The LATimes follows up today with an excellent story on how the bullseye will be planted on Anwar Awlaki, the former San Diego imam who U.S. counterterrorism officials believe has joined al Qaida’s forces in Yemen.

First, ABC News and then The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is considering whether to order a Predator strike on Awlaki, a case that’s complicated by the fact that he’s a U.S. citizen.

The LATimes’ Greg Miller provides more detail on the process of how the CIA marks suspected terrorists for death in its “targeted killing” program:

• Memos proposing new targets are drafted by analysts in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center.
• CTC analysts typically submit several new names each month to high-level officials, including the CIA General Counsel, Stephen W. Preston, and sometimes Director Leon E. Panetta.
• The list is scrutinized every six months; some names are scrubbed if the intelligence grows stale.
• The program is overseen by the National Security Council.
• The CIA does not need White House approval when adding names to the target list, unless the individual is a U.S. citizen.

Miller’s story contradicts a Jan. 27 story by Dana Priest at The Washington Post on a key point:

Miller: “No U.S. citizen has ever been on the CIA’s target list, which mainly names Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, according to current and former U.S. officials. But that is expected to change as CIA analysts compile a case against a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico but now resides in Yemen.”

Priest: “As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.”

Also are targeting decisions based on whether on an individual is “deemed to be a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests,” as Miller reported. That appears to be a slightly lower threshold that what Priest describes as an individual who presents “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”

Semantics, perhaps, but we are talking about executing a U.S. citizen without due process.

Can the president target an American citizen in a lethal attack?

White House lawyers are struggling with that question in the case of Anwar Awlaki, a former San Diego imam and SDSU graduate student, according to an ABC News report. 

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee noted last week that U.S. intelligence and military officials consider Anwar Awlaki, a former San Diego imam and U.S. citizen, to be “a direct threat to U.S. interests” although he has not yet been accused of a crime.

Awlaki corresponded with alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan before the attack that killed 12 soldiers, and investigators believe he also met with accused “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

• For more see my Awlaki timeline.

ABC’s Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito and Brian Ross are reporting:

According to the people who were briefed on the issue, American officials fear the possibility of criminal prosecution without approval in advance from the White House for a targeted strike against Awlaki.

The former imam at the Masjid al-Rabat al-Islami in San Diego was said to be in the Predator’s sights after the Fort Hood attack, but the strike wasn’t authorized because of questions over the citizenship of the New Mexico-born Awlaki.

President Reagan signed an an executive order in 1981 that forbid anyone employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government from engaging in or conspiring to engaging in assassination. That order remains in effect today.

However, we can kill those who are trying to kill us. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the president the authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force” to prevent future acts of terrorism against the United States. The specifics are said to be set out in a secret presidential “finding” signed by President Bush after the attacks.

In 2002, a CIA drone attack in Yemen killed a carload of suspected terrorists, including the target of the operation, the top al-Qaida leader in the country. U.S. officials weren’t troubled that the strike killed Yemeni-American Kamal Derwish, a U.S. citizen. “No constitutional questions are raised here,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Putting the bullseye on Awlaki and pulling the trigger would break new legal ground and raise fresh questions about the limits of presidential power.

At the very least, the U.S. government should make plainly clear what Awlaki has done to earn the wrath of a Hellfire missile. Meeting, corresponding and, odious as it may be, enouraging jihadists, doesn’t cut it.

Intelligence sharing is a bit like a game of hot potato: If you get stuck with it, you’ll get burned.

FBI officials in San Diego recently caught just such a hot potato when they intercepted e-mails between Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused Fort Hood shooter, and a radical former San Diego imam named Anwar al-Awlaki.

These intercepts are among the government’s biggest secrets. Yet, at the same time, it would be surprising if Hasan and Nidal didn’t know that their communications were likely to be intercepted.

Awlaki had been an FBI counter-terrorism target for years. As an imam in San Diego in 2000, Awlaki served as a “spiritual advisor” to three 9/11 hijackers.

