Bin Laden hideout papers show terrorist racked with doubts

He was plotting new attacks on the US right up until he was killed by special forces last year.

A selection of documents seized in last year’s raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan house was posted online yesterday by the US Army’s Combating Terrorism Centre.

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 organisation 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 US leaders.

He particularly wished to target planes carrying General 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 United States into crisis.

However a report by US analysts’ report released together with bin Laden’s correspondence describes him as upset over the inability of spin-off 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 adviser Adam Gadahn urged him to disassociate their organisation from the acts of al-Qaida’s spin-off operation in Iraq, known as AQI, and bin Laden told other terrorist groups not to repeat AQI’s mistakes.

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.