Hellfire and damnation.
Al Qaeda’s US-born chief propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki, got what he deserved yesterday — courtesy of a Hellfire missile from a CIA drone in Yemen.
The missile blasted his two-car convoy to bits — killing not just him but also Samir Khan, the Saudi-born, New York-raised editor of al Qaeda’s “magazine.”
Both men openly considered themselves US traitors — and, indeed, were proud of it.
And both were determined to kill as many innocent Americans as possible.
As Awlaki said just one year ago: “It is either them or us.”
Fortunately, they were the ones who paid the price yesterday.
But like the killing of Osama bin Laden last May, this wasn’t an “assassination.”
It was justice — pure and simple.
They joined the enemy in wartime, like US-born Germans who fought for the Nazis in WWII. That made them fair targets.
And that’s true even though Awlaki was the first-ever US citizen officially targeted by Washington for killing without a trial.
So kudos to President Obama and his national-security team.
Kudos also to the military and intelligence communities — and to David Petraeus, who scored his first major operational success since becoming CIA director.
Yesterday’s strike, like the daring mission that dispatched bin Laden, may not have dealt a fatal blow to al Qaeda, but it certainly was a big one.
“It sets a sense of doom for the rest of them … [and] increases the sense of fear,” one senior military official said. “It’s hard for them to attack when they’re trying to protect their own backside.”
Awlaki, of course, was much more than just a glib mouthpiece for al Qaeda who “inspired” home-grown, murderous jihadists — like Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan, with whom he’d been in regular e-mail contact.
Increasingly, he’d been directly involved in the actual planning of attacks, like the 2009 “underwear” bombing attempt and the 2010 Times Square car-bomb plot.
“For the past several years, he has been more dangerous even than Osama bin Laden,” said the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Michael Leiter, the US official in charge of analyzing terror threats, told Congress a few months ago that Awlaki posed “the most significant risk to the US homeland.”
Alas, that didn’t stop the bleeding hearts at the ACLU (which actually sued to get Awlaki off the kill list) from calling his death a breach of US and international law.
Or the folks at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (no surprise, there) from whining about “the constitutional issues raised by the assassination of American citizens without due process of law.”
As if Awlaki and Khan ever had the slightest interest in due process.
In the long run, this was the far better outcome — a well-aimed Hellfire missile as judge, jury and executioner.
America is now safer. That’s what counts.