The killing of theological blogger Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen by a CIA drone demonstrates the US's increasing use of death squads to silence critics abroad, writes James Petras* The killing of theological blogger Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen by a CIA drone demonstrates the US's increasing use of death squads to silence critics abroad, writes James Petras The killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen, in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on September 30 has been publicised by the mass media, US President Barack Obama and the usual experts on Al-Qaeda as "a major blow to the jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden". US officials called Al-Awlaki "the most dangerous figure in Al-Qaeda", according to the London Financial Times at the beginning of October. There is ample evidence to suggest that the publicity surrounding the killing of Al-Awlaki has greatly exaggerated his political importance and is an attempt to cover up the declining influence of the US in the Islamic world. The US State Department's declaration of a major victory serves to exaggerate US military capacity to defeat its adversaries. The assassination serves to justify Obama's arbitrary use of death squads to execute overseas US critics and adversaries by executive fiat, denying the accused elementary judicial protections. MYTHS ABOUT AL-AWLAKI: Al-Awlaki was a theological blogger in a small, poor Islamic country: Yemen. He was confined to propagandising against Western countries, attempting to influence Islamic believers to resist Western military and cultural intervention. Within Yemen, his organisational affiliations were with a minority sector of the mass popular opposition to the US- backed dictator, President Ali Abdullah Saleh. His fundamentalist group was largely influential in a few small towns in southern Yemen. He was not a military or a political leader in his organisation, dubbed by the West "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" (AQAP). Like most of what the CIA calls "Al-Qaeda" AQAP was a local autonomous organisation, meaning that it was organised and controlled by local leaders even as it expressed agreement with many other loosely associated fundamentalist groups. Al-Awlaki had a very limited role in the Yemeni group's military and political operations and virtually no influence in the mass movement engaged in ousting Saleh. There is no evidence, documented or observable, that he was "a very effective propagandist", as ex-CIA and now US thinktank the Brookings Institution member Bruce Riedal claims. In Yemen and among the mass popular movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain or elsewhere, his followers were few and far between. One "expert" cites such intangibles as his "spiritual leadership", which is as good a way as any to avoid the test of empirical evidence: apparently a crystal ball or a tarot reading will do. Given the paucity of evidence demonstrating Al-Awlaki's political and ideological influence among the mass movements in North Africa, the Middle East or Asia, the US intelligence agencies claim his "real influence was among English-speaking jihadi, some of whom he groomed personally to carry out attacks on the US." In other words, Washington's casting Al-Awlaki as an "important threat" revolves around his speeches and writings, since he had no operational role in organising suicide bomb attacks -- or at least no concrete evidence has been presented up to now. The intelligence agencies "suspect" he was involved in the plot that dispatched bombs in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010. US intelligence claims he provided a "theological justification" via e-mail for US army Major Nidal Malik's killing of 13 people at the Fort Hood military base. In other words, like many US philosophical writers and legal experts such as Princeton University's Michael Walzer and Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, Al-Awlaki discussed "just wars" and the "right" of violent action. If political writings and speeches of publicists are cited by an assassin as the bases for their actions, should the White House execute leading US Islamophobes like Marilyn Geller and Daniel Pipes, cited as inspiration by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Brevik? Or does their Zionist affiliation provide them with immunity from US Navy Seal assaults and drone missiles? Even assuming that the unsubstantiated "suspicions" of the CIA, the British agency MI6 and the Al-Qaeda "experts" are correct and Al-Awlaki had a direct or indirect hand in "terrorist action" against the US, these activities were absurdly amateurish and abject failures, certainly not a serious threat to security. The "underwear bomber" Omar Farouk Abdel-Mutallab's effort to ignite bomb materials on a flight to Detroit in December 2009 is one example. Likewise, the bombs dispatched in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010 were another bungled job. If anything, the Yemeni AQAP's hapless operational planning has served to highlight its technical incompetence. In fact, according to Abdel-Mutallab's own admission, published on the US TV channel NBC News at the time, Al-Awlaki played no role in the planning or execution of the bomb attack. He merely served to refer Abdel-Mutallab to the Al-Qaeda organisation. Clearly, Al-Awlaki was a minor figure in Yemen's political struggles. He was a propagandist of little influence in the mass movements during the "Arab Spring". He was an inept recruiter of English-speaking would-be bombers. The claims that he planned and "hatched" two bomb plots, reported earlier this month in the Financial Times, are refuted by the confession of one bomber and the absence of any corroboratory evidence regarding the failed cargo bombs. The mass media inflates the importance of Al-Awlaki to the stature of a major Al-Qaeda leader and subsequently his killing as a "major psychological blow" to worldwide jihadists. This claim has no substance. But the puff pieces do have a very important propaganda purpose. Worse still, the killing of Al-Awlaki provides a justification for extra-judicial state assassinations of ideological critics of Anglo-American leaders engaged in bloody colonial wars. PROPAGANDA TO BOLSTER FLAGGING MORALE: Recent events strongly suggest that the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban: top collaborating officials are knocked off at the drop of a Taliban turban. After years of occupation, Iraq is moving closer to Iran than to the US. Libya in the post-Gaddafi period is under warring mercenary forces squaring off for a fight for the billion-dollar booty. Al-Qaeda prepares for battle against neo-liberal expatriates and Gaddafi renegades. Washington and NATO's attempt to regain the initiative via puppet rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen is being countered by a "second wave" of mass pro-democracy movements. The "Arab Spring" is being followed by a "hot autumn". Positive news and favourable outcomes for Obama are few and far between. He has run out of any pseudo-populist initiatives to enchant the Arab-Islamic masses. His rhetoric rings hollow in the face of his UN speech denying recognition of an independent Palestinian state. His grovelling before Israel is clearly seen as an effort to bolster his re-election campaign financing by wealthy Zionists. Diplomatically isolated and domestically in trouble over his failed economic policies, Obama pulls the trigger and shoots an itinerant Muslim preacher in Yemen to send a "message" to the Arab world. In a word he says, "if you, the Arabs, the Islamic world, won't join us, we can and will execute those of you who can be labelled 'spiritual mentors' or are suspected of harbouring terrorists." Obama's defence of the systematic killing of his ideological critics and his denying US constitutional norms of judicial due process to a US citizen and in blatant rejection of international law all define a homicidal executive. Let us be absolutely clear what the larger implications are of political murder by executive fiat. If the president can order the murder of a dual American-Yemeni citizen abroad on the basis of his ideological-theological beliefs, what is to stop him from ordering the same in the US? If he uses arbitrary violence to compensate for diplomatic failure abroad, what is to stop him from declaring a "heightened internal security threat" in order to suspend remaining freedoms at home and to round up critics? We seriously understate the "Obama problem" if we think of this ordered killing merely as an isolated murder of a "jihadist" in strife-torn Yemen. Obama's order of the murder of Al-Awlaki has profound, long-term significance because it puts political assassinations at the centre of US foreign and domestic policy. As US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has stated, "eliminating homegrown terrorists" is at the core of US "internal security". * The writer is a former professor of sociology at Binghamton University, New York.
