Letters show bin Laden was isolated, angry

May 4, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

Seventeen letters seized from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout by the Navy SEALs who found and killed him there last May expose the international terrorist icon in his final years as increasingly irrelevant to his own movement.

The selection of letters — written between 2006 and April 2011 and released Thursday by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point — show bin Laden to be frustrated by the actions of the al-Qaida affiliates that had cropped up around the world and claimed the mantle of the organization he’d founded. With al-Qaida’s central organization largely destroyed and what was left harried and in hiding, the letters indicate that bin Laden and his inner circle were unable to direct the activities of a network of affiliates — from Pakistan to Yemen to Algeria — over which he apparently had little or no control.

During bin Laden’s final years, as American and NATO forces focused the war on terrorism on breaking apart al-Qaida’s ability to operate from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the terrorist leader was dashing off letters that were highly critical of the affiliates’ operations, particularly those that resulted in the deaths of Muslims, and making calls for attacks that appear to have been ignored. Among them, bin Laden called for assassinating President Barack Obama — which he said would leave a “totally unprepared” Vice President Joe Biden to assume power — and Gen. David Petraeus, who was then the head of U.S. Central Command.