General

Letters reveal Osama bin Laden’s plans for 10th anniversary of 9/11 attacks

A sheaf of letters obtained at Osama bin Laden’s last refuge in Pakistan showed that the former Al Qaeda leader planned to release a package of special materials to the media ahead of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Journalists in the United States, the United Kingdom and in four other countries, including Canada, were mentioned by Al Qaeda’s spokesman Adam Gadahn, as possible recipients of the materials in the letters.

From the Toronto Star:

Among the journalists Gadahn favoured were Eric Margolis, a longtime columnist with the Toronto Sun, and Canadian author Gwynne Dyer, a syndicated columnist based in London.

Margolis, Dyer and others would receive a link to a password-protected website to download materials perhaps five days before the anniversary.

Al Qaeda’s plans to mark the Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary were included in a trove of documents bin Laden allegedly wrote and received between September 2006 and April 2011.

The correspondence was obtained last year in the raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden. Seventeen of those documents, a collective 175 pages, were published Thursday by the U.S. Army’s Combating Terrorism Center.

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