The FBI has asked him numerous times about his contacts with the hijackers, including when agents visited him in 2007 in a Yemeni prison. The intercepts were made about a year after he got out of prison. Today, he is said to be hiding in Yemen.

As for Hasan, he was a psychiatrist in the military. His contacts with Awlaki were viewed as consistent with some research he was conducting as a psychiatric resident at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center. A 2007 slideshow he gave at Walter Reed was titled “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.”

As many as 20 e-mails between Hasan and Awlaki were intercepted by the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) between December 2008 and May 2009. The communications were deemed “consistent with research being conducted by Major Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center,” the FBI says.

After the shooting that killed 13 people, a blog post on Aulaki’s website praised Hasan as a “hero.”

The communications between Awlaki and Hasan were never shared with the Defense Department, even though a member of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service was on the multi-agency San Diego JTTF.

CIA Director William Webster is conducting a review to find out what happened. According to The Washington Post, Webster will have the authority to make recommendations about possible changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs the highly sensitive communications intercepts at issue.

Awlaki is particularly troublesome for investigators because he is a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971. As a result of that circumstance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the JTTF to apply for a court order of surveillance at the secret FISA court or a certification from the U.S. attorney general. Investigators were required to present evidence that Awlaki was “an agent of a foreign power, or an officer or employee of a foreign power.”

Al-Qaida qualifies as a foreign power, and Charles Allen, a former CIA official and US Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, declared last year that Awlaki was part of al-Qaida’s reach into the U.S. homeland.

So, they got a warrant. Great. What good is such intelligence if you don’t use it?

In Hasan’s case, an investigator and a supervisor concluded that Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or planning.

Further dissemination of the information “was neither sought nor authorized.” In plain English, the JTTF FBI supervisor wouldn’t let the folks from the Defense Department on his task force tell their commanders about the e-mails.

Officials in San Diego told Voice of San Diego’s Kelly Thornton that their counterparts in Washington are to blame:

One federal source described the probe this way: “Webster is going to investigate the Fort Hood guy and al-Aulaqi and whether the FBI screwed up. They’re saying San Diego failed to communicate the e-mails — but San Diego pestered the shit out of them, sending e-mails multiple times. The Washington field office didn’t do anything on it.”

The Washington Post reported Dec. 1 that members of Congress have identified “at least two troubling e-mails” that were intercepted by the San Diego FBI but not shared with Washington.

In a tit-for-tat battle, Thornton’s anonymous San Diego sources responded by saying that everything was fully communicated to Washington, which had “computer access” to everything San Diego had.

The Voice of San Diego, however, leaves out crucial background found in reports by the 9/11 Commission and Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11:

In June 1999, the FBI in San Diego investigated Awlaki after learning that he may have been contacted by a man who bought a satellite phone bin Laden used in the 1990s.

During its investigation, FBI learned that Awlaki knew individuals from the Holy Land Foundation and others involved in raising money for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Sources alleged that Awlaki had other extremist connections.

In early 2000, Awlaki was visited by a subject of a Los Angeles FBI investigation closely associated with Blind Sheikh [Omar Abdel] Rahman.

Around the time Awlaki was holding closed door meetings in San Diego with two of the hijackers, the FBI closed its investigation, stating “the imam … does not meet the criterion for [further] investigation.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that the FBI in San Diego misjudged Awlaki. Then again, no one bothered to tell the FBI in San Diego about two of the 9/11 hijackers whom the CIA had tracked from Bangkok to Los Angeles in 2000 until it was too late.

Anwar al-Aulaqi’s website and his statement praising the suspected Fort Hood shooter as a “hero” has vanished from the Internet. (For those who are interested, the statement in its entirety can be found at the end of this post.)

The words of the former San Diego imam — now said to be living hiding in Yemen — have received wide distribution. The timing of his Nov. 8 statement of support for Maj. Nidal Hasan, however, has escaped notice.

While Aulaqi’s name and his links to Maj. Hasan were being leaked to the Western press, U.S. military officials were quietly holding two days of talks on terrorism and other issues with their counterparts in Yemen, according to Saba, Yemen’s official state news agency.

