Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Anwar al-Awlaki

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/opinion/20johnsen.html?_r=1
EARLY last week, as a federal court in Washington was hearing arguments 
over the Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing of an 
American linked to Al Qaeda, the man at the center of the case was 
having his own say. The same day, Nov. 8, Anwar al-Awlaki appeared in a 
23-minute video that concluded: “Don’t consult anyone in killing 
Americans. Fighting Satan doesn’t require a religious ruling.”
The coincidental timing of the video added to the urgency of a case the 
judge has called “extraordinary and unique.” Unique, indeed. But in 
truth Mr. Awlaki is hardly significant in terms of American security. 
Contrary to what the Obama administration would have you believe, he has 
always been a minor figure in Al Qaeda, and making a big deal of him now 
is backfiring.
Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents in 1971, left 
the United States for good in 2002 before eventually settling in Yemen 
in 2004. He is believed to be hiding in the southern province of Shabwa, 
where his tribe, the Awaliq, holds sway.
The federal lawsuit, which is being brought by the American Civil 
Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights at the request 
of Mr. Awlaki’s father, has set off a broader debate over whether the 
government should be allowed to assassinate an American in a country the 
United States is not at war with. The administration maintains that the 
president has sole authority over such strikes, while the other side is 
arguing that judicial review is required.
It’s a vexing legal question worthy of debate. But no one should remain 
under the mistaken assumption that killing Mr. Awlaki will somehow make 
us safer.
He is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to 
be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in 
the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama 
bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan.
Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali 
al-Shihri, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who was repatriated to 
Saudi Arabia in 2007 and put in a “terrorist rehabilitation” program. 
(The treatment, clearly, did not take.)
Mr. Awlaki isn’t the group’s top religious scholar (Adil al-Abab), its 
chief of military operations (Qassim al-Raymi), its bomb maker (Ibrahim 
Hassan Asiri) or even its leading ideologue (Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh).
Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have 
American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda 
threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the 
reach of the Qaeda branch.
He’s not even particularly good at what he does: Mr. Awlaki is a 
decidedly unoriginal thinker in Arabic and isn’t that well known in 
Yemen. His most famous production is a lengthy sermon-lecture series 
called “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” which emphasizes the global 
nature of holy war: “If a particular people or nation is classified as 
... ‘the people of war’ in the Shariah, that classification applies to 
them all over the earth.” But “Constants” isn’t really his own creation; 
it’s an adaptation of a work written by a Saudi militant killed in 2003. 
At most, Mr. Awlaki is a popularizer, someone who takes the work of 
others and makes it his own.
When he preached in the United States, first in San Diego and then in 
Virginia, he exploited his knowledge of Arabic and his Yemeni heritage 
to burnish his credentials as a genuine Islamic voice. He has been 
linked to Maj. Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 
people at a Texas Army base in 2009, and some of the 9/11 hijackers 
attended his services. But until the Obama administration put him on its 
hit list, he had little standing in the Arab world.
Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of 
this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned 
his name before it was reported in January that the United States had 
decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in 
the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed 
in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in 
Shabwa Province.
So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the 
administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; 
if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. The 
best way out is to redouble its efforts to track down the real, more 
dangerous leaders of the Yemen group like Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Asiri, 
who likely made the bombs used in the parcel attacks and carried by Umar 
Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day bomber.
Mr. Awlaki’s name may be the only one Americans know, but that doesn’t 
make him the most dangerous threat to our security.

 Che leale alleatoh :)
"Alleato"? :)
Namib
---
"Was you ever bit by a dead bee?"