ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden through a fake vaccination program also assisted in the final confirmation of the terror kingpin’s hideout, intelligence sources said. 
 
 Dr. Shakeel Afridi disappeared after bin Laden was killed in a US raid one year ago in the walled compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad. Afridi is being held in the custody of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency. 
 
 The father-of-three angered Pakistan’s military authorities by helping the CIA organize a fake vaccination program to extract DNA from inside the bin Laden compound. 
 
 The program failed, but Afridi provided another vital clue, Pakistani intelligence officials told The (London) Times. 
 
 PHOTOS: OSAMA BIN LADEN KILLED 
 
 Afridi obtained a telephone number for, and spoke to, the compound’s putative owner, Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s right-hand man and courier. 
 
 The number Afridi obtained enabled al Kuwaiti’s voice to be recorded and provided the final confirmation that the tall figure seen by drones in the compound was bin Laden. 
 
 “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how he is or how his health is. I am so worried about him,” Afridi’s wife Mona, who lost her job as a teacher, said from a secret location. 
 
 Afridi, who was kidnapped in 2008 by Lashkar-e-Islami, an insurgent group allied to the Pakistani Taliban, is believed to have been recruited by the CIA while he was in the US in 2009. 
 
 Pakistani officials recovered a GPS device that they said was given to him by US intelligence to arrange rendezvous with his handlers, including on one occasion in the US embassy in Islamabad, the report said. After initial efforts by the US for his release, Afridi is no longer discussed with Islamabad, Pakistani officials said. 
 
 “He was a very patriotic person and could never do anything against his country,” Mona said. “My husband has been sacrificed.” 
 
 Yesterday, President Obama defended his administration’s decision to tout the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death as been “entirely appropriate.” 
 
 “I hardly think that you’ve seen any excessive celebration taking place here,” he told reporters at a White House news conference with the Japanese prime minister. 
 
 “The American people rightly remember what we, as a country, accomplished in bringing to justice somebody who killed over three thousand of our citizens.” ||||| Holed up in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden nevertheless hatched a plan to trigger a "crisis" in the U.S. by assassinating President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus. Watch a preview of "Secrets of bin Laden's Lair," airing Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET on the Discovery Channel. 
 
 Materials found inside Osama bin Laden’s compound last May show that the al-Qaida leader regularly ordered his subordinates to plan new attacks, including assassinations of President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus, despite an increasingly limited cadre of operatives capable of carrying out such attacks. 
 
 Like Adolf Hitler at the end of World War II ordering mythical German divisions to attack Russian positions, bin Laden wanted progress reports on how his plans were coming together. And like Hitler’s generals, al-Qaida’s top commanders believed that their isolated leader didn’t get how bad things were on the ground. 
 
 That’s one of the insights U.S. officials gleaned as they went through the terabytes of data quickly scooped up during the raid one year ago on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In all, Navy Seals recovered five computers, 10 hard drives and more than 100 storage devices -- DVDs, discs and thumb drives -- that included between 10,000 and 15,000 documents and between 15,000 to 25,000 videos, including a large number of duplicate files. 
 
 NBC News was granted a rare briefing on the materials by a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official with first-hand knowledge of what was found. The briefing, which occurred on condition of anonymity, took place in Washington in late April and is reflected in the Discovery Channel documentary “Inside bin Laden’s Lair.” The broadcast, produced by NBC News, airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET. 
 
 After Osama bin Laden's death, U.S. intelligence agents poured through the trove of documents seized from his compound and discovered that the al-Qaida leader was 'in charge, and just as dangerous as ever.' Watch a preview of "Secrets of bin Laden's Lair," which airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET on the Discovery Channel. 
 
 Among the highlights of the briefing: 
 
 -- The materials did not contain any operational plans, either for future attacks or past attacks, but included “aspirational” plans for attacks that bin Laden wanted to carry out but didn’t have the wherewithal to do. There was nothing to suggest any planning for attacks beyond those broad plans disclosed in the weeks after the raid: assassinations of Obama and Petraeus, attacks on tankers and mass transit and bombings planned for anniversaries like the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. 
 
