Last Friday lawyers for Ali Al-Timimi, a Virginia man serving a life sentence for supporting jihad against the U.S., pushed to obtain more information from the federal government on evidence pertaining to the cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki’s recruitment as a U.S. government informant a decade ago.
According to Al-Tamimi’s defense lawyer Jonathan Turley, recently-released FBI files suggest that Al-Awlaki may have been acting as an “asset” for some government agency. In response to Turley’s request for this crucial evidence government prosecutors insisted that they had no obligation to provide the detail of its dealings with Al-Awlaki: “Mr. Turley has no right to know [whether the government] had an asset into Awlaki at that time. Mr. Turley has no right to know if Mr. Awlaki was an asset at that time!”
Leonie Brinkema, the presiding U.S. District Court Judge on the case, has not been inclined to grant motions filed by Muslim scholar Ali Al-Timimi seeking more details on the government’s relationship with Al-Awlaki. Further, last Friday Brinkema suggested that part of the answer to these concerns is so highly classified that she is the only person at the court who is allowed to see it, and that even a number of other personnel with “Top Secret” clearance were not allowed to see the documents pertaining to these concerns.
What a tangled web we weave
Speaking about government assets. Over the weekend the U.S. captured (renditioned or kidnapped) Anas al-Libi in Libya and raided a “seaside villa” in Somalia in an effort to capture an “al Shaba terrorist leader.” No drones were used. But there’s a troubling aspect to all of this. (Aside from the fact that NO DRONES were used.) On Sept. 21, the Westgate Mall in Kenya was attacked and 67 people were killed. Four days later Obama approved the operations in Libya and Somalia. Our intelligence agencies (NSA) have know the whereabouts of both al Libi and the unnamed al Shabab leader, who wasn’t taken into custody, for more than a year. Why were they allowed to operate freely for all of that time? Some “terrorists” we kill outright with drones and some we capture. Why is that?