Dirty Wars (60 page)

Awlaki, meanwhile, was quickly becoming a household name. In the aftermath of the December strikes and raids, the media and Congress began to awaken to the reality that the United States seemed to be heading toward an undeclared war in Yemen. The events of Christmas Day in 2009 would shake the entire country.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
and his family were
singing Christmas carols
in Hawaii when one of the president's aides interrupted the festivities, pulling Obama aside for an urgent phone call with John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser.

A few hours earlier, a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had boarded
Northwest Airlines Flight 253
in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Three days before, he had turned twenty-three years old. At around 8:00 a.m. local time, he made his way down the aisle of the plane and settled into seat 19A. At 8:45 a.m., the plane was wheels up, headed across the Atlantic en route to Detroit.
Abdulmutallab's father
, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, was a retired businessman, former federal commissioner for economic development in Nigeria, and one of the wealthiest men on the African continent.

The path that led the wealthy young Nigerian to Flight 253 ran straight through Yemen. Abdulmutallab had attended elite private schools in Lomé, Togo, where he was known to be a devout Muslim and was described by one instructor as “
every teacher's dream
.” In 2005, he spent part of the year
studying Arabic
in Sana'a and, like many figures being watched in Yemen by the US counterterrorism apparatus, attended lectures at Iman University. Later that year, Abdulmutallab moved to London, where he
enrolled in college
. There, he became president of the University College of London's Islamic society and participated in nonviolent protests against the US-UK wars in Muslim countries. He organized a conference to protest the “war on terror.”

On at least two occasions, Abdulmutallab
traveled to the United States
for visits and, in 2008, was given a multiple-entry visa. In August 2008, he attended lectures at an
Islamic institute in Texas
before returning to Yemen to study Arabic. During that period, Abdulmutallab's father described his son as growing increasingly radical, becoming obsessed with Sharia law and what he called “
the real Islam
.” Eventually, Abdulmutallab fell off the map. His father grew so concerned that on November 19, 2009, he went to the
US Embassy in Nigeria
and met with two US security officials, later identified as CIA, to tell them that his son had gone missing in Yemen. During the meeting, he described his son's “
extreme religious views
.”

As Flight 253 began its descent into Detroit, Abdulmutallab complained that he had a stomachache and went into a bathroom, where he remained for about twenty minutes. When he returned to his seat, he covered himself with a blanket. Moments later, other passengers say they heard a noise that sounded like a firecracker. In a flash, Abdulmutallab's pants leg was on fire, as was part of the plane's inner wall. A nearby passenger jumped on him, and flight attendants scrambled to put out the fire. When a flight
attendant asked Abdulmutallab what he had in his pants, he reportedly responded, “
Explosive device
.”

It was Christmas morning and families across the United States were opening presents and preparing for celebrations when the news broke that there had been an attempted attack on a US airliner. Abdulmutallab quickly became known as the “Underwear Bomber” after it was revealed that he had smuggled explosives in his undergarments. It didn't take long before Abdulmutallab's Yemen connection was out in the open, with intense focus on the possible involvement of AQAP. The fact that PETN was among the explosives in Abdulmutallab's makeshift underwear bomb was
cited as evidence
of the involvement of Ibrahim Asiri, who made the pentaerythritol tetranitrate bomb his brother had used in the attempt to kill Prince bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia a few months earlier.

As the Obama administration scrambled to respond, the US intelligence community and congressional Republicans began to spring leaks. Before long, Abdulmutallab was presented as an AQAP operative who had been
sent on a suicide mission
by Anwar Awlaki. Yemeni intelligence officials told the United States that Abdulmutallab had traveled to Awlaki's tribal area of Shabwah in October 2009. There, they say, he hooked up with members of AQAP. A US government source said that the National Security Agency had intercepted “
voice-to-voice communication
” between Abdulmutallab and Awlaki in the fall of 2009 and had determined that Awlaki “was in some way involved in facilitating this guy's transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things. I don't think we know for sure,” the anonymous source told the
Washington Post
.

