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"First of all, we will be held responsible for this before God Almighty. And in practical terms, it causes great damage to the message of jihad," he writes in a May 2010 letter to the same lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who was himself killed in an August airstrike in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. Instead, he advises, they should focus on attacking Americans, whether in the U.S. or in countries where the mujahedeen would not be vulnerable to retaliation. But al-Qaida's allies did not necessarily heed the advice. The Pakistani Taliban, for example, are suspected in persistent suicide bombings killing civilians in Pakistan, such as a blast in a market Friday that left 16 dead. Bin Laden details a plan for an administrative overhaul, by which al-Qaida's central leadership would weigh in on the naming of the branches' leaders and their deputies
-- and much like an employer recruiting staff, he asks that biographies of the candidates be sent to the central leaders. Al-Qaida Central, he says, must issue media guidelines to ensure the branches stay on message in their statements. Despite the plan, it is not clear that al-Qaida Central -- or bin Laden's successor Ayman al-Zawahri
-- managed to bring that increased control. In the letter, bin Laden advises al-Qaida's branch in Yemen not to get bogged down in trying to fight the Yemeni government to establish an "Islamic state" in the country. Yet since bin Laden's death, al-Qaida militants and their allies in Yemen have been battling with the military over control of several towns in the south of the country. Bin Laden's annoyance shows whenever anyone goes off message. He chides militant clerics for telling Pakistani victims of devastating floods which displaced millions in the summer of 2010 that the disaster was punishment for their sins. "It occurred to me too at the time that a main cause (of the flood) was sin," bin Laden wrote. "But it had to be kept in mind, there were people holding on to two of their children (in the floodwaters) and losing the rest. It would have been better to focus on talking about rescuing the Muslim victims."
He complains of bad media spin in al-Qaida in Yemen's plot to bomb a U.S. jetliner on Christmas Day, 2009
-- which failed when the would-be bomber botched setting off his explosives on the plane. Bin Laden points out that the branch said the attempted bombing was in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike in Yemen. They should have said the attack was in support of the Palestinian cause, he said. Such bad messaging, he says, "weakens our position when we say we are an international organization fighting to free Palestine and all the Muslim nations to establish an Islamic caliphate."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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