The Lawfare Podcast: How Anwar al Awlaki Become Objective Troy
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2015
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane came on the Lawfare Podcast to provide an overview of his new book on the life and death of radical Islamic cleric Anwar al Awlaki, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone. Shane provides an overview of the book, examining the role played by al Awlaki in al Qaeda plots against the United States, his continued influence on the jihadi movement, and how his life and death was intimately tied to the rise of the drone in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Why and how did al Awlaki transform from a leader in American Islamic thought into a recruiter for al Qaeda? And what lessons can the trajectory of his life teach us about countering violent extremism and the methods the United States uses to achieve its counterterrorism goals?
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.0 | So you know what you realize is none of this was quite inevitable, even after he left the |
| 0:37.6 | UK and moved permanently to Yemen in 2004. |
| 0:41.2 | He was experimenting mostly with father's money in real estate. |
| 0:46.5 | None of that came to anything. |
| 0:49.7 | But it's interesting, even then he was sort of exploring other paths. |
| 0:53.9 | But his family's view, and I think there's at least some truth to this, this is a somewhat |
| 0:59.1 | defensive view of what happened to Onwara Al-Aliqi. |
| 1:02.4 | His family, you know, several family members told me he was blocked. |
| 1:06.0 | That's the police were following him around. |
| 1:08.9 | There was, you know, US pressure on the Yemenis to keep an eye on him. |
| 1:13.6 | And that he didn't see any way forward and that that's why he ended up with Al-Qaeda. |
| 1:18.8 | That's clearly an oversimplification. |
| 1:21.1 | But I think there's something to that, you do get the sense that if, you know, the prostitution |
| 1:25.3 | thing had not come up, he might well have finished his PhD and either become a public figure |
| 1:29.6 | in the States or become an education professor in Yemen. |
| 1:33.0 | And even at later stages, there were other possibilities for this to happen. |
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