Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded
his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to
attack the aircraft of President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus.
“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader
explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of
infidelity and killing him automatically will make (Vice President Joe)
Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that
post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the
man of the hour … and killing him would alter the war’s path” in
Afghanistan.
Administration officials said Friday the Obama-Petraeus plot was never a serious threat.
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| Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri |
The
scheme is described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s
compound by U.S. forces on May 2, the night he was killed. I was given
an exclusive look at some of these remarkable documents by a senior
administration official. They have been declassified and will be
available soon to the public in their original Arabic texts and
translations.
The man bin Laden hoped would carry out the attacks
on Obama and Petraeus was the Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri.
“Please ask brother Ilyas to send me the steps he has taken into that
work,” bin Laden wrote to his top lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. A
month after bin Laden’s death, Kashmiri was killed in a U.S. drone
attack.
The plot to target Obama was probably bluster, since
al-Qaeda apparently lacked the weapons to shoot down U.S. aircraft. But
it’s a chilling reminder that even when he was embattled and in hiding,
bin Laden still dreamed of pulling off another spectacular terrorist
attack against the United States.
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