Bin Laden targeted trains and small cities

DEEP in hiding, Osama bin Laden kept pressing followers to find ways to hit the US, officials said, citing his private journal and other documents recovered in last week’s raid.

Strike smaller cities, bin Laden suggested. Target trains as well as planes. Kill as many Americans as possible in a single attack.

Though he was out of the public eye and al-Qaida seemed to be weakening, bin Laden never yielded control, US officials said. His personal, handwritten journal and his massive collection of computer files reveal his hand at work in every recent major al-Qaida threat, including plots in Europe last year that had travellers and embassies on high alert, two officials said.

The information shattered the US government’s thinking about bin Laden, who had been regarded for years as mostly an inspirational figurehead.

Instead, he was communicating from his walled compound in Pakistan with al-Qaida’s offshoots, including the Yemen branch that has emerged as the leading threat to the US, the documents indicate.

Though there is no evidence he was directly behind the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner or the nearly successful attack on cargo planes heading for Chicago and Philadelphia, it’s now clear they bear some of bin Laden’s hallmarks.

Don’t limit attacks to New York, he said in his writings. Consider areas such as Los Angeles or smaller cities.

Bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the US to withdraw from the Arab world. He concludes that only a body count of thousands, on the scale of the September 11, 2001, attacks, would shift US policy.

The communications were in missives sent via flash drives. The devices were ferried to bin Laden’s compound by couriers, a process that is slow but exceptionally difficult to track.