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Bombshell documents confirm USAID funded al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki’s college tuition

February 11, 2025 | | Print Article

Exposure of decades of corruption turned a spotlight on one of USAID’s more infamous handouts to a man who went on to be a leader for al Qaeda.

As leftist judges attempt to block President Donald Trump from exercising his authority as head of the executive branch, revelations on the extent of waste, fraud, and abuse at the U.S. Agency for International Development and elsewhere can not be contained. Among the examples causing outrage was the recirculation of a document showing that American taxpayers funded the education of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Dating back to 1990, prior to the jihadist becoming a Muslim cleric and terrorist recruiter, the New Mexico-born al-Awlaki applied and was granted “full funding” from USAID to attend Colorado State University while claiming to be a citizen of the Republic of Yemen seeking exchange visitor status.

George Washington University’s National Security Archive detailed in 2015 that al-Awlaki admitted to the “deliberate falsehood” to obtain the scholarship for foreign citizens and that in 2002 an arrest warrant on fraud charges had been issued over it before prosecutors withdrew the charges.

After having his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering funded by hardworking Americans, al-Awlaki went on to become a Muslim cleric, leading to investigations of his ties to terrorists and numerous arrests before he was ultimately killed in a drone strike during the Obama administration.

At the time, then-President Barack Obama said in part, “The death of al-Awlaki marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. Furthermore, this success is a tribute to our intelligence community, and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces, who have worked closely with the United States over the course of several years.”

In addition to being the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Obama cited the terrorist’s failed directives to blow up a plane on Christmas Day 2009 and another in 2010, as well as his call “around the globe to kill innocent men, women, and children to advance a murderous agenda.”

While working as a cleric, al-Awlaki met two of the 9/11 hijackers for the first time at a San Diego mosque in 2000 and he was said to have been in contact with Nidal Hasan prior to the then-U.S. Army major’s mass murder of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Meanwhile, while the funds allocated to the terrorist’s education represented a drop in the ocean of corrupted waste since the agency’s inception, including at least $80 million that had gone to “Palestinian territories” prior to the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel, part of over $1.3 billion in foreign aid from the Biden administration suspected of aiding terrorists and their allies, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a temporary restraining order preventing Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency from putting USAID workers on administrative leave.

The revelation about al-Awlaki was readily directed at Democratic lawmakers and their cheerleaders in particular who were having fits over the exposure of how taxpayer money has been used outside of taxpayer interest for years.

Kevin Haggerty
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