US uses bin Laden letters to degrade al-Qaida

CALVIN WOODWARD

MATT APUZZO

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Let­ters from Osama bin Laden’s last hide­away, released by U.S. offi­cials intent on dis­cred­it­ing his ter­ror orga­ni­za­tion, por­tray a net­work weak, inept and under siege — and its leader seem­ingly near wit’s end about the pass­ing of his global jihad’s glory days.

The doc­u­ments, pub­lished online Thurs­day, are a small sam­ple of those seized dur­ing the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s Pak­istan com­pound in which he was killed a year ago. By no acci­dent, they show al-Qaida at its worst. The raid has become the sig­na­ture national secu­rity moment of Barack Obama’s pres­i­dency and one he is eager to empha­size in his re-election campaign.

Those ends are served in the 17 doc­u­ments cho­sen by U.S. offi­cials for the world to see — not to men­tion Amer­i­can vot­ers. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has refused to release a fuller record of its bin Laden col­lec­tion, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to glean any larger truths about the state of the ter­ror­ist organization.

What is clear from the doc­u­ments released so far is that al-Qaida’s lead­ers are con­stantly on the run from unmanned U.S. air­craft and try­ing to evade detec­tion by CIA spies and National Secu­rity Agency eavesdroppers.

In one let­ter, either bin Laden him­self or his senior deputy tells the leader of Yemen’s al-Qaida off­shoot that, in the face of U.S. power, it is futile to try to estab­lish a gov­ern­ment that will offer it safe haven.

“Even though we were able to mil­i­tar­ily and eco­nom­i­cally exhaust and weaken our great­est enemy before and after the eleventh,” the let­ter says, refer­ring to the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror­ist attacks, “the enemy con­tin­ues to pos­sess the abil­ity to top­ple any state we establish.”

Again and again in the let­ters, bin Laden and his inner cir­cle strug­gle to keep the focus of Islamic ter­ror­ism on killing Amer­i­cans and tamp down attacks by al-Qaida affil­i­ates on Mus­lim inno­cents. The doc­u­ments describe the U.S. as “a mali­cious tree with a huge trunk,” and its allies as mere branches not worth al-Qaida’s time.

From his redoubt in Pak­istan, bin Laden was keenly aware that his organization’s stand­ing with Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions was crumbling.

“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.”

Such pas­sages offer a glimpse into the terrorist’s mind­set. They also fit into the U.S. government’s pub­lic rela­tions fight with al-Qaida. The U.S. has repeat­edly sought to dimin­ish the group’s stand­ing in the Mus­lim world.

The doc­u­ments, which date from Sep­tem­ber 2006 to April 2011, were declas­si­fied by U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials and posted by schol­ars at the U.S. Mil­i­tary Acad­emy at West Point. As part of the declas­si­fi­ca­tion process, intel­li­gence offi­cials would have with­held any doc­u­ments that they felt could inflame anti-American sen­ti­ment — another rea­son the doc­u­ments offer a largely san­i­tized version.

The release was the lat­est beat in a drum­roll from the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. Over sev­eral weeks, offi­cials have leaked select doc­u­ments seized in the raid, Obama has made a sur­prise visit to Afghanistan and the pres­i­dent and senior offi­cials have made them­selves avail­able for an hour-long show about the raid on NBC.

Yet the admin­is­tra­tion has refused requests by The Asso­ci­ated Press to review U.S. gov­ern­ment records — includ­ing heli­copter main­te­nance logs and reports about the per­for­mance of mil­i­tary gear used in the raid — that could pro­vide insights into how bin Laden died, how the U.S. ver­i­fied his iden­tity and how it decided to bury him at sea.

Obama’s re-election cam­paign dis­trib­uted a video ques­tion­ing whether Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney would have ordered the raid on bin Laden’s com­pound. Rom­ney snapped back that “of course” he would have.

White House spokesman Jay Car­ney said the new doc­u­ments came out after a long process of declas­si­fi­ca­tion and analy­sis, and the tim­ing was dri­ven in part by inter­est sur­round­ing the anniver­sary of bin Laden’s death.

The doc­u­ments show that bin Laden’s inner cir­cle was frus­trated when, in 2010, atten­tion in the U.S. shifted to the eco­nomic down­turn with­out link­ing al-Qaida to the dam­age. “All the polit­i­cal talk in Amer­ica is about the econ­omy, for­get­ting or ignor­ing the war and its role in weak­en­ing the econ­omy,” wrote his spokesman, Adam Gadahn.

As bin Laden strug­gled to right his orga­ni­za­tion, no detail seemed too small for his atten­tion. In one let­ter, he 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.” Adults should be with them out­side to keep their voices down, he said.

The main mes­sage of the doc­u­ments released so far is that “bin Laden is bur­dened by the incom­pe­tence of his jihadi broth­ers,” said Nelly Lahoud, one of the West Point schol­ars who stud­ied the cor­re­spon­dence. “I wouldn’t want to be any one of them.”

Bin Laden’s oper­a­tives, much like arm­chair polit­i­cal junkies in the United States, were atten­tive view­ers of U.S. TV news.

Gadahn described ABC as “all right, actu­ally it could be one of the best chan­nels as far as we are con­cerned,” crit­i­cized CNN as being too close to the gov­ern­ment and heaped scorn on Fox News, which “falls into the abyss, as you know, and lacks neu­tral­ity.” He said of Fox: “Let her die in anger.”

Al-Qaida’s rela­tion­ship with Iran, a point of abid­ing 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. Oth­ers remain.

Abd al-Rahman, who became al-Qaida’s No. 2 after bin Laden’s death, com­plained bit­terly about deal­ing with the Ira­ni­ans and what he con­sid­ered their Byzan­tine meth­ods of nego­ti­at­ing. He died 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,” he wrote of the Ira­ni­ans. “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.”

In other documents:

• It appeared bin Laden was unaware of the planned bomb­ing of Times Square in New York in May 2010, by al-Qaida asso­ciates in Pak­istan, but he was dis­ap­pointed that it failed.
• Bin Laden warned the leader of the affil­i­ate group in Yemen against attempt­ing to take over the gov­ern­ment and estab­lish an Islamic state, instead say­ing he should “refo­cus his efforts on attack­ing the United States.”
• Bin Laden appeared unin­ter­ested in rec­og­niz­ing Somali-based al-Shabab when that 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, such as cut­ting off the hands of thieves.

The pic­ture formed from the small sam­pling — of ter­ror­ists who were more pathetic than potent — is not complete.

In the period cov­ered by the let­ters, al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen rat­tled the U.S. by smug­gling a bomb onto a plane and nearly tak­ing it down on Christ­mas 2009. That group also sneaked bombs onto cargo planes in 2010 as part of a plot that the U.S. foiled at the last minute.

Al-Qaida in the Ara­bian Penin­sula, as the Yemen branch is known, has an elu­sive mas­ter bomb maker among its ranks and remains intent on car­ry­ing out attacks on U.S. interests.

Posted by AP News on May 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.