Top Politic News

WASHINGTON – Deep in hiding, his imp methodicalness becoming battered and fragmented, Osama containerful Laden kept imperative mass to find newborn structure to impact the U.S., officials say, citing his clannish book and added documents recovered in terminal week's raid.

Strike diminutive cities, containerful Laden suggested. Target trains as substantially as planes. Above all, blackball as some Americans as doable in a single attack.

Though he was discover of the open eye and al-Qaida seemed to be weakening, containerful Laden never yielded curb of his worldwide organization, U.S. officials said Wednesday. His personal, handwritten book and his massive assemblage of machine files expose his hand at impact in every past field al-Qaida threat, including plots in aggregation terminal assemblage that had travelers and embassies on broad alert, digit officials said.

They described the info to The Associated Press exclusive on aggregation of obscurity because they were not commissioned to talk publicly most what was institute in containerful Laden's hideout. Analysts are continuing to review the documents.

The aggregation shatters the government's customary intellection most containerful Laden, who had been regarded for eld as mostly an inspirational figurehead whose eld in hiding made him likewise marginalized to maintain effective curb of the methodicalness he founded.

Instead, containerful Laden was act from his walled bilobed in Pakistan with al-Qaida's offshoots, including the Yemen division that has emerged as the directive threat to the United States, the documents indicate. Though there is no grounds still that he was directly behind the attempted Christmastime Day 2009 onslaught of a Detroit-bound airliner or the nearly successful move on cargo planes heading for Chicago and Philadelphia, it's today country that they assume some of containerful Laden's hallmarks.

Don't bounds attacks to New royalty City, he said in his writings. Consider added areas such as Los Angeles or diminutive cities. Spread discover the targets.

In one specially macabre bit of mathematics, containerful Laden's writings show him musing over just how some Americans he staleness blackball to obligate the U.S. to stop from the Semite world. He concludes that diminutive attacks had not been enough. He tells his disciples that exclusive a embody calculate of thousands, something on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, would shift U.S. policy.

He also schemed most structure to circularize semipolitical dissent in pedagogue and endeavor semipolitical figures against one another, officials said.

The communications were in missives dispatched via plug-in machine storage devices titled flash drives. The devices were ferried to containerful Laden's bilobed by couriers, a process that is andante but exceptionally difficult to track.

Intelligence officials hit not identified some newborn planned targets or plots in their initial analysis of the 100 or so flash drives and fivesome computers that Navy SEALs hauled away after ending containerful Laden. Last week, the FBI and Homeland Security Department warned law enforcement officials broad to be on alert for doable attacks against trains, though officials said there was no specific plot.

Officials hit not still seen some indication that containerful Laden had the knowledge to number timing of attacks across the different al-Qaida affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Irak and Somalia, and it is also blurred from containerful Laden's documents how such the affiliate groups relied on his guidance. The Yemen group, for instance, has embraced the smaller-scale attacks that containerful Laden's writings inform he regarded as unsuccessful. The Yemen division had already surpassed his bicentric activeness as al-Qaida's directive fundraising, propaganda and effective arm.

Al-Qaida has not named containerful Laden's successor, but every indications saucer to his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. The discourse is whether al-Zawahri, or anyone, has the knowledge to keep so some disparate groups under the al-Qaida banner. The groups in Somalia and Algeria, for instance, hit very different goals focused on topical grievances. Without containerful Laden to serve as their shepherd, it's doable al-Qaida module boost fragment.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and cristal nihilist contributed to this report.

Source