Terror by any other name: Osama eyed name change

MATT APUZZO

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — As Osama bin Laden watched his ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion get picked apart, he lamented in his final writ­ings that al-Qaida was suf­fer­ing from a mar­ket­ing prob­lem. His group was killing too many Mus­lims and that was bad for busi­ness. The West was win­ning the pub­lic rela­tions fight. All his old com­rades were dead and he barely knew their replacements.

Faced with these chal­lenges, bin Laden, who hated the United States and decried cap­i­tal­ism, con­sid­ered a most Amer­i­can of busi­ness strate­gies. Like Black­wa­ter, Val­u­Jet and Philip Mor­ris, per­haps what al-Qaida really needed was a fresh start under a new name.

The prob­lem with the name al-Qaida, bin Laden wrote in a let­ter recov­ered from his com­pound in Pak­istan, was that it lacked a reli­gious ele­ment, some­thing to con­vince Mus­lims world­wide that they are in a holy war with America.

Maybe some­thing like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, mean­ing Monothe­ism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote. Or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, mean­ing Restora­tion of the Caliphate Group.

As bin Laden saw it, the prob­lem was that the group’s full name, al-Qaida al-Jihad, or The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as sim­ply al-Qaida. Lop­ping off the word “jihad,” bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to “claim decep­tively that they are not at war with Islam.” Maybe it was time for al-Qaida to bring back its orig­i­nal name.

The let­ter, which was undated, was dis­cov­ered among bin Laden’s recent writ­ings. Navy SEALs stormed his com­pound and killed him before any name change could be made. The let­ter was described by senior admin­is­tra­tion, national secu­rity and other U.S. offi­cials only on con­di­tion of anonymity because the mate­ri­als are sen­si­tive. The doc­u­ments por­tray bin Laden as a ter­ror­ist chief exec­u­tive, strug­gling to sell holy war for a com­pany in crisis.

At the White House, the doc­u­ments were taken as pos­i­tive rein­force­ment for Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s effort to elim­i­nate reli­giously charged words from the government’s lan­guage of ter­ror­ism. Words like “jihad,” which also has a peace­ful reli­gious mean­ing, are out. “Islamic rad­i­cal” has been nixed in favor of “ter­ror­ist” and “mass mur­derer.” Though for­mer mem­bers of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion have backed that effort, it also has drawn ridicule from crit­ics who said the pres­i­dent was being too polit­i­cally correct.

“The infor­ma­tion that we recov­ered from bin Laden’s com­pound shows al-Qaida under enor­mous strain,” Obama said Wednes­day in his speech to the nation on with­draw­ing troops from Afghanistan. “Bin Laden expressed con­cern that al-Qaida had been unable to effec­tively replace senior ter­ror­ists that had been killed and that al-Qaida has failed in its effort to por­tray Amer­ica as a nation at war with Islam, thereby drain­ing more wide­spread support.”

Bin Laden wrote his mus­ings about renam­ing al-Qaida as a let­ter but, as with many of his writ­ings, the recip­i­ent was not iden­ti­fied. Intel­li­gence offi­cials have deter­mined that bin Laden only com­mu­ni­cated with his most senior com­man­ders, includ­ing his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and his No. 3, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, accord­ing to one U.S. offi­cial. Because of the courier sys­tem bin Laden used, it’s unclear to U.S. intel­li­gence whether the let­ter ever was sent.

Al-Yazid was killed in a U.S. airstrike last year. Zawahri has replaced bin Laden as head of al-Qaida.

In one let­ter sent to Zawahri within the past year or so, bin Laden said al-Qaida’s image was suf­fer­ing because of attacks that have killed Mus­lims, par­tic­u­larly in Iraq, offi­cials said. In other jour­nal entries and let­ters, they said, bin Laden wrote that he was frus­trated that many of his trusted long­time com­rades, whom he’d fought along­side in Afghanistan, had been killed or captured.

Using his courier sys­tem, bin Laden could still exer­cise some oper­a­tional con­trol over al-Qaida. But increas­ingly the men he was direct­ing were younger and inex­pe­ri­enced. Fre­quently, the gen­er­als who had vouched for these young fight­ers were dead or in prison. And bin Laden, unable to leave his walled com­pound and with no phone or Inter­net access, was annoyed that he did not know so many peo­ple in his own organization.

The U.S. has essen­tially com­pleted the review of doc­u­ments taken from bin Laden’s com­pound, offi­cials said, though intel­li­gence ana­lysts will con­tinue to mine the data for a long time.

Posted by AP News on Jun 24 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.