BEIRUT, Lebanon – Recruits at Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were clamoring for suicide missions against the United States more than a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks, according to al-Qaida documents declassified by the U.S. Defense Department.
One document published on the Pentagon Web site this week contained rare criticism of bin Laden from an al-Qaida operative, who accused the terrorist leader of monopolizing decision-making and ignoring advice.
“We must completely stop outside operations until we sit down and consider the disaster we have caused,” said the operative, who used the name Abdel Halim Adel.
Adel appealed to a friend in the al-Qaida leadership to steer the group away from the policies of bin Laden, whom he referred to as Abu Abdullah.
“Stop foreign operations, stop sending people to detention, and stop planning new operations, whether they are ordered by Abu Abdullah or not,” he wrote.
The documents provide a rare glimpse of the mentality and training of recruits at al-Qaida’s camps in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was based until late 2001. After the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the United States threw its weight behind opponents of the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden.
While the camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed, many of those who trained there have returned to their home countries, taking al-Qaida’s ideology and tactics with them.
The U.S. military said the documents, published Wednesday, were “captured during recent operations.” Some were seized in the 2003 invasion of Iraq but many, according to U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, were found in Afghanistan.
“Why have the martyrdom operations against the Americans been delayed?” one recruit wrote on a calendar page dated July 8, 2000.
Another recruit referred to the 1998 suicide attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 231 people, saying: “We look forward to martyrdom operations like the ones in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. What are the characteristics of the man that is required to execute such operations?”
A third recruit asked the leadership why it disapproved of assassination: “Why do you oppose and find it inappropriate, knowing that it cleansed many tyrants?”
The Pentagon cautioned it has made “no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy.”
Bomb kills police
A roadside bomb in Afghanistan killed five police officers Friday as they traveled in a convoy to Kandahar transporting four bodies believed to be Macedonian workers kidnapped in southern Afghanistan a week ago, a senior official said.
The four Macedonian employees of a German firm were purportedly abducted by Taliban.
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