 -- Bin Laden was more than the titular head of the terrorist group. Everything “went through him” – including communications from field operatives -- and he had “a wide range of authority over al-Qaida even at the end,” the official said, declining to provide specifics. In short, he was “as dangerous individual on May 1st as he had been years before,” because of the intense loyalty he still engendered in the organization and the broader militant Islamist movement. 
 
 -- Bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, saw the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa as a “danger” for the future of al-Qaida, representing a “fundamental shift” in the region. Governments that bin Laden and his followers had given up on overturning were “toppling,” but “the demonstrators were not expressing support for al-Qaida at all, not using al-Qaida themes, etc.,” the official said. Moreover, by hiding in Pakistan, with limited access to media, bin Laden felt isolated from the movement. 
 
 Slideshow: After the raid: Inside bin Laden's compound Farooq Naeem / AFP - Getty Images U.S. forces found and killed the al-Qaida leader in the affluent Pakistani town of Abbottabad, where he had been living in a large compound. Launch slideshow 
 
 -- The Obama administration’s decision to abandon the “messaging” of a Global War on Terrorism and instead pose the struggle as a war on al-Qaida had an effect on the terror group. Al-Qaida’s leaders were able to portray the Global War on Terrorism as a “war against Islam,” the official said. When it turned into a war against al-Qaida, “it was harder for their message to get through. … The impression you can get from reading different documents was that it allowed moderate Muslims to say we’re opposed to al Qaida.” 
 
 -- There was “nothing in the materials to indicate the Pakistani Government knew of OBL’s location in Abbottabad,” the official said. But the U.S. does not believe the Pakistani intelligence services has fully shared what they seized from the compound after the SEALs departed with their bags full of materials. “We got some stuff (from the Pakistanis). Did we get 80 percent of what was there or 40 percent of what was there?” Beyond the raw data, the official said, “It is not our sense that they have shared with us a lot of insights from that.” 
 
 -- The official would neither confirm nor deny that the materials recovered at the compound led to the deaths of several top al-Qaida operatives in the weeks and months after the raid. Among those killed in U.S. military operations were bin Laden’s “general manager” or chief of staff, and his “director of external operations,” his chief operative. “We don’t want to talk about what we learned,” the official said. However, he did note that after culling the materials for any threat to the homeland, analysts' top priority was “any potential leads to senior al-Qaida” officials, adding, “I think we got more of a sense of their vulnerabilities.” 
 
 The official said bin Laden’s desire to attack without resources was particularly frustrating for his aforementioned top aides, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Ilyas Kashmiri, both of whom were killed in Predator drone attacks within four months of bin Laden’s death. 
 
 Related stories 
 
 Did rogue spies or 'Pakistani Blackwater' shield bin Laden? 
 
 Panetta recalls nail-biting moments of bin Laden raid 
 
 U.S. acknowledges drone strikes, says civilian deaths 'rare' 
 
 “What you get is that bin Laden would come up with an idea but it was a very broad aspirational idea. And then he’d turn it over to somebody and there was always some sort of disconnect," said the official describing what was gleaned from the documents. “There was more (of Attiyah and Kashmiri) trying to explain to Bin Laden how bad it was, that ‘you don’t understand.'" 
 
 One such example was bin Laden’s desire to kill Obama. “My recollection was that he said it would be a good thing.” It was up to Attiyah and Kashmiri to plot it out. 
 
 “By the end of last year in some of the communications, because they would provide him with a list of the people who had died, there was certainly a sense of loss in terms of the senior leaders that perished, a sense that the mid-level cadre had been decimated,” the official added. 
 
