Exclusive: Yemeni Journalist Says Awlaki Alive, Well, Defiant
The radical imam who was reported to have been killed in a U.S.-backed airstrike last week has resurfaced this week, very much alive and very much defiant, a Yemeni journalist tells Declassified.
Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni-based imam who had conducted a lengthy email correspondence with accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, "called me last night and told me a lot of information," the journalist, Abdul Elah Hider al-Shaya, said in a telephone interview from Yemen.
Although friends and relatives of Awlaki had already cast doubt on the reports of the controversial cleric's demise, his apparent phone conversation with Shaya seems to be the most direct confirmation so far that he emerged unscathed from a joint U.S-Yemeni military strike that was supposed to have led to his death.
According to Shaya, Awlaki told him when he called, "I'm in my house. The statement that the Yemeni government put out [reporting his death] is lies." Awlaki further told Shaya that he was also at his home in Shabwa, a southern Yemen province, at the time of the airstrike and did not attend a supposed meeting of Al Qaeda leaders that included Nasir al Wuhayshi, the head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Said al-Shihri, a former Guantanamo detainee who is the Al Qaeda leader's chief deputy.
Awlaki also appeared to defend his seeming email correspondence with Hasan in the year before the Army psychologist allegedly engaged in a shooting rampage at the Texas army base that left 13 people dead early last month. Awlaki argued that "that was a military operation," says Shaya. "It was not against civilians."
There is no independent way to confirm Shaya's account and U.S. intelligence officials are now ducking the question of whether they believe Awlaki is dead or alive. "His status is not entirely clear," a U.S. intelligence official says. But Gregory Johnsen, a Yemeni expert at Princeton University, says that journalist Shaya, while known to have jihadi sympathies, has generally proved to be a credible source in the past. "Nothing I've seen him ever say has ever turned out not to be true," Johnsen says.
Certainly, there is little question that the journalist has good contacts in Islamic militant circles. Earlier this month, he conducted an interview with Awlaki for the Al-Jazeera network in which the cleric described his email correspondence with Hasan, saying it began on Dec. 17, 2008, when the Army psychologist contacted him and asked "whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not." In the Al-Jazeera interview, Awkali described Hasan's Fort Hood shooting as a "heroic act," saying that the American soldiers he killed "weren't normal ones, but they were prepared and getting ready to take off to fight and kill weakened Muslims and commit crimes in Afghanistan."
Shaya insists to NEWSWEEK that Awlaki is not tied to Al Qaeda. Asked whether Awlaki had told him about any contacts he may have had with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused bomber of the Christmas Day Northwest airlines flight bound to Detroit, Shaya declined to comment, saying this was all he was going to say for now.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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