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The trap was set. After appearing at several conferences in the UK, Awlaki began to travel, reportedly visiting Yemen and Saudi Arabia during mid-2002. Finally, he walked into the net. On October 10, 2002, Awlaki and his family returned to the United States on a flight from Riyadh to New York. Customs and immigration officials had been alerted to detain him, and the family was escorted to a secondary screening area.

Once Awlaki had been secured, however, something went wrong. When customs officials contacted the FBI, they discovered that the arrest warrant had been revoked—one day earlier. After fewer than four hours in custody, he received an apology and was permitted to connect with a flight to Washington, D.C.17

The decision to revoke the warrant was made by an assistant U.S. attorney in Denver, David Gaouette, who said in 2009 that his office “couldn’t prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and we asked the court to withdraw the complaint,” adding that he couldn’t prosecute someone for a “bad reputation.” The decision did not go over well with his colleagues in the Justice Department and the State Department’s investigative service, who were infuriated at the cancellation of the warrant.18

The writing was on the wall. Awlaki left the United States for good and returned to London, where he continued to lecture prolifically at the Masjid At-Tahwid mosque and various forums and conferences. After his departure from the United States, he took his long-held narrative about the victimization of Muslims further than ever before. In December 2003 he gave the Friday khutba at the East London Mosque.

You have over 520 Muslims who are locked up in jail and are left to rot in there, and there’s no crime. They have not committed anything. There are no charges brought against them. And they are left there for months at end to just rot in those prison cells. What have you done for them? [ … ]

[Allah] will revenge for himself. [Allah] does not need us. But the thing is, we cannot allow such things to happen and we watch. We just sit there watching, doing nothing. Thinking by ducking down and by being quiet, we’ll be safe. If you don’t stop it now, it’s gonna happen to you, it might happen to your wife, it might happen to your own daughter. You need to stop it in its tracks before it grows.19

As if a foreboding had gripped him, Awlaki was becoming increasingly obsessed with prison and the horrors that might be visited on a Muslim who had been detained. His speeches were colored, perhaps, by his own sexual demons.

The Jews and the Christians will not be pleased until you become like them. How can you have trust in the leaders of kufr [the infidels], when today, right now, right now, there are Muslim brothers who are in jail? Every sinister method of interrogation is used against them. They would use against them homosexuals to rape them. They would bring their mothers and sisters and wives, and they would rape them in front of these brothers. The United Nations knows about it. Amnesty International knows about it, and they are doing nothing. In fact, sometimes they are encouraging it.20

Awlaki traveled to a number of mosques and Islamic centers in the UK, sponsored by the Muslim Association of Britain, where he spoke more and more openly about jihad, “the most beloved deed to Allah.”

He left dozens, perhaps hundreds, of radicalized disciples in his wake, such as University of London students Roshonara Choudhry and Omar Farouq Abdulmutallab. The former tried to assassinate an English parliament member for supporting the Iraq war, and the latter tried to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 but succeeded only in setting his underwear on fire.

In 2004 Awlaki returned to his ancestral home in Yemen. He began to lecture at Sanaa University, where he continued his attacks on U.S. foreign policy. Soon he moved to Iman University, also in Sanaa, which was run by his old mentor and al Qaeda associate Abdul Majid Zindani. The