 Despite his isolation from the battlefield and the fact that communiques had to reach him by a secret network of trusted couriers, bin Laden continued to hold a key place in the jihad, as more and more al-Qaida “franchises” took hold in places like Iraq, Somalia and Nigeria. It was often his personal charisma that attracted young men to join the terrorist ranks, the official said, adding that he acted the part. 
 
 “He weighed in on a lot of issues. They tended to seek his guidance on a lot of things and clearly would wait until he got back to them,” said the official. 
 
 Beyond the specific details in the seized documents, said the official, the U.S. was able to better gauge al-Qaida’s vulnerabilities. 
 
 “They worry about how we think about targeting,” the official said, discussing Predator attacks. “… Through the course of all the letters it was clear (what) things … mattered to them.” It allowed U.S. intelligence to “hone our approach … put more resources on this or that,” the official said. 
 
 The job of analyzing the wealth of materials seized from bin Laden’s compound was enormous, the official said. 
 
 The intelligence community pulled in 200 analysts and 100 linguists to mine the trove as quickly as possible. 
 
 Despite the daunting numbers of documents and videos, most had no intelligence value and were set aside in the “triage” of intelligence analysis. Some were duplicates. Of the 15,000 to 25,000 videos, for example, not one contained images of possible targets. Not one was an instructional video. A lot of them, said the official, depicted “life around the compound … chickens and cows, rabbits and dogs,” in effect home videos to alleviate the drudgery of the more than a dozen bin Laden family members who were cooped up in the walled complex. 
 
 Most of the documents were likewise of little value, but each had to be catalogued, he said. “A lot of people would give them thumb drives and disks etc. They would send articles and the like. It was something off of Time magazine or something translated, so it wasn’t really an al-Qaida document,” the official said. 
 
 Adding to the job of separating the wheat from the chaff was that some of the thumb drives -- al-Qaida’s preferred means of communicating -- held dozens of videos or documents not meant for bin Laden. That did not discourage the analysts, the official said. 
 
 “Part of it is this, for analysts and people have been following al-Qaida for years, trying to understand how it works and how it functions etc., … this was great,” he said. “They loved coming in day after day reading, piecing together the data.” 
 
 Despite the massive amount of material grabbed by the Navy SEALs in the brief time they had in the compound, the official acknowledged “we didn’t get everything” and that there may have been other “baskets” of data outside the compound. 
 
 And the job is not over, he noted. “ 
 
 The work is ongoing, going back and looking, because there’s always bits in the document that don’t make sense now that we keep going back looking at as we get new intelligence from other individuals to see if we could put some of this into perspective.” 
 
 Jim Miklaszewski is chief pentagon correspondent for NBC News; Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for the network. ||||| The two polite Pakistanis who helped Osama bin Laden hide in the shadow of their country’s army bought bulk food orders, chose major brands and equally favored Pepsi and Coke, neighbors and a local shopkeeper said. 
 
 The men called themselves Akbar and Rashid Khan and they owned the fortified home where U.S. commandos killed bin Laden in an early morning raid May 2. They did the daily shopping in the Pashtu-language accents of Waziristan, a region on the Afghan border, said grocer Anjum Qaisar, 27, who works 150 meters from the compound. Bin Laden’s men “never came by foot, they always drove a Pajero or a little Suzuki van, and they bought enough food for 10 people,” Qaisar said in an interview yesterday. 
 
 “I was curious about why they bought so much food, but I did not want to be rude by asking” such a personal question, Qaisar said. The Khans told neighbors they had fled a violent tribal feud in Waziristan to seek a calmer life in Abbottabad, an army headquarters town 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. 
 
 A day after the gun battle that revealed bin Laden’s presence, his former neighbors expressed astonishment that the al-Qaeda leader had hidden among them, just a mile from the gate of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point in the U.S. Eight days before U.S. helicopters swooped in, Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani visited the academy, telling its cadets the “Pakistan army is fully aware of internal and external threats to the country,” an army statement said last week. 
 
