Osama bin Laden documents released: trove from Al-Qaida leader’s compound declassified

Bin Laden (AP/File)

A selection from more than 6,000 pages documents seized during the May 1, 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden were released on Thursday by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, giving the public a rare glimpse into the Al-Qaida leader's terror plans and largely solitary life.
A total of 17 documents totaling 175 pages--uncovered from bin Laden's Abbottabad compound by U.S. forces.--were released by the CDC. Both the Arabic originals and versions translated and summarized in English were posted on the center's website shortly before 9 a.m. ET.

The earliest letter is dated September 2006 and the latest April 2011, the CDC said. The internal communications were authored by several al-Qaida leaders, including bin Laden, Atiyya Abd al-Rahman, Abu Yahya al-Libi and Adam Gadahn, the terror group's American spokesman.

Given that the electronic documents were "saved on thumb drives, memory cards or the hard drive of Bin Laden's computer," the CDC noted, it's unclear whether any of these letters reached their intended destinations.

As was previously reported, the documents show that bin Laden had ordered the assassinations of President Barack Obama and U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, but did not have the resources to carry out the killings.

"Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President Joe] Biden take over the presidency," Bin Laden wrote in a message to one of his top lieutenants, the Washington Post noted. "Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis."

"Bin Laden would come up with an idea but it was a very broad aspirational idea," an administration official told NBC ahead of the West Point release. "And then he'd turn it over to somebody and there was always some sort of disconnect."

By the end of 2010, the official added, "there was certainly a sense of loss in terms of the senior leaders that perished, a sense that the midlevel cadre had been decimated."