Terrorism

Bin Laden Obsessed with U.S. Attack

Wanted al Qaeda to recruit African Americans, Latinos.

Osama bin Laden was so preoccupied with staging another terrorist attack on U.S. soil that it began to chafe some of his followers, who focused on operations in places like Yemen and Somalia instead. According to his journal and files recovered from his compound, bin Laden wanted al Qaeda to recruit non-Muslims “who are oppressed in the United States”—especially African Americans and Latinos—to help with attacks and suggested targeting cities other than New York and Washington. He seemed to care little about operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. collected what amounts to millions of pages of documents from bin Laden’s compound; scans, so far, have taken the form of keyword searches of things like city names and al Qaeda names.