to be ground into Colosseum dust!

  8. prostratedragon says:

    With notably rare exceptions, it would be highly unsurprising to find that supposed terrorist leaders are unaware of the “truths” about them that are asserted by conventional wisdom.