Bin Laden's last words go online

WASH­ING­TON (AP) — In let­ters from his last hide­out, Osama bin Laden fret­ted about dys­func­tion in his ter­ror­ist net­work and crum­bling trust from Mus­lims he wished to incite against their gov­ern­ment and the West.

A selec­tion of doc­u­ments seized in last year's raid on bin Laden's Pak­istan house was posted online Thurs­day by the U.S. Army's Com­bat­ing Ter­ror­ism Cen­ter. The doc­u­ments show dark days for al-Qaida and its hunkered-down leader after years of attacks by the United States and what bin Laden saw as bum­bling within his own orga­ni­za­tion and its ter­ror­ist allies.

"I plan to release a state­ment that we are start­ing a new phase to cor­rect (the mis­takes) we made," bin Laden wrote in 2010. "In doing so, we shall reclaim, God will­ing, the trust of a large seg­ment of those who lost their trust in the jihadis."

Until the end, bin Laden remained focused on attack­ing Amer­i­cans and com­ing up with plots, how­ever improb­a­ble, to kill U.S. lead­ers. He wished espe­cially to tar­get air­planes car­ry­ing Gen. David Petraeus and even Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, rea­son­ing that an assas­si­na­tion would ele­vate an "utterly unpre­pared" Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden into the pres­i­dency and plunge the U.S. into crisis.

But a U.S. ana­lysts' report released along with bin Laden's cor­re­spon­dence describes him as upset over the inabil­ity of spin­off ter­ror­ist groups to win pub­lic sup­port for their cause, their unsuc­cess­ful media cam­paigns and poorly planned plots that, in bin Laden's view, killed too many inno­cent Muslims.

Bin Laden's inner cir­cle also was frus­trated when, in 2010, atten­tion in the U.S. shifted to the weak econ­omy with­out appar­ently cred­it­ing al-Qaida for the eco­nomic dam­age that ter­ror­ist attacks had caused. "All the polit­i­cal talk in Amer­ica is about the econ­omy, for­get­ting or ignor­ing the war and its role in weak­en­ing the econ­omy," his spokesman, Adam Gadahn, wrote.

Al-Qaida's rela­tion­ship with Iran, a point of deep inter­est to the U.S. gov­ern­ment, was rough, judg­ing from the doc­u­ments. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, some top al-Qaida oper­a­tives and their fam­i­lies fled to Iran, where author­i­ties there put them under house arrest. Over the years, Iran has released some, includ­ing mem­bers of bin Laden's fam­ily. Still, oth­ers remain.

Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who became al-Qaida's No. 2 after bin Laden's death, com­plained bit­terly about deal­ing with the Ira­ni­ans and their Byzan­tine meth­ods of nego­ti­at­ing. Al-Rahman was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.

"The crim­i­nals did not send us any let­ter, nor did they send us a mes­sage through any of the broth­ers," al-Rahman wrote. "Such behav­ior is of course not unusual for them; indeed, it is typ­i­cal of their mind­set and method. They do not wish to appear to be nego­ti­at­ing with us or respond­ing to our pressures."

Bin Laden him­self wrote that "con­trol­ling chil­dren" was one of the keys to hid­ing in cities, as he did for years while U.S. forces searched Pakistan's rugged fron­tier. He encour­aged his fol­low­ers in hid­ing to teach their chil­dren the local lan­guage and not let them out of their homes "except for extreme neces­sity like med­ical care."

The cor­re­spon­dence sug­gests that al-Qaida care­fully mon­i­tored U.S. cable news net­works and gen­er­ally didn't like what it saw. "We can say that there is no sin­gle chan­nel that we could rely on for our mes­sages," Gadahn wrote, although he described ABC as "all right, actu­ally it could be one of the best chan­nels as far as we are con­cerned." He com­plained that Fox News "falls into the abyss, as you know, and lacks neu­tral­ity." CNN, he said, "seems to be in coop­er­a­tion with the gov­ern­ment more than the oth­ers except Fox News, of course."

Gadahn sug­gested send­ing videos of bin Laden's remarks to all the U.S. news net­works — except Fox News. "Let her die in anger," he wrote.

The cor­re­spon­dence includes let­ters by then-second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi, tak­ing Pak­istani off­shoot Tehrik-e-Taliban Pak­istan to task over its indis­crim­i­nate attacks on Mus­lims. The al-Qaida lead­er­ship "threat­ened to take pub­lic mea­sures unless we see from you seri­ous and imme­di­ate prac­ti­cal and clear steps towards reform­ing (your ways) and dis­so­ci­at­ing your­self from these vile mis­takes that vio­late Islamic Law," al-Libi wrote.

Appar­ently bin Laden was not made of aware of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan's planned bomb­ing of Times Square in New York in May 2010. But he expressed dis­ap­point­ment that Faisal Shahzad didn't man­age to pull off the attack after the bomb failed to det­o­nate. Shahzad was con­victed and sen­tenced to life in prison for the attempted attack.

Bin Laden also warned the leader of Yemeni AQAP, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, against attempt­ing a takeover of Yemen to estab­lish an Islamic state, instead say­ing he should "refo­cus his efforts on attack­ing the United States."

And he seemed unin­ter­ested in rec­og­niz­ing Somali-based al-Shabab when the group pledged loy­alty to him because he thought its lead­ers were poor gov­er­nors of the areas they con­trolled and were too strict with their admin­is­tra­tion of Islamic penal­ties, like cut­ting off the hands of thieves.

Noth­ing in the papers that were released points directly to al-Qaida sym­pa­thiz­ers in Pakistan's gov­ern­ment, although pre­sum­ably such ref­er­ences would have remained clas­si­fied. Bin Laden described "trusted Pak­istani broth­ers" but didn't iden­tify any Pak­istani gov­ern­ment or mil­i­tary offi­cials who might have been aware of or com­plicit in his hid­ing in Abbottabad.

It wasn't imme­di­ately clear how many of bin Laden's doc­u­ments the U.S. was still keep­ing secret. In a note pub­lished with the 175 pages in Ara­bic that were released Thurs­day along with Eng­lish trans­la­tions, retired Gen. John Abizaid said they prob­a­bly rep­re­sent only a small frac­tion of mate­ri­als taken from the com­pound in the U.S. raid that tracked down and killed bin Laden in May 2011. The U.S. said the doc­u­ments span Sep­tem­ber 2006 to April 2011.

The report said the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions troops in the bin Laden raid were trained to search the home after­ward for thumb dri­ves, printed doc­u­ments and what it described as "pocket lit­ter" that might pro­duce leads to other ter­ror­ists. "The end of the raid in Abbot­tabad was the begin­ning of a mas­sive ana­lyt­i­cal effort," it said.

It said the per­sonal files showed that, dur­ing one of the most sig­nif­i­cant man­hunts in his­tory, bin Laden was out of touch with the day-to-day oper­a­tions of var­i­ous ter­ror­ist groups inspired by al-Qaida. He was "not in sync on the oper­a­tional level with its so-called affil­i­ates," researchers wrote. "Bin Laden enjoyed lit­tle con­trol over either groups affil­i­ated with al Qaida in name or so-called fel­low travelers."

Posted by Scott Mahoney on May 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.