In 2011, Osama bin Laden mulled assassinating then-US President Barack Obama, but did not plan to kill then-VP Joe Biden because the number one terrorist deemed Biden as unprepared to be at the helm of America, a new book has claimed.
“The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden", written by a national security analyst and former CNN producer, Peter Bergen, was released on Thursday.
According to the author, as time was ticking towards the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, “Bin Laden was eager to memorialise the occasion with another spectacular strike” against America.
“He told his lieutenants that he wanted ‘effective operations whose impact, God willing, is bigger than that of 9/11’. He explained that killing President Barack Obama was a high priority, but he also had General David Petraeus, at that time the US commander in Afghanistan, in his sights”, Bergen wrote.
He argued that the then-al-Qaeda leader “told his team not to bother with plots against Vice President Joe Biden, whom he considered ‘totally unprepared’ for the post of president”.
Bergen did not elaborate on why bin Laden thought so, only suggesting that his push for another major strike on the US was allegedly because he felt “agitated” that he was being forgotten.
“History seemed to be passing him by”, Bergen claimed, adding that the jihadist’s other plots had “fizzled”, which ostensibly prodded bin Laden to focus on Arab Spring events rather than his calls for jihad.
“As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, his overriding goal was to carry out another spectacular terrorist attack against the US. He died knowing that he had failed”, Bergen argued.
6 December 2020, 07:36 GMT
On 2 May 2011, US Special Forces raided an al-Qaeda compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden as part of Operation Neptune Spear.
The raid came almost 10 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States, which claimed the lives of at least 2,977 people and injured some 6,000 others. The 9/11 attacks led Washington to declare a war on terror, and to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
*al-Qaeda is a terrorist group banned in Russia and a number of other countries