Brig. Gen. Jefforey A. Smith, recently named deputy director for politico-military affairs in the Middle East (J5) for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed a joint cooperation agreement today, confirming U.S. support for Yemen’s shaky government.

Update: The US embassy declined to comment on whether an agreement had been signed, but tells AFP that talks involving Smith had taken place and said they focused on counterterrorism efforts against groups operating in Yemen. (The AFP misidentified Smith.)

This week’s talks in Sana’a have attracted no attention in the United States. But Yemen’s Chief of the General Staff Ahmed al-Ashwal said the talks were of great concern to the government of President Ali Abdullah Salih, which is battling al-Qaida in the east and tribal rebels in the north backed by Iran.

The Economist reported this week:

Yemen’s increasing lawlessness outside shrinking zones of state control around the main cities is one reason why, earlier this year, al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch announced it was moving across the border and merging forces with its brethren in Yemen. The joint operation, calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”, known in intelligence circles as AQAP, has carried out sporadic attacks inside Yemen, where tacit agreements with the government appear to have broken down. But its main target still appears to be Saudi Arabia.

The most recent State Department report on terrorism described Yemen’s efforts as “mixed.” While it took action against al-Qaida, Yemen, despite pressure from the U.S., continued a surrender program for terrorists it could not apprehend and released all returned Guantanamo detainees.

All of which makes the timing of Aulaqi’s statement even more interesting:

Nidal Hassan Did The Right Thing

Nidal Hassan is a hero.

He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.

Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal’s operation.

The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can defy the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right — rather the duty — to fight against American tyranny. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy.

Allah(swt) says: Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful punishment – Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed, honor belongs to Allah entirely. (al-Nisa 136-137)

The inconsistency of being a Muslim today and living in America and the West in general reveals the wisdom behind the opinions that call for migration from the West. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold on to Islam in an environment that is becoming more hostile towards Muslims.

May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Ameen.

In the Hall of Fame of missed business opportunities, a special place is reserved for Emmit McHenry.

In 1995, McHenry sold his small company called Network Solutions for $4.7 million to the secretive and powerful San Diego defense giant SAIC.

Five years later, McHenry’s business sold again for $3.5 billion.

Network Solutions (known today as VeriSign) administers a database of 90 million domain names that includes all the dot-coms on the Internet (including this one). This database told your computer where to find the page you are now reading. Without it, there would be no Internet as we know it. No Google. No Amazon.

If you haven’t heard the full story of SAIC and Network Solutions it’s because the full story hasn’t really been told before. SAIC hasn’t exactly tooted its own horn on the whole the Network Solutions saga. Many were outraged that the government had granted the employee-owned company what amounted to a license to print money.

In this 2-part piece by my friend Bruce Bigelow at Xconomy, a local San Diego business website that I have done some work for in the past, got SAIC founder Robert Beyster to tell the story.

In SAIC’s hands, McHenry’s small company turned out to be “unbelievably profitable,” says  Robert Beyster, the scientist who founded and ran SAIC until his ouster from the company in 2004. In fact, thanks to Network Solutions, SAIC may have been making too much money:

X: Why did SAIC decide to do the partial IPO in 1997? Did that turn out to be a smart thing to do? SAIC sold 3.3 million common shares, or a 21 percent-stake in Network Solutions, raising more than $59 million. SAIC retained almost 12 million shares of the stock, which carried preferential rights that basically preserved 96 percent control of the company.

JRB: The value of NSI was becoming so great that we wanted to take some of the profits we had made off the table in case of difficulties later on. (emphasis added)

There were — and still are — many people who think this never should have been allowed. The Internet had its origins in a network created by a research unit at the Pentagon and thus belonged to no one. The National Science Foundation oversaw the domain name registration database, a job that it contracted out to Network Solutions.