A local tribal leader from Shabwah, Mullah Zabara, later told me he had seen the young Nigerian at the farm of Fahd al Quso, the alleged USS
Cole
bombing conspirator. “
He was watering trees
,” Zabara told me. “When I saw [Abdulmutallab], I asked Fahd, ‘Who is he?'” Quso told Zabara the young man was from a different part of Yemen, which Zabara knew was a lie. “When I saw him on TV, then Fahd told me the truth.”

Awlaki's role in the “underwear plot” was unclear. Awlaki later claimed that Abdulmutallab was
one of his “students
.” Tribal
sources in Shabwah
told me that al Qaeda operatives reached out to Awlaki to give religious counseling to Abdulmutallab, but that Awlaki was not involved in the plot. While praising the attack, Awlaki said he had not been involved with its conception or planning. “
Yes, there was some contact
between me and him, but I did not issue a fatwa allowing him to carry out this operation,” Awlaki told Abdulelah Haider Shaye in an interview for Al Jazeera a few weeks after the attempted attack: “I support what Umar Farouk has done after I have been seeing my brothers being killed in Palestine for more than
sixty years, and others being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And in my tribe too, US missiles have killed” women and “children, so do not ask me if al-Qaeda has killed or blown up a US civil[ian] jet after all this. The 300 Americans are nothing comparing to the thousands of Muslims who have been killed.”

Shaye pressed Awlaki on his defense of the attempted downing of the plane, pointing out to Awlaki that it was a civilian airliner. “You have supported Nidal Malik Hasan and justified his act by saying that his target was a military not a civilian one. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's plane was a civilian one, which means the target was the US public?” Shaye pressed him. “It would have been better if the plane was a military one or if it was a US military target,” Awlaki replied. But, he added:

The American people live [in] a democratic system and that is why they are held responsible for their policies. The American people are the ones who have voted twice for Bush the criminal and elected Obama, who is not different from Bush as his first remarks stated that he would not abandon Israel, despite the fact that there were other antiwar candidates in the US elections, but they won very few votes. The American people take part in all its government's crimes. If they oppose that, let them change their government. They pay the taxes which are spent on the army and they send their sons to the military, and that is why they bear responsibility.

Soon after the attempted bombing, AQAP posted a web statement praising Abdulmutallab as a hero who had “penetrated all modern and sophisticated technology and devices and security barriers in airports of the world” and “reached his target.” The statement boasted that the “mujahedeen brothers in the manufacturing department” made the device and that it did not detonate due to a “
technical error
.” Four months after the attempted attack,
AQAP released a video
showing Abdulmutallab, armed with a Kalashnikov and wearing a keffiyeh, at a desert training camp in Yemen. In the video, masked men conducted live-ammunition training. One scene showed AQAP operatives firing at a drone flying overhead. At the end of the video, Abdulmutallab read a martyrdom statement in Arabic. “You brotherhood of Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula have the right to wage jihad because the enemy is in your land,” he said, sitting before a flag and a rifle and dressed in white. “God said if you do not fight back, he will punish you and replace you.”

The incident gave ammunition to Republicans and former Bush administration officials who accused President Obama and his national security team of missing repeated warning signs leading up to the incident, saying
that Abdulmutallab's father's warning at the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, should have been taken more seriously. An intelligence official pushed back, telling
Newsweek
, “While this is the
season for second-guessing
and finger-pointing, I have not seen anything to come from the meeting in Abuja that suddenly would have rocketed Abdulmutallab to the no-fly list. You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family's wealthy lifestyle. That alone makes him neither Saint Francis nor a dead-eyed killer. Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.”

