Salman Al-Awdah, a Saudi cleric who played an influential role in Bin Laden’s early radicalism, made the statement during an appearance on his “Life is a Word” show on MBC, a Saudi-owned news and entertainment satellite TV channel, later posting his remarks on his website, Islam Today.

“Incidents [such as the Ft. Hood shootings] have bad consequences, and undoubtedly this man might have a psychological problem; he may be a psychiatrist but he [also] might have had psychological distress, as he was being commissioned to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, and he was capable of refusing to work whatever the consequences were.”…

Danger Room spoke to NEFA Foundation senior analyst Evan Kohlman, who first flagged al-Awdah’s statement. He described Awdah’s comments as “a good indication of how far on a tangent Anwar al-Awlaki is, that even former favorites of [O]sama Bin Laden openly reject his globalist view of jihad. He’s been characterized as a deviant, even according to the standards of others within the Salafi-jihadi world itself.”