بعد أنور العولقي‎

Of all the coverage given to Anwar al-Awlaki’s targeted assassination this morning, I liked the almost Onion-worthy take Wired magazine (via Gawker) had regarding its consequence:

Yemen Strike Leaves Misfit Metalhead as Al-Qaida’s Last American Voice

The description of Adam Gadahn, “the last terrorist left chatting in an American accent,” is quite pathetic:

Gadahn’s background as a loner and misfit, by contrast, didn’t prepare him to be a particularly effective jihad-evangelist. He grew up isolated, home-schooled on his parents farm. Before he converted to Islam, he dabbled in the Southern California metal scene. Apparently unable to scrape enough friends together for a group, Gadahn formed a one-man metal band, Aphasia (named after a speech impediment). After his conversion, he ran into problems at his Orange County mosque, sleeping on his job as a security guard there and getting expelled after punching his Imam.

n 1998, Gadahn left the U.S. for Pakistan, eventually joining up with al-Qaida as a translator. He never quite racked up the same kind of fan club as Awlaki later did. …Gadahn’s been cranking out videos for seven years now. He’s even recently jumped on the bandwagon of encouraging lone-wolf attacks. And still he’s not the object of fanboy affection. Terrorists haven’t cited him as an ideological catalyst for an attack.

Of course, there are more serious constitutional issues concerning al-Awlaki’s death and that of his compatriot Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, who was an editor of the Al Qaeda’s goofy English-language web magazine, Inspire. Do Americans really want their president to be the judge, jury and executioner when it comes to American citizens that have been deemed “enemy combatants” in the GWOT (or whatever they’re calling it these days)?

Update: A deep-thinking Canadian “conservative” weighs in with his elevated discourse on the subject…