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Objective Troy tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11, a man who ultimately directed his outsized talents to the mass murder of his fellow citizens. It follows Barack Obama’s campaign against the excesses of the Bush counterterrorism programs and his eventual embrace of the targeted killing of suspected militants. And it recounts how the president directed the mammoth machinery of spy agencies to hunt Awlaki down in a frantic, multi-million-dollar pursuit that would end with the death of Awlaki by a bizarre, robotic technology that is changing warfare—the drone. Scott Shane, who has covered terrorism for The New York Times over the last decade, weaves the clash between president and terrorist into both a riveting narrative and a deeply human account of the defining conflict of our era. Awlaki, who directed a plot that almost derailed Obama’s presidency, and then taunted him from his desert hideouts, will go down in history as the first United States citizen deliberately hunted and assassinated by his own government without trial. But his eloquent calls to jihad, amplified by YouTube, continue to lure young Westerners into terrorism—resulting in tragedies from the Boston marathon bombing to the murder of cartoonists at a Paris weekly. Awlaki’s life and death show how profoundly America has been changed by the threat of terrorism and by its own fears.
Writing in The New York Times former counter terrorism expert for the CIA Paul Pillar wrote that Shane observes how debate over the drone program has been impeded by the administration’s policy of not speaking fully and directly about it. This policy makes the program one of a few subjects that have the strange and silly status, in Shane’s words, of “public but classified.” Journalists sometimes exhibit an occupational bias toward the declassification of everything, but in this case Shane is right to complain. As he notes, “drone strikes were never secret” and the official reticence is a matter of daintiness in not talking about how the United States is blowing people to bits by remote control. Governmental policy has not facilitated the needed debate about drones and counterterrorism, but this readable and skillfully reported book will surely move us toward that fuller discussion.
Pillar writes: “His book has some of the attributes of a dual biography, and he takes note of remarkable parallels in the lives of the terrorist and the president: each born in the United States to a secular-minded foreign father of Muslim ancestry, living part of his childhood in a Muslim country before returning to the United States and as a young man presented with the temptations of radicalism. Shane successfully accomplishes the task he set for himself of explaining how the talented Yemeni-American could take the destructive path he did, and how the former constitutional law professor who criticized the harder-edged counterterrorist practices of the George W. Bush administration came to rely so heavily on targeted killings.
“The book tells us that while Awlaki was still preaching messages of peace and purity, the F.B.I. began surveilling him because of suspected extremist connections. The bureau did not observe any terrorist activity then, but it did discover that Awlaki (who was married with children) was a regular patron of prostitutes in the Washington area. One of the escort services he used tipped him off about the F.B.I.’s questioning; afraid of ruin from the revelation of his secret life, Awlaki suddenly decamped to Britain. There he became part of more radical Muslim circles, which were a way station toward the hinterland of Yemen and the final stage of his life as a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Shane appropriately attributes the transformation to a “toxic mix” of both political factors and personal ones, including Awlaki’s ambition and possibly a kind of self-loathing that took the form of “fury at his native country for producing the sinful sexual culture that had so enticed and entangled him.”
“The other major transformation reflected in the book is not so much of Barack Obama personally but of the American public, whose values and priorities shifted suddenly and dramatically as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. ‘Like Bush and his advisers — indeed, like the American people,’ Shane writes, ‘Obama and his aides had themselves been radicalized by the threat posed by Islamic radicals.’ Earlier objections to the use of armed drones as far-ranging killing machines quickly dissolved after 9/11, although the technology would develop more fully over the next several years.
Illuminating and provocative, and based on years of in depth reporting, Objective Troy is a brilliant reckoning with the moral challenge of terrorism and a masterful chronicle of our times.
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