Usama bin Laden wanted to kill Obama so 'totally unprepared' Biden would be president, declassified docs show
Usama
bin Laden wanted to assassinate then-President Barack Obama so that the
"totally unprepared" Joe Biden would take over as president and plunge
the United States "into a crisis," according to documents seized from
bin Laden's Pakistan compound when he was killed in May 2011. The secretive documents, first reported
in 2012 by The Washington Post, outlined a plan to take out Obama and
top U.S. military commander David Petraeus as they traveled by plane. “The
reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of
infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President]
Biden take over the presidency," bin Laden wrote to a top deputy. "Biden
is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a
crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour ... and killing him
would alter the war's path" in Afghanistan. Bin Laden specifically wanted fellow terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri to shoot down Obama. “Please
ask brother Ilyas to send me the steps he has taken into that work,”
bin Laden wrote to the top lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. Kashmiri
wouldn't get too far along in the plot, however; he was killed in 2011
in a U.S. drone strike shortly after bin Laden himself was shot to death
by U.S. special forces.
Usama bin Laden said he wanted Joe Biden to be president, according to declassified documents.
Intelligence officials told the Post that bin Laden's plan never progressed past the aspirational stage. For his part, Biden has sent mixed signals on his role in bin Laden's death, as explained at length in a timeline
by The Washington Examiner's Jerry Dunleavy. In late April 2011, Obama
gathered together a team that included Biden before making a final
decision on whether to strike at bin Laden's suspected compound. In January 2012, Biden revealed he had opposed to
the raid, and claimed that “every single person in that room hedged
their bet” except for CIA Director Leon Panetta, who supported striking
the compound. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go,” Biden said he told his boss, as reported by The New York Times. "We have to do two more things to see if he's there.'" But in 2015, Biden changed his mind and said he had told Obama he "should go." Obama
himself verified Biden's opposition to the plan, telling Mitt Romney in
a 2012 presidential debate, “Even some in my own party, including my
current vice president, had the same critique as you did." On CBS’s “60 Minutes" in Oct. 2015, Biden tried to clear up the confusion, and insisted everything he said had been "accurate." “In
order to give the president the leeway he needed, I said, ‘Mr.
President, there’s one more thing we can do.’ … One more pass to see if
it was bin Laden. I said, ‘You should do that, and there’d still be time
to have the raid, but that’s what I would do,” Biden said. SEAL
Team Six ultimately landed at bin Laden's compound in two MH-60 Black
Hawks, killed the terror leader and seized a fateful cache of valuable
intelligence.
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