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Bin Laden Raid Data Points To Planned Plots

David McAlpine |
May 6, 2011 | 11:44 a.m. PDT

Executive Producer

One possible terror plot targeted U.S. rail and subway systems. (Photo via Flickr)
One possible terror plot targeted U.S. rail and subway systems. (Photo via Flickr)
Senior U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida, was directing more terror attacks against the United States after preliminary analysis of documents and electronic files found in the compound where he was killed, according to government officials.

Senior officials said files on confiscated computers and flash drives found in bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan pointed to a plan to attack American railroads on this year's 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Officials added that this plan had been active since as early as February of last year.

The New York Times reported:

The documents include a handwritten notebook from February 2010 that discusses tampering with tracks to derail a train on a bridge, possibly on Christmas, New Year’s Day, the day of the State of the Union address or the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said. But they said there was no evidence of a specific plot.

An Obama administration official said that documents about attacking railroads were among the first to be translated from Arabic and analyzed. The materials, along with others reviewed in the intelligence cache, have given intelligence officials a much richer picture of the Qaeda founder’s leadership of the network as he tried to elude a global dragnet.

“He wasn’t just a figurehead,” said one American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, who had been briefed on the documents. “He continued to plot and plan, to come up with ideas about targets and to communicate those ideas to other senior Qaeda leaders.”

The potential terror plot findings were just the beginning of U.S. analysis of the information they collected after Sunday's raid of bin Laden's compound.

“Other leaders of al-Qaeda should be concerned,” said a U.S. official familiar with the investigation. “The U.S. government is on to many of them.”

CNN reported:

Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former FBI agent, said Thursday that some of the material is encrypted and its language is an immediate obstacle, "so it's going to take a little longer than people think. We have to sort through all of those issues and then they'll have a series of things that they want to look at first."

But Rogers, R-Michigan, said the information gathered will be "incredibly valuable" to the war on terror and "I would argue now is the time to step on the gas."

"Think about how we caught bin Laden -- a nickname out of an interrogation five years ago and a constant investigation and widening what we know to finally get Osama bin Laden. We're likely to get more than just a nickname in some of this information that I think is going to be incredibly valuable."

McLaughlin said it's unlikely that investigators will find a "soup-to-nuts" description of an unfolding plot, but the body of information the United States has developed over the last 10 to 15 years about al Qaeda will mean "little clues that would be meaningless to the average person will be very meaningful to an intelligence analyst."

As details continued to come out about what U.S. officials found inside the compound, the CIA began to reveal how they tracked bin Laden in Abbottabad as well. Officials from the intelligence agency said they maintained a safe house in the Pakistani town to help establish an idea of day-to-day operations at bin Laden's hideout.

From The Washington Post:

The on-the-ground surveillance work was part of an intelligence-gathering push mobilized after the discovery of the suspicious complex in August that involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound.

The effort was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.

Most of that surveillance capability remained in place until the execution of the raid by U.S. Navy SEALs shortly after 1 a.m. in Pakistan. The agency’s safe house did not play a role in the raid and has since been shut down, in part because of concerns about the safety of CIA assets in the aftermath, but also because the agency’s work was considered finished.



 

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