[imagesource: Robert Clark / Associated Press]

Last September marked 20 years since a terror attack that will forever be remembered for shaking America, and the world, to its core.

It’s worth watching Netflix’s Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror if you want to understand what led to that point.

The latest details on what al-Qaeda had planned post-9/11 come via The Bin Laden Papers, written by Nelly Lahoud, which unpacks the documents found by the team of Navy Seals that killed Bin Laden in May 2011.

More than 470 000 files were recovered from multiple computers, including close to 6 000 Arabic pages of internal al-Qaeda communication.

Those pages and files were recently declassified and have been analysed by Lahoud, an Arabic-speaking expert in security and counter-terrorism.

According to The Telegraph, they offer “an extraordinary insight into the inner workings of Al-Qaeda, both before and after 9/11”:

The papers also reveal that, from 2004, Bin Laden [below, in 1998] worked tirelessly to rebuild his shattered organisation and at the time of his death was planning another “spectacular”: a coordinated attack on supertankers carrying oil to the United States.

He hoped to choke off a third of America’s oil supply, thus producing an economic meltdown and public protests that would lead to a change in US foreign policy.

Image: Rahimullah Yousafzai / Associated Press

Might it have worked? Not according to former US general Joseph Votel. Al-Qaeda could have sunk the tankers, argues Votel, but this would not have destroyed the US economy. This is yet more evidence for Lahoud of the “vast chasm” between Bin Laden’s “global vision and the absence of the means by which to realize it”.

In the years following 9/11, most of al-Qaeda’s leaders went into hiding or were imprisoned in Iran, which blunted the organisation’s effectiveness.

The declassified papers also shed more light on how Bin Laden’s whereabouts were revealed:

After Bin Laden’s death, the CIA claimed they were able to identify his compound by intercepting calls made by one of his Pakistani security guards, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. This, says Lahoud, was deliberate disinformation to protect the probable informant, Abu al-Harish al-Sindi, who was one of three trusted intermediaries between Bin Laden and his followers in North Waziristan.

From the papers, Lahoud discovers that al-Sindi was arrested by the Pakistani security service, ISI, in January 2011. Bin Laden knew this, but took no precautions.

A scribbled note by Bin Laden, also collected during the Navy Seal raid, details how he came up with the idea for 9/11.

In 1999, a pilot deliberately crashed EgyptAir Flight 990 flying from New York to Cairo and killed all 217 people on board.

Bin Laden thought the pilot could have killed far more people if he chose to crash the plane into “a financial tower” and identified New York’s financial district, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building in Washington DC as ideal targets.

[source:telegraph]