It took too long to get Awlaki

Paul Sperry:

It took 10 years and several missed opportunities, but US authorities finally brought to justice the American at the center of the 9/11 hijacking plot. 

Only it may have come too late -- Anwar al-Awlaki has already caused lasting damage to our security. 

The feds didn’t do enough to stop this dangerous traitor before he got out of the country and became a martyr. Since they mysteriously released him from custody after 9/11, Awlaki’s been linked to no fewer than 19 terror plots. 

His hand shows up in virtually every major attack -- from the Times Square car bomb to the Fort Hood massacre to the Christmas Day underwear bomber. He inspired the Fort Dix Six and the London subway bombers. 

Although his death is a major blow to al-Qaeda’s Western recruiting and homegrown-terror ops, Awlaki already managed to train hundreds of American and European converts to Islam. Officials say the radical US-born cleric gave his blessing to dozens of suicide missions while in Yemen. His acolytes, some of whom are believed to have re-entered the US, are now ticking time bombs. 

And thanks to CD sets of his sermons, which are sold on the Web and still available in mosques and Islamic bookstores from coast to coast, he’ll go on radicalizing young Muslim-American men from the grave. In his “The Women of Paradise” track, Awlaki, speaking in colloquial English, paints an alluring picture of the carnal pleasures and rewards supposedly awaiting jihadists in the afterlife. While overseas, Awlaki was able to attract some 4,800 Facebook “friends,” many American. 

His influence doesn’t touch just this generation. In recent lectures, Awlaki encouraged Muslim parents to teach their children to be ruthless killers. “Our children need to be raised up with the love of jihad,” Awlaki fulminates in his 2009 Internet screed “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad.”

Sickly, he offers the example of Al Zubair bin al Awam, a warrior companion of Muhammad, who “took with him to the battlefield his son Abdullah when he was still a child.” 

“But since Abdullah was still a child and therefore couldn’t fight, his father would have him carry a small knife and go around the battlefield searching for injured disbelievers in order to finish them off,” Awlaki wrote. “ 

Abdullah then grew up to become one of the great fighters of this ummah.” 

Despite all this, the US treatment of Awlaki has been baffling and bumbling. 

The US only officially designated Awlaki an al Qaeda terrorist in July 2010. “He has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism -- fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents,” Treasury said in freezing his assets. 

But Awlaki was conspicuously absent from the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.

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There is more.

We missed several opportunities to stop this traitor.  He took full advantage of US and then conspired to  commit mass murder of our citizens.  I have no sympathy for him.  The world is a better place without him and his weird religious beliefs.