Obama hails death of cleric Awlaki

Both men played major roles in inspiring attacks against the United States, and their killings are a devastating double blow to al Qaida’s most dangerous franchise.

Seeking to justify the targeted killing of a US citizen, Mr Obama outlined al-Awlaki’s involvement in planning and directing the murder of innocent Americans.

“He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up US cargo planes in 2010,” Mr Obama said. “And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.”

After three weeks of tracking the targets, US armed drones and fighter jets shadowed al-Awlaki’s convoy before armed drones launched their lethal strike early today. The strike killed four operatives in all, officials said.

Al-Awlaki was targeted in the killing, but Khan, who edited the slick Jihadi internet magazine, was apparently not targeted directly.

Al-Awlaki played a significant operational role in plotting and inspiring attacks on the United States, US officials said.

Khan, who was from North Carolina, was not considered an operational leader but had published seven issues online of Inspire Magazine, a widely read Jihadi site offering advice on how to make bombs and the use of weapons.

Mr Obama praised Yemen’s government and security forces for their close co-operation with the US in fighting al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), arguably the terror network’s most dangerous affiliate. With al-Awlaki’s death, Mr Obama said AQAP remains “a dangerous but weakened terrorist organisation”.

Al-Awlaki was killed by the same US military unit that got Osama bin Laden on May 1. Al-Awlaki is the most prominent al Qaida figure to be killed since then.

US word of al-Awlaki’s death came after the government of Yemen reported that he had been killed on Friday about five miles from the town of Khashef, some 87 miles from the capital, Sanaa.

The air strike was carried out more openly than the covert operation that sent Navy Seals into bin Laden’s Pakistani compound.

Counterterrorism co-operation between the United States and Yemen has improved in recent weeks, allowing better intelligence-gathering on al-Awlaki’s movements, US officials said. The ability to track him better was a vital factor in the success of the strike, US officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Al-Awlaki’s death is the latest in a run of high-profile kills for the Obama administration. But the killing raises questions that the death of other al Qaida leaders, including bin Laden, did not.

Al-Awlaki is a US citizen, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, who had not been charged with any crime.

Civil liberties groups have questioned the government’s authority to kill an American without trial.

Al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, had sued Mr Obama and other administration officials 13 months ago to try to stop them from targeting his son for death. The father, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for Constitutional Rights, argued that international law and the US Constitution prevented the administration from assassinating his son unless he presented a specific imminent threat to life or physical safety and there were no other means to stop him.

US District Judge John Bates threw out the lawsuit in December, saying a judge does not have authority to review the president’s military decisions and that al-Awlaki’s father did not have the legal right to sue on behalf of his son. But Judge Bates also seemed troubled by the facts of the case, which he wrote raised vital considerations of national security and for military and foreign affairs. For instance, the judge questioned why courts have authority to approve surveillance of Americans overseas but not their killing and whether the president could order an assassination of a citizen without “any form of judicial process whatsoever”.

US officials have said they believe al-Awlaki inspired the actions of army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan, who is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the attack at Fort Hood, Texas.

In New York, the Pakistani-American man who pleaded guilty to the May 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt said he was “inspired” by al-Awlaki after making contact over the internet.

Al-Awlaki is also believed to have had a hand in mail bombs addressed to Chicago-area synagogues, packages intercepted in Dubai and Europe in October 2010.

Al-Awlaki’s death “will especially impact the group’s ability to recruit, inspire and raise funds as al-Awlaki’s influence and ability to connect to a broad demographic of potential supporters was unprecedented”, said terrorist analyst Ben Venzke, of the private intelligence monitoring firm the IntelCenter.

But Mr Venzke said the terror group al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula will remain the most dangerous regional arm “both in its region and for the direct threat it poses to the US following three recent failed attacks”, with its leader Nasir al-Wahayshi still at large.

Al-Awlaki wrote an article in the latest issue of the terror group’s magazine justifying attacking civilians in the West. It is titled Targeting the Populations of Countries that are at War with the Muslims.

Al-Awlaki served as imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb, for about a year in 2001.

The mosque’s outreach director, Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, has said that mosque members never saw al-Awlaki espousing radical ideology while he was there. and he believes al-Awlaki’s views changed after he left the United States.