Weird Stuff! Pizza, Hookers, and the Report Card: Inside Anwar al-Awlaki's Post-9/11 Life

[KoKo]

Pizza, Hookers, and the Report Card: Inside Anwar al-Awlaki's Post-9/11 Life

On September 30, 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born in New Mexico, was killed by an American drone in Yemen. A little less than ten years earlier, he was living in Virginia, taking classes at George Washington University, and getting pizza from a restaurant downtown. Documents obtained by the activist group Judicial Watch portray the FBI's detailed surveillance of someone who, on paper, seems pretty normal.

In its review of the documents, Judicial Watch points out a number of unusual details from the al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi) case file it obtained. (The organization has requested and obtained a number of al-Awlaki documents in the past, including ones indicating that he'd purchased plane tickets for hijackers.) Beginning shortly after the terror attacks of September 11th, the FBI started surveilling al-Awlaki, who at the time was the imam of a mosque in Falls Church. Before moving to Virginia in the beginning of that year, he led a mosque in San Diego attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers.

On February 5, 2002, al-Awlaki spoke at a luncheon at the Pentagon. The day prior, someone ran a query on al-Awlaki, yielding the following warning.

A number of other FBI agents already knew the details of al-Awlaki's life. For months, starting as early as November 2001, he'd been tailed by agents as he puttered around Northern Virginia. He spent a decent amount of time with prostitutes, prompting a memo to senior Department of Justice officials detailing his dalliances and proposing arrest. This wasn't exactly a new habit; in the '90s, while he was in San Diego, he was arrested for solicitation and agreed, with his signature, to avoid certain parts of town, as seen below. (It included a few military installations.)



The FBI's interviews with (understandably nervous) hookers is the most interesting part of the notes from the FBI's post-9/11 surveillance. Otherwise, they're more focused on details like his appearance on NPR or, as Politico notes, going to a pizza restaurant. One note details a particularly boring detail: al-Awlaki's attendance of a "Graduate Studies for Human Development" class at D.C.'S George Washington University.



Judicial Watch didn't point out one interesting aspect of al-Awlaki's studies. Less than a month after the terror attacks, al-Awlaki got his grades. He got an A in Leadership in Organizations, but an "incomplete" in Group Dynamics in Organization.



This was substantially better than his science work during his undergraduate courses at Colorado State some years earlier. He failed Engineering Mechanics and got Ds in Fluid Mechanics and Mechanics of Solids.

MORE of WEIRD STUFF AT:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/07/anwar-al-awlaki-document/66803/

[leveymg]

1. Some Muslims have been saying since the mid-1990s that AAA is under CIA control.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june032010/al-awlaki-critique-ew.php

Leave it to The f-cking Atlantic to trivialize him.

[KoKo]

2. I didn't see anything in that which Trivialized AA...I thought the article

pointed out that he wasn't a person who should have been "Taken Out" by Obama/USA because there wasn't enough evidence for that dire an operation.

I really thought your post asked questions you didn't attempt to answer.

[leveymg]

3. AAA was taken out because he had become a major liability, or outlived his usefulness.

Last edited Wed Jun 3, 2015, 08:39 AM - Edit history (1)

There's a great deal you don't know about al-Awlaki, and the CIA's motives for killing him, apparently.

The former head of the CIA Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, admits Al-Awlaki was a US Intel Asset. See video below.

This guy was much more than a propagandist hater. He was a double-agent who played a role in identifying numerous al-Qaeda operatives involved in attacks on the US during the last ten years, before the fact of the attacks -- from the guys who flew Flt. 77 into the Pentagon, to the shoe bomber, to the Ft. Hood shooter, to the Underwear bomber. The only question is how witting his role was as the spider at the center of the CIA (and/or) DIA (and/or) FBI web(s).

Killing him means Anwar al-Awlaki will never talk about what he understood his actual role was. Nor will the kid. Anwar al-Awlaki was far more than a propagandist - AAA was a CIA double-agent.

Al-Awlaki lasted way past his shelf life in the GWOT. But, he was eventually thrown into the cutout bin, and here is why I think they finally did that.

The President was not pleased the Underwear Bomber got as far as the airspace over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Even less so about the publicity attached to the role of others in getting him onto that airplane, leading back to Awlaki (who was also involved in aiding the Flt. 77 hijackers, the Ft Hood shooter, and the Times Square bomber). In the end, al-Awlaki's role as a U.S. agent was all but admitted to by U.S. officials. Here's what Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy said in his testimony before a Senate Committee in January 2010: http://www.state.gov/m/rls/remarks/2010/135865.htm

“We will use revocation authority prior to interagency consultation in circumstances where we believe there is an immediate threat. Revocation is an important tool in our border security arsenal. At the same time, expeditious coordination with our national security partners is not to be underestimated. There have been numerous cases where our unilateral and uncoordinated revocation would have disrupted important investigations that were underway by one of our national security partners. They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Government’s interest in the individual and ended our colleagues’ ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists’ plans and co-conspirators.”

So it was in a sense for AAA. The remaining questing is this: did Anwar al-Awlaki become unreliable or simply lose his operational usefulness? That makes his killing seem all the more outrageous.

[KoKo]

4. I didn't like the title of article, either. It links back to the FOIA request

from Judicial Watch.

The article does hint at what you say. You have more details than I was aware of about AAA being a double agent in your links. Even though the Atlantic article title is annoying and trivializing it may attract others like me who didn't know that connection who will read the article in the Atlantic and begin to ask questions about the connections and why he was taken out. The Atlantic article does have a link to the FOIA release from Judicial Watch with more detail..which I did follow and read further.

Thanks for your links and hopefully there are others here who will find the connections informative.

[leveymg]

5. I apologize if I was overly critical. Not aimed at you.

Thanks for your consistently thoughtful responses. As for Judicial Watch, they have bungled every counter-terrorism and national security case they've taken on - I get the feeling that's not just because they're incompetent.