It took 10 years and several missed opportunities, but US authorities finally brought to justice the American at the center of the 9/11 hijacking plot.
Only it may have come too late — Anwar al-Awlaki has already caused lasting damage to our security.
The feds didn’t do enough to stop this dangerous traitor before he got out of the country and became a martyr. Since they mysteriously released him from custody after 9/11, Awlaki’s been linked to no fewer than 19 terror plots.
His hand shows up in virtually every major attack — from the Times Square car bomb to the Fort Hood massacre to the Christmas Day underwear bomber. He inspired the Fort Dix Six and the London subway bombers.
Although his death is a major blow to al-Qaeda’s Western recruiting and homegrown-terror ops, Awlaki already managed to train hundreds of American and European converts to Islam. Officials say the radical US-born cleric gave his blessing to dozens of suicide missions while in Yemen. His acolytes, some of whom are believed to have re-entered the US, are now ticking time bombs.
And thanks to CD sets of his sermons, which are sold on the Web and still available in mosques and Islamic bookstores from coast to coast, he’ll go on radicalizing young Muslim-American men from the grave. In his “The Women of Paradise” track, Awlaki, speaking in colloquial English, paints an alluring picture of the carnal pleasures and rewards supposedly awaiting jihadists in the afterlife. While overseas, Awlaki was able to attract some 4,800 Facebook “friends,” many American.
His influence doesn’t touch just this generation. In recent lectures, Awlaki encouraged Muslim parents to teach their children to be ruthless killers. “Our children need to be raised up with the love of jihad,” Awlaki fulminates in his 2009 Internet screed “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad.”
Sickly, he offers the example of Al Zubair bin al Awam, a warrior companion of Muhammad, who “took with him to the battlefield his son Abdullah when he was still a child.”
“But since Abdullah was still a child and therefore couldn’t fight, his father would have him carry a small knife and go around the battlefield searching for injured disbelievers in order to finish them off,” Awlaki wrote. “
Abdullah then grew up to become one of the great fighters of this ummah.”
Despite all this, the US treatment of Awlaki has been baffling and bumbling.
The US only officially designated Awlaki an al Qaeda terrorist in July 2010. “He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism — fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents,” Treasury said in freezing his assets.
But Awlaki was conspicuously absent from the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.
The “world’s most dangerous terrorist,” as some US officials have dubbed him, never made the cut. This is more curious in view of the FBI’s listing of Adam Gadahn, another American al Qaeda member.
Odder still, the FBI drew up charges against Gadahn, who is said to be hiding in Pakistan, but not on Awlaki. Gadahn was indicted in absentia for treason and material support to al Qaeda, charges that easily could have applied to Awlaki. Even Awlaki’s American understudy, Samir Khan, also killed in the Yemen drone strike, was under grand-jury indictment. Yet Awlaki was kept out of the courts.
In his case, politics may have trumped security. The FBI is loath to advertise its mistakes, and Awlaki is an embarrassing one.
After 9/11, agents let him off the hook, buying his line he was an innocent, moderate cleric, even though he met privately with some of the hijackers, who followed him from a mosque in San Diego to a mosque outside Washington, not far from the Pentagon they attacked. This after the FBI’s San Diego field office had opened a terror investigation on Awlaki in 1999.
Cleared as a 9/11 co-conspirator, Awlaki was invited to conduct a pray service in the US Capitol and even speak at the Pentagon, where he dined with military brass.
It was like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime and being hosted by the victims’ family.
Turns out Awlaki acted as a field commander for the Pentagon hijackers, helping them obtain housing. But his main job was preparing them for Islamic martyrdom, his specialty.
Citing scripture, he convinced them they’d feel no pain on impact, and that rivers of wine and dark-eyed damsels with swelling breasts beckoned them in Paradise.
A year after the hijackers killed thousands, Customs agents took Awlaki into custody at JFK Airport on an arrest warrant for passport fraud, according to classified logs I obtained. But mysteriously, the FBI in Washington told Customs to release him.
Awlaki then fled the country and threatened his place of birth from afar.
“He was a very high-value target. Everybody wanted to wrap him up, get him in a chair” and see what he knew about the 9/11 plot, recalled Ray Fournier, a federal agent who tracked Awlaki as part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“Then we got the word that they wanted to rescind the warrant,” he says, “and everybody’s like, What the f – – – do you want to do that for?”
Ten years later, Fournier remains skeptical .
He thinks the FBI didn’t indict Awlaki in absentia because it would have opened up a can of worms. “The Justice Department was afraid to be embarrassed by the entire Awlaki episode,” Fournier told me.
Rep. Pete King (R-LI) has asked Attorney General Eric Holder for answers, thanks to the reporting of my findings. But so far he’s been stonewalled. Hopefully the mystery of why we let Awlaki go won’t be buried with him.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”