If McHenry didn’t realize what he had, SAIC sure did. A few months after SAIC acquired the company, the government amended the terms of Network Solutions’ contract. The amendment allowed SAIC to charge $100 to register a domain name (subsequently lowered). Equally important, the contract amendment allowed SAIC to keep 70 percent of the revenue, and gave the company a monopoly over the business.

This monopoly began to rub people the wrong way, and a spate of lawsuits were filed. So SAIC turned to its friends in Washington, says Mitch Daniels, who engineered the Network Solutions deal:

MD: We spent significant amounts of time and money at NSI educating the public, Congress, and senior government officials about aspects of the business that were really important: the Internet, domain names, Internet security, major policy questions involved with domain names, and keeping the “A” server and the other domain names servers running and secure. From 1995 until 2000, we brought at least one-half of the entire United States Senate and House members as well as senior White House and cabinet-level officials to tour our facilities in Herndon, VA.

Even if McHenry had hung on to the company, he would have been unable to marshal the kind of firepower that SAIC had in Washington. After a court held that Network Solutions was assessing an illegal tax, Congress in 1998 slipped language into an appropriations bill that retroactively made this “fee” legal. (See Thomas v. Network Solutions.) One of SAIC’s lobbyists in 1998, incidentally, was the ethically challenged former San Diego congressman Bill Lowery.

Last month, SAIC moved its headquarters to McLean, Va. At last report, it had annual revenues of more than $10 billion.

As for McHenry, he’s moved on and tries not to dwell on what could have been.

Did the U.S. government consider designating San Diego college student Mohdar Abdullah (left) as an enemy combatant after the 9/11 attacks?

The suggestion appears in one of several 9/11 Commission memoranda that were recently released by the National Archives and that make it clear that U.S. authorities viewed Abdullah as a major threat. An enemy combatant designation would have allowed President Bush to order Abdullah detained indefinitely in Guantanamo or military brig.

Ten days after the attacks, Abdullah was arrested as a material witness to the 9/11 attacks and shipped off to New York. Prosecutors there considered charging him along with Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving life in prison for conspiring to kill Americans in the 9/11 attacks but ultimately decided not to.

Commission documents show that Abdullah presented a dilemma for the government, which believed that he knew much more about the attacks than he would admit, but lacked sufficient evidence to support a terrorism charge. Abdullah was charged with visa fraud and deported to Yemen in 2004.

“If anyone in San Diego had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks it would be Abdullah,” one unnamed FBI agent told the Commission.

Abdullah had befriended the two hijackers when they lived in San Diego in 2000 and admitted helping the two men obtain state identification, contacting flight schools on their behalf and translating for them. Abdullah knew the pair had extremist leanings and sympathized with them, according to the 9/11 Commission’s final report. After Hazmi after he left San Diego, he remained in contact with Hazmi.

For three weeks before the attacks, Abdullah had been acting strangely. Several witnesses described him as nervous, paranoid and anxious. He stopped using the phone and didn’t show up at work or school.

On the morning of Sept. 10 at the Texaco station where Abdullah worked, an FBI source reporting hearing Abdullah saying something like, “It’s finally going to happen.” That night, Abdullah wanted to marry a young woman he had met a few months earlier, according to FBI Special Agent Daniel Gonzales.

Much later, Abdullah’s fellow inmates told the FBI that he had bragged to them of advance knowledge of the attacks, but authorities couldn’t substantiate the reports.

Abdullah denied foreknowledge of the attacks.

Gonzales described Abdullah as “a ‘slick’ and charismatic ‘liar.’” The unnamed San Diego FBI agent described Abdullah as a “goofball” and didn’t think he was a willing facilitator for the hijackers.

In their efforts to deport Abdullah, U.S. authorities were “running against the clock,” Justice Department officials told 9/11 Commission staffers in 2004.

Exactly what this means is unclear. The full explanation remains classified, but there’s no doubt that authorities didn’t want to let Abdullah go.

“The fear was a worst-case scenario where the opportunity to deport disappears, criminal charges do not materialize, and Abdullah succeeds in his habeas petition and is walking the streets,” Jonathan Cohn of the Justice Department told Commission staffers.