Imam cited in Fort Hood case: recruiter of terrorists or just a rabble-rouser?

McClatchy Newspapers

CAIRO — The Yemeni-American imam who’s been under renewed scrutiny after the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, preaches against alcohol, birthday parties, black magic and extramarital sex. He also supports armed struggle — jihad — against the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and has encouraged extremist insurgents in Pakistan and Somalia.

None of that sets Anwar al- Awlaki, 38, apart from other militant Sunni Muslim clerics — and even many mainstream ones — in the Middle East. Al-Awlaki uses digital means to spread his views, however, through a blog, lectures on YouTube and Facebook pages with more than 1,000 fans.

American-born and popular with young, Westernized Muslims, al-Awlaki preaches mainly in English and drops pop-culture references, invoking Michael Jackson in a sermon on death or the parable of a marijuana-smoking Muslim who turned his life around.

Al-Awlaki’s teachings, however, also reportedly have inspired suspects in a number of high- profile international cases: two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, alleged militants accused of planning to blow up targets in Toronto, several Somali-American youths who died while fighting in Mogadishu and, most recently, the Muslim Army major who’s charged with killing 13 people in the Fort Hood rampage Nov. 5.

In the past year, U.S. investigators say, al-Awlaki corresponded several times with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The investigators deemed the exchanges benign, consistent with research Hasan was conducting on Muslims in the military. Al-Awlaki himself, purportedly speaking through an intermediary to The Washington Post, said last week that he’d answered only a couple of the dozen or so e-mails Hassan sent him.

Al-Awlaki was under FBI investigation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but concerns surrounding him today appear to be based, at least publicly, more on his incendiary sermons than on solid evidence establishing a link to militant groups. Despite several brushes with terrorism suspects — allegedly by phone, e-mail and in U.S. mosques — al-Awlaki hasn’t been charged with a terrorism-related crime, and the only time he’s apparently spent in jail was in Yemen in connection with a tribal dispute, according to news and court accounts.

Al-Awlaki’s militant message and wide audience made him a subject of interest for U.S. intelligence agencies nearly a decade before the Fort Hood shootings.

Back then, al-Awlaki wasn’t hard to find. He served as imam to 3,000 Muslims at a mosque in suburban Virginia, conducted an online chat on The Washington Post’s Web site in which he answered questions about the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and granted several news interviews. In a report just after Sept. 11, The New York Times held up al-Awlaki as an example of a “new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West.”

The FBI, however, was investigating al-Awlaki’s activities and connections. The cleric moved to Yemen in 2002, presumably to be out of reach of U.S. authorities.

“He’s a 9/11 loose end,” Sept. 11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow told McClatchy Newspapers. Zelikow added that one of his frustrations with the Sept. 11 investigation was its inability to determine what al- Awlaki’s relationship was to the hijackers who turned up at al- Awlaki’s mosques in the U.S.