At the same time, Republicans used the incident to portray Obama as a naïve peacenik. “
The Obama administration came in
and said, ‘We're not going to use the word “terrorism” anymore. We're going to call it “man-made disasters,”' trying to, you know, I think, downplay the threat from terrorism,” quipped Representative Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, on Fox News two days after the failed attack. On December 30, former vice president Cheney launched another scathing public attack on Obama. “As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is
trying to pretend we are not at war
,” declared Cheney. “He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war.” Cheney's attack was bold, not least for its hypocrisy. When the so-called Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, tried to blow up a flight in a similar way, the Bush administration prosecuted him in civilian courts and Rumsfeld declared that the case was “a matter that's
in the hands of the law enforcement people
.” Unlike Obama, who responded to the incident swiftly, it took President Bush six days to address Reid's attempted attack.

Cheney further charged that Obama “seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,' we won't be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't,
it makes us less safe
.” Cheney's statement was a phenomenal misrepresentation. Obama had already bombed Yemen more times in his first year in office than Bush and Cheney had in the entire eight years of their term in the White House. “
A lot of the knuckleheads
I've been listening to out there on the network shows don't know what they're talking about,” Brennan fumed to the
New York Times
. “When they say the administration's not at war with Al Qaeda, that is just complete hogwash. What they're doing is just playing into Al Qaeda's strategic effort, which is to get us to battle among ourselves instead of focusing on them.” At his inauguration, Obama had declared,
“
Our nation is at war
against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” When it came to Yemen, Obama certainly viewed the country's al Qaeda presence as a priority target, despite Cheney's very public allegations.

While the Obama administration was facing intense scrutiny over its handling of the incident, it was also ratcheting up US military action against AQAP. “
We have a growing presence there
, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence,” Senator Joe Lieberman asserted on Fox News. Lieberman, who had traveled to Yemen in August, said, “Somebody in our government said to me in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen: ‘Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war.' That's the danger we face.” Like Cheney, Lieberman, it seemed, was late to the game. The war in Yemen was already well under way.

IN EARLY
2010, the Obama administration continued to downplay the US role in Yemen, with officials publicly repeating a version of the same line: the United States is only providing support to Yemen's counterterrorism operations. “People ask me—the question comes up—
Are we sending troops into Yemen
?” Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs, said in a lecture at the US Naval War College on January 8. “And the answer is we have no plans to do that and we shouldn't forget this is a sovereign country. And sovereign countries get to vote on who comes in their country and who doesn't.” Those comments were echoed two days later by the president himself. “
We've known throughout this year
that al-Qaeda in Yemen has become a more serious problem,” Obama said on January 10. “And as a consequence, we have partnered with the Yemeni government to go after those terrorist training camps and cells there in a much more deliberate and sustained fashion.” Obama said bluntly: “I have no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” in Yemen. It was an incredible statement from a commander in chief who, for a full year, had troops on the ground who were entrenched, operational and growing in ranks. While the US footprint was small, JSOC was on the ground with the president's direct authorization.

In Sana'a, the State Department noted “
steadily growing military elements
based at the [US] embassy” as part of an expanding “U.S. military footprint.” Under National Security Decision Directive-38 (NSDD-38), issued in 1982, the US ambassador had
authority to approve all personnel
entering Yemen. In June 2010, the embassy reported that it was managing a “daily flow of proposals for engagement by the U.S. military” and requests for intelligence and military personnel to be granted “country clearances”
for “temporary duty.” The Special Operations Command liaison to the embassy was Lieutenant Colonel Brad Treadway, who had served as a liaison for a team of SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Group in Iraq in the early stages of the US invasion. He was undoubtedly a busy man, as Special Operations teams began a substantial expansion. By late January, JSOC had been involved with
more than two dozen
ground raids and air strikes in Yemen since the December 17 bombing of al Majalah. Scores of people were killed in the raids and strikes, and others were taken prisoner. At the same time, JSOC began
operating its own drones
in the country. What started as a day of coordinated strikes was turning into a sustained targeted killing campaign in Yemen coordinated by JSOC.