Al Qaeda Targets Trains, Planes

Osama bin Laden’s private diary has revealed plans by his terror network to hit America including striking smaller cities, targeting trains and planes and killing as many Americans as possible in a single attack.

Fox News quoting US intelligence sources said last night that the handwritten journal was impounded in the Pakistani hide-out of the Al Qaeda leader, following the raid of the compound and the killing of the man.

According to Fox News, the journal was part of the largest intelligence collection ever, including 100 flash drives and five computers.

Fox also reported that though Osama bin Laden lived like a prisoner in his Abbatobad home since 2005, he never yielded control of his worldwide organisation, U.S. officials said. Documents show his hand at work in every recent major Al Qaeda threat, including plots in Europe last year that had travellers and embassies on high alert, two officials said.

The information shatters the government’s conventional thinking about bin Laden, who had been regarded for years as mostly an inspirational figurehead whose years in hiding made him too marginalised to maintain operational control of the organisation he founded.

Instead, bin Laden was communicating from his walled compound in Pakistan with Al Qaeda’s offshoots, including the Yemen branch that has emerged as the leading threat to the United States, the documents indicate. Though there is no evidence yet that 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 that they bear some of bin Laden’s hallmarks.

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

In one particularly macabre bit of mathematics, bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world. He concludes that small attacks had not been enough. He tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, would shift U.S. policy.

Al Qaeda has not named bin Laden’s successor, but all indications point to his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. The question is whether al-Zawahri, or anyone, has the ability to keep so many disparate groups under the Al Qaeda banner. The groups in Somalia and Algeria, for instance, have very different goals focused on local grievances. Without bin Laden to serve as their shepherd, it’s possible Al Qaeda will further fragment.