 Support Network 
 
 The U.S. will investigate whether bin Laden’s support network included Pakistani officials, White House counter- terrorism adviser John Brennan said yesterday on NBC’s Today show. Abbottabad’s district government chief, Zahir ul-Islam, said in an interview that local officials would not comment on that issue or on the fate of several women and children from the house that local residents said were taken to a hospital and then detained by authorities. 
 
 In Bilal Town, a neighborhood of new, walled villas interspersed with farm plots where bin Laden’s 1.5-acre compound was the biggest, neighbors yesterday offered stories of the al- Qaeda leader’s household. 
 
 “When we played cricket in the field near the house, if the ball flew over their wall and we went to the gate to ask for it, the guards would be angry,” said Tariq Khan, 14, a schoolboy. “They would give us up to 100 rupees ($1.20) to buy a new one,” rather than allow the ball to be retrieved, he said. That’s a large sum as balls cost only 20 to 30 rupees, Khan said. 
 
 ‘Best Brands’ 
 
 With Pakistani troops and police guarding the streets, Qaisar was one of few merchants open for business yesterday. 
 
 Bin Laden’s protectors “always bought the best brands -- Nestle milk, the good-quality soaps and shampoos,” Qaisar said. “They always paid cash, never asked for credit.” They purchased meat from a butcher who was closed yesterday, he said. 
 
 Rashid and Akbar owned the compound, said Kamar Khan, the police official who sealed the house yesterday. He would not say whether the Khans’ bodies had been found inside after the U.S. raid. The White House says U.S. troops killed two al-Qaeda couriers, along with bin Laden and his son. 
 
 U.S. officials in Washington say a courier, known by the pseudonym Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, was the man the CIA tracked to find bin Laden’s hideout, the Associated Press reported. 
 
 Tora Bora 
 
 Michael Scheuer, the CIA veteran who led the agency’s hunt for bin Laden in the 1990s, said it would be a surprise to find that the al-Qaeda leader, a Saudi, had relied on foreigners like the Khans for his innermost security. “Historically, anyone that close to him almost always was an Arab rather than a Pakistani or an Afghan,” Scheuer said in a May 2 phone interview from Washington. 
 
 Bin Laden escaped U.S. surveillance about 90 days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, as troops closed in on him in the Tora Bora mountains on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The CIA found evidence of him last August in Abbottabad, a military town in the Himalayan foothills that is favored by Pakistani army retirees and named for its founder, a 19th-century British major, James Abbott. 
 
 Soviet Occupation 
 
 The U.S. commando team collected an “impressive amount” of materials from the compound, including computers and other electronics, CIA Director Leon Panetta told Time magazine. 
 
 Neighbors in Bilal Town knew that Arabic-speaking women “lived inside that house because our children heard them through the gate one day and told us,” said Altaf Khan, 35, whose house is on the same street. 
 
 Still, at least some of bin Laden’s guards were ethnic Pashtuns, the group whom bin Laden befriended by joining their war against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said Amin Akbar, the nearest neighbor to the al-Qaeda house. 
 
 “They had very powerful security lights at night,” Akbar said. “When I saw them on one day last month, I knocked on the gate to tell them so they could turn them off, because our electricity is so expensive.” 
 
 A Pakistani opened the door “and became very angry with me,” he said. “He asked me ‘Who told you to come here?’” 
 
 Umar Nassir, a teenage student, said neighbors are concerned that bin Laden’s refuge in Abbottabad may bring more trouble. “The schools in the city have been closed for three days,” he said. “We worry that al-Qaeda will come back to attack in our town and take revenge for Osama’s death.” 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Anwar Shakir in Abbottabad, Pakistan at ashakir1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net ||||| Kill Obama: Bin Laden plotted to assassinate President before 2012 election 
 
 
 
 Bin Laden called on followers to kill President in run up to 2012 election 
 
 
 
 Longed for another 9/11 to replicate mass attacks of the past 
 
 Orders to not only target New York, but smaller U.S. cities such as LA 
 
 
 
 Desperately wanted to 'sow political dissent' in Washington 
 
 Urged followers to strike on anniversary of 9/11 and Fourth of July 
 
 But arrogant leader became 'lazy and complacent' about own security 
 
 Osama Bin Laden wanted to assassinate President Obama as in the run up to the 2012 presidential elections, the terror leader's journal seized by U.S. forces reveals. 
 
