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.
AP
Though he was out of the public eye and al-Qaida seemed to be weakening, bin Laden never yielded control of his worldwide organization, U.S. officials said Wednesday. His personal, handwritten journal and his massive collection of computer files reveal his hand at work in every recent major al-Qaida threat, including plots in Europe last year that had travelers and embassies on high alert, two officials said.
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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 marginalized to maintain operational control of the organization he founded.
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Officials have not yet seen any indication that bin Laden had the ability to coordinate timing of attacks across the various al-Qaida affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and Somalia, and it is also unclear from bin Laden's documents how much the affiliate groups relied on his guidance.
As I said from the beginning - the story that Osama bin Laden was irrelevant was a Bush Administration lie, spread to reduce the political cost of not bringing him to justice after Bush swore to do so. And then gave up on the effort in 2006, disbanding the CIA's team which was dedicated to doing so.
And as I've commented several times in recent days, bin Laden was not merely a wanted criminal. He was a commander of a force engaged in asymmetrical warfare and therefore a valid target for a military operation.
The world is a much better place because ObL has been subtracted from it. He wanted very much to stage another 9-11 sized attack.