US-Born Al-Qaeda Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki Credits the WaPo With Saving Him From US AirstrikeFrom Weasel Zippers: [Image]

Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born imam linked to the Fort Hood shooting spree in Texas in November, the botched Christmas Day airliner bombing, and the failed Times Square bombing early this month, credited the Washington Post with tipping him off and allowing him to elude a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in December.
Most of the attention given to al-Awlaki’s lengthy interview in an al-Qaida video released Sunday has focused on his call to kill civilian Americans. But far more provocative is his revelation of how the U.S. media can inadvertently assist and protect al-Qaida terrorists.
“I had posted an article of mine in support of what Nidal Hasan did,” al-Awlaki said in Arabic, referring to the Army major now charged with 13 murder counts in the Fort Hood massacre. “And so, they shut down my website.”
Al-Awlaki added, “Then I read in the Washington Post that they were monitoring my communications. So I was forced to stop these communications. I left that region, and then the American air strikes took place.”
A Nov. 16, 2009 Washington Post article on al-Awlaki written by Sudarsan Raghavan of the Post’s Foreign Service — with a dateline of Sanaa, Yemen and featuring contributions from Post staff writer Spencer S. Hsuin Washington — included the revelation from anonymous federal law enforcement officials that the terrorist cleric was under surveillance.
“U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted e-mails from Hasan” to al-Awlaki, the Post story revealed, “but the FBI concluded that they posed no serious danger and that an investigation was unnecessary,” the law enforcement officials told the paper.