 The mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks wanted to kill the President in a follow up mission, 10 years after the devastating 2001 attack. 
 
 
 
 U.S. intelligence officials are currently analysing over one million pages of data taken from the terror leader's compound, including his handwritten journal. 
 
 Target: Handwritten notes reveal that Bin Laden was plotting to assassinate Obama before 2012 election 
 
 
 
 The documents reveal that the Al Qaeda leader was still plotting attacks against the U.S. and wanted to find a way to kill Obama. 
 
 Bin Laden's own writings indicate that he had urged followers to assassinate Obama as a way of disrupting the 2012 presidential election. 
 
 Former intelligence officials said that Bin Laden was focussed on killing the President. 
 
 'I would say this is probably very personal on Bin Laden's part, to kill [Obama] that he believes has violated the Muslim faith,' Brad Garrett, a former FBI profiler, told ABC News. 
 
 
 
 'He is incensed, inflamed, obsessed about killing the President.' 
 
 Video footage of Bin Laden watching TV in his hideout showed that whenever Obama came on the screen, the terror leader would quickly try to change the channel. 
 
 
 
 Treasure trove of intelligence: A Pakistani soldier walks toward the final hideout of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where SEALs recovered a mass of data 
 
 The seized documents could be the most valuable find of all - a written record that takes readers inside the mind of America's greatest enemy. 
 
 Osama Bin Laden's handwritten journal was found at the Pakistan compound where the terror chief was killed in a dramatic U.S. raid more than a week ago. 
 
 In it, he directed Al Qaeda operatives to not only focus on New York City, but spread their operations to target smaller cities such as Los Angeles. 
 
 
 
 The discovery shatters previously held beliefs that Bin Laden was a 'has been' - acting simply as Al Qaeda's spiritual leader rather than its operational chief. 
 
 
 
 The journal, as well as hundreds of computer 'pen' drives also containing directives, will only add to the heightened threat level across the U.S. 
 
 
 
 Among the edicts, one particularly macabre note reveals a mathematical calculation of how many people Al Qaeda would have to kill to finally force the U.S. out of the Middle East - concluding it would take another 9/11 at least. 
 
 INSIDE BIN LADEN'S MIND: HOW THE TERROR CHIEF PLOTTED Among the cache of intelligence analysed so far, Bin Laden wrote to followers: 
 
 Assassinate Obama in run up to 2012 election 
 
 Strike smaller cities - such as Los Angeles 
 
 Target trains as well as planes 
 
 Spread out the targets in the U.S. 
 
 
 
 Only death toll in thousands would shift U.S. policy in Middle East 
 
 Kill as many Americans as possible in a single attack 
 
 Wanted to sow dissent in Washington 
 
 Use dates such as 9/11 anniversary and 4th of July 
 
 
 
 U.S. officials said the Al Qaeda leader's diary is filled with planning ideas and details of operations. 
 
 Among them were the notes for the potential plots against the U.S. rail system which prompted an advisory from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security last week. 
 
 In the journals he tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of the September 11 attacks in 2001, would shift U.S. policy. 
 
 He also schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another, officials said. 
 
 They give a clear indication that Bin laden was communicating with other extremists. 
 
 'There are strong indications there is back and forth with other terrorists,' an official said. 
 
 
 
 The handwritten journal included significant dates bin Laden noted as preferred for attacking American targets, including the Fourth of July and the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a U.S. official said. 
 
