Osama Bin Laden plotted to assassinate Barack Obama on Afghan flight

OSAMA bin Laden plotted to kill Barack Obama because the assassination would elevate an “utterly unprepared” Joe Biden into the presidency and plunge the US into crisis, letters from the terrorist’s last hideout reveal.

Documents seized in last year’s raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan house, posted online by the US army, show the al-Qaeda leader was plotting new attacks on the West right up until he was killed by special forces last year.

• Read the Osama Bin Laden report in full

Bin Laden wished especially to target planes carrying President Obama and General David Petraeus. Vice-president Biden would become president after the assassination. Letters also show bin Laden worrying about mistakes within his organisation and its terrorist allies, and the need to regain the trust of potential Muslim supporters.

“I plan to release a statement that we are starting a new phase to correct [the mistakes] we made,” he 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.”

A US analysts’ report released along 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-Qaeda’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-Taleban Pakistan to task over its indiscriminate attacks on Muslims.

The al-Qaeda leadership “threatened to take public measures unless we see from you serious and immediate practical and clear steps towards reforming and dissociating yourself from these vile mistakes that violate Islamic Law,” al-Libi wrote.

And bin Laden 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”.

Bin Laden also seemed uninterested in recognising 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, such as cutting off the hands of thieves.

The US said the letters reflect al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran – a point of deep interest to the US government – as “not one of alliance, but of indirect and unpleasant negotiations” over some al-Qaeda terrorists and their families who were imprisoned in Iran.

Nothing in the papers that were released points directly to al-Qaeda sympathisers in Pakistan’s government, although such references would be likely to remain classified.

It was not immediately clear how many of bin Laden’s documents the US was keeping secret.

In a note published with the 175 pages in Arabic that were released along with English translations, retired General John Abizaid said the pages probably represent only a small fraction of materials taken from the compound in the US raid that tracked down and killed bin Laden in May 2011. The US said the documents span September 2006 to April 2011.