BREAKING: FORT HOOD SHOOTER'S IMAM KILLED

Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who knew and gave spiritual counsel to two or three of the 9/11 hijackers as well as to Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan via email, is reportedly a dead victim of an air strike in Yemen.

Reuters REPORTS:

U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki may also have died in the air strike which targeted a meeting of militants planning attacks on Yemeni and foreign oil and economic targets, he said.

If all the deaths are confirmed, the air strike would appear to have struck a severe blow against AQAP, seen as the most dangerous regional offshoot of Osama bin Laden's network.

"Anwar al-Awlaki is suspected to be dead," the official said of the cleric who was on the run in Yemen, where he was on the government's most-wanted list of terrorist suspects.

According to U.S. officials, the U.S. army psychiatrist who ran amok at the Fort Hood army base in Texas on November 5 had contacts with Awlaki.

If true, poetic justice and strong irony may have also been delivered. As MICHELLE MALKIN points out, ABC reported on an interview al-Awlaki gave that appeared on al-Jazeera one day earlier in which he claimed Hasan asked him about killing American soldiers in his very first email.

Awlaki claims that Hasan initiated the e-mail correspondence with a message on Dec. 17, 2008. "He was asking about killing U.S. soldiers and officers," says Awlaki. "His question was is it legitimate [under Islamic law]."

One day later, al-Awlaki appears to have crossed the line that separates confidence from over-confidence.