The Majestic Arabian Peninsula with it's Deep Emerald Persian Gulf by it's Side In A NASA Photo of A Massive Dust Storm.
According to a Yemeni journalist, Abdul Ramin, al Aulaqi who was the 16 year old son of Anwar al Aulaqi, told the emir of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the hours before he met his death that he would seek to become a martyr and then he went and joined the traveling group of a known terrorist on the day he was killed.
It is also telling that the same thing was the intent of the powerful men in AQAP that Abdul follow in his father's footsteps as noted in the report linked above. What was the son going to do, run away and join a circus -- in Yemen -- seriously? Quit the family business and eke out a living by selling Khat (qat)? There is no other business that would make him a comfortable living (and I mean barely above subsistance comfortable, not the American millionaire meaning of the word) in Yemen since he did not come from a family that could control or profit from Yemeni oil. Follow the Money is just as potent an idea, if not more so, in Yemen as it is in America, since there are so few opportunities in their land to make more than subsistence living-- even if you call losing half your children before they are grown and your own life early actual "subsistence". (More explanation at * below. linking within a page does not seem to work on this blog, possibly because of security reasons.)
And the fact that young al Aulaqi then went and joined the camp of one of AQAP's most prominent terrorists, Ibrahim al-Banna, creates a scenario that is similar to a young American man saying he is going to become lawyer, and going to Harvard Law School, but people maintaining that the young man wasn't really interested in becoming a lawyer. (And, in fact, what really makes me mad is that the ultra-left talks like the US chose to attack young al Aulaqi when they wail about Obama's drones killing a "teenager". The drone tried to kill a proven murderous terrorist. To stop the terror attacks on us we have to stop the terrorists. It became a business to hire young impoverished youth to attack America. That's how we got 911 which led to the war in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq in which more that 6000 Americans died and over a million people from those nations. And the center of that Jihad business are Jihadist kingpins like al Banna and the senior al Aulaqi.)
Children grow up early in harsh circumstances and this young man was likely as adult as an 18 year old American, and could have left home earlier if his father's business was abhorrent to him. As it was he went on a journey from home to try to find his father and prove he wasn't dead when he heard the rumors and traveled straight to the emir of AQAP. This young man clearly wasn't a child. And what he said at the end of that journey was that he would continue to do what his father had done and he would apparently be proud of it. He pledged to go on helping to dole out deadly payback on non-Muslims for every imagined slight they thought they could get done until one of the plans led to his own death. Yes, I suppose the fact that the young man met that death before he had killed some of us, is tragic because it leaves us with less justification. If you want to volunteer to get killed by al Qaeda so one of them can be punished, there might be somewhere you can apply. Personally I don't think AQAP really cares who applies because they have been trying strike where they can, when they can. And why do they do it? Because their money backers will continue to dribble out the money for them to do so. Stopping the flow of that money has been one of the concerns of US Government, but it is constrained since much of it comes from oil on which we depend until we can change our ystem of fueling our automobiles.
Abdulramen's dad's gems were:
There were redacted papers released a few weeks ago that apparently show that the ekder al Aulaqi paid for plane tickets for three of the 911 hijackers in July and August of 2001 including the ring leader Mohammed Atta in the run up to the major attack. This blogger relates the details He is a conservative blogger, but liberals seem to be ignoring this new information which came from an FOI request, apparently because it hurts the case against drones strike that killed the terrorist leader. Two of the tickets were to Las Vegas and Miami, a couple of party towns, the kinds of places that are anathema to good Muslims.
If I remember correctly the Bipartisan 911 Report and/or journalists notes of the inquiry (which were much more extensive that the ridiculous report that emerged) said that others of the hijackers participated in carnal gratification in the weeks before the terror attack in a New Jersey town, too. Apparently, their enablers helped them party it up in ways that were against their religion, most likely (it seems reasonable to assume) to bind them to their pledge to go through with the deed to earn their redemption and avoid ostracism from their fellow believers who may also have provided the money that enabled them to live a decent life style for a while without the hardships of their earlier years (again it's follow the money). It's just such a package that often keeps people in a "faith group" or cult through their years of young adulthood might otherwise cause them to doubt and free themselves from the mind-control of religion. (And in fact, I'm convinced how destroying young people's ability to control their own bodies will lead to a Christian based oligarchy in the US if the GOP have their way.)
The senior al Aulaqi also preached to 3 of the 911 hijackers personally, and counseled Nidal Malik Hasan via e-mail before the Army major attacked fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009 according to Wikipedia. He is reported to have encouraged Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah (also noted in the link attached to NMH's name) in his quest for matrydom. This is what is reported in Wikipedia. (I believe that news reports also said that the senior al Aulaqi also actually provided the explosive device Mr. Abdulmutallah wore, but that is not in Wikipedia which doesn't do US news information very well-- or maybe that was disproven somewhere I didn't catch, but Wikipedia is prone to information manipulation because of it's ability to be edited by outside sources). So that's what was the al Aulaqi family way of doing Jihad.
The clearest path to self sufficiency, one that he said he would follow was to do what his father had been doing in the last years of his life, counseling violent Jihad and enabling violent Jihad.
I'm not saying that the drone or someone controlling it was prescient or knew this, but this young man was probably no more innocent of murderous intent, either in person or as a far off "adviser" like his father, and he was traveling in the company of someone who was a target for the kinds of reasons that Abdul (other places know as Abdulramen as one word) would have been in the future if he followed his father's path. It is tragic that people who are not trying to kill Americans and Europeans and anyone who won't submit to their murderous and rights destroying control, do get killed. Hopefully people can be convinced to work things out, so the killing will stop. I wonder what the same ultra left and ultra right would have said if young Mr. Abdulmutallah had been able to set off his bomb. I'm sure they would have folded their hands and said ah yes, that is the result of our demanding no reaction or retribution on people trying to kill us. (No they wouldn't. They'd be screaming about Obama letting this happen.)
My point here is that 2013 is beginning to look like 1997 and the start of a 4 year political jihad by right and ultra left to hand the nation to a Republican president in the next election, which many people hought and apparently still think will result in some ultra right or ultra left paradise at some time in the future.
Such a belief seems to defy sanity after how that worked out in the period after Ralph Nader's run basically handed the government to George W. Bush's wrecking crew that caused massive war and debt crises, and some pretty spectacular terror attacks.
Just insert Glenn Greenwald for Ralph Nader and you have it set up again, with many of the same enablers, and even more. In addition Greenwald is an admitted non liberal except in the case of his marriage rights, was in favor of the invasion of Iraq, and does conspiracy almost as well as Alex Jones, a recognized nut cake. At least Ralph Nader had been a real liberal, apparently.
Even worse, more mainstream liberal news sources feared being ostracized by powerful ultra-liberals if they didn't go full outrage mode over drone strikes like the ultra left did over Clinton's limited actions in Serbia and Kosovo in which no Americans died, and many Muslim lives were saved from racist extermination. In addition, a few years later, a new nation was born in which the people are free from attack by those who tried to eliminate their presence in a fertile land that the attackers coveted for their own.
Like Clinton, Obama does what he discerns most Americans want. It's our lookout to manage our reaction to the ultra left so we don't find our nation hijacked by neo-cons again. The lives that were destroyed by the George W Bush administration cry out for that kind of sanity.
Picture above sampled and used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to Flickr user NASA Goddard photo and video which has no connection to this blog or blogger.
A good short URL for this is http://x.co/uJfA
* In fact, "follow the money" has been a mantra for 50 years or more (since the Watergate scandal was broken open by Mark Felt the FBI #2 and Watergate's "Deep Throat" contact with Washington Post reporters), and the more I understand business, and politics, and other endeavors we often think of as more divinely or at least sincerely heartfelt, the more I realize that passion and concern only go so far. Most of our own political and news reporting systems follow the dictates of making money, and I don't mean the money you plop down for your paper, but from the big money backing papers like that from their billionaire and mufti-millioniare investors and big ad buyers. And bloggers are no better at defying the source of their money, from working to boost the numbers of their readers through conspiracy theories and trying to gain more affluent people who are more likely to click on their ads or react to the ones in their paper edition, and those who will spend more money, to their advertisers' direct threats of canceling their contracts. I know personally relatable stories of people living decades being falsely promised relief from a deteriorating condition and trying all the herbal remedies, finally trying the conventional medicine road, and finding relief that is almost worth the harsh pricing of the same. But the herbal websites and magazines are still out there promising everything from flee control by splashing around vinegar or putting it on your pet (its only a repellent and the problem continues to grow) to cancer "cures", trust in which could be deadly -- as Steve Jobs found out, and allowing advertising or outright selling the same herbs they claim will cure or at least greatly reduce the effects of a person's real or imagined diseases. If you understand politics and the news business you will see that most of them are following the money these days often to the detriment of our understanding of our world.