 No imminent plots have been discovered in the journal, which officials have been pouring over since the raid, officials said. 
 
 The journal was part of a huge cache of intelligence that included about 100 flash drives and five computers taken by a U.S. Navy SEALs assault team after they swept through the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. 
 
 Officials said that the terror leader had become fixated on attacks on the U.S. - a drive which had alienated some of his followers, who were more focused on regional issues. 
 
 The notes also reveal Bin Laden's sinister plans to target non-Muslim blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. who had felt oppressed. 
 
 Shabby: There was also footage of the Al Qaeda chief watching Barack Obama on television 
 
 And rather than reducing his role, Bin Laden had worked frantically to direct Al Qaeda operations from his secret hideout. 
 
 One official said Bin Laden had worked like a 'crime boss'. 
 
 
 
 But the 51-year-old killer had become so arrogant that he believed he was virtually untouchable - plotting destruction by day and bedding down with his wife at night. 
 
 'Bin Laden got lazy and complacent,' a source told the Washington Post. 
 
 
 
 'I don’t think he thought he would meet his maker in that house. And he certainly didn’t make any preparations.' 
 
 Another raised the possibility that he may not have been restricted to his compound. 
 
 
 
 'There are strong indications there is back and forth with other terrorists,' the official said. 
 
 
 
 Questions were raised about why Bin Laden did not attempt to escape the building during the raid or hide in a secret compartment, but it now appears that he never feared he would be caught there. 
 
 Bin Laden has long been known to record his thoughts, but the discovery of his journal is a real coup for American intelligence chiefs. 
 
 His son, in a memoir, has described his father as recording his thoughts and plans, spending hours speaking into a Dictaphone. 
 
 
 
 The diary may also reveal more about the psyche of the man - his secret fears and terrors. 
 
 The treasure trove of intelligence recovered from the 'safe' house is producing a new lead every hour, it has emerged. 
 
 Intelligence officials told CBS News that Bin Laden had actually been killed 'relatively early' in the 40-minute operation inside the house. 
 
 Popular: The killing of Bin Laden has given Obama a huge poll bounce 
 
 At least half the time was then spent scooping up every single document, laptop, hard drive and CD that the hit team could find. 
 
 In the aftermath of the raid, the CIA has been analysing the information - which comes in at 2.7 terrabytes of data or 220 million pages of text - round the clock. 
 
 'Home videos' of Bin Laden recovered from the compound which show the terror chief watching Barack Obama on the news and fluffing his lines in a recorded message, have already been released. 
 
 The terror journal shows Bin Laden was communicating from his walled compound in Pakistan with al-Qaeda's offshoots - including the Yemen branch that has emerged as the leading threat to the United States. 
 
 Though there is no evidence yet that he was directly behind the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner or the nearly successful attack on cargo planes heading for Chicago and Philadelphia, it's now clear that they bear some of bin Laden's hallmarks. 
 
 Officials have not yet seen any indication that bin Laden had the ability to coordinate timing of attacks across the various al-Qaeda affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and Somalia, and it is also unclear from bin Laden's documents how much the affiliate groups relied on his guidance. 
 
 The Yemen group, for instance, has embraced the smaller-scale attacks that bin Laden's writings indicate he regarded as unsuccessful. 
 
 However, the real value of the intelligence is likely to come from leads to other members of Al Qaeda and an insight into the terror network, including how Bin Laden communicated with his subordinates. 
 
 The diary could play a key role in that. 
 
 
 
 Speaking in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, President Obama described the information as a treasure trove that 'could serve us well in the weeks and months to come'. 
 
 'We've got a chance to, I think, really deliver a fatal blow to this organisation if we follow through aggressively in the months to come,' he said. 
 
 
 
 Reprisal: Pakistani security personnel secure the area outside the Saudi consulate in Pakistan's port city of Karachi today following a grenade attack 
 
 In a chilling statement posted on Islamic