Family hits out at US in fury at fate of Awlaki’s slain son

Editor’s Note: In the Obama era of state-sponsored assassinations, there’s always that moral or ethical dilemma that won’t go away. In America, the Party Leader has already spoken on this issue in his 2009 inaugural speech, when Barack Obama said that America must “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”.

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Alastair Beach
The Independent
October 19, 2011

The family of a American teenager killed in Yemen during a US attack – a week after his terrorist father also died in a US strike – has lashed out at reports that the young man was a militant.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, 16, who was born in Denver, was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, one of America’s most-wanted men, whom an unmanned drone obliterated with a rocket in Yemen last month.

Some US newspapers described the American-born teenager as a militant in the mould of his notorious father, a preacher who was implicated in a series of alleged terrorist plots – including an attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit – over the past five years.

Yet this week the young man’s family, who said Abdulrahman left the US in 2002 when he moved to Yemen with his father, released a statement lashing out at the American media. The teenager’s family “watched with surprise” as several newspapers and TV channels “twist the truth” [sic] about the young man,” according to the statement. On the night of 14 October, the day Abdulrahman was killed by a US drone, he had “gone barbecuing under the moonlight” with his friends.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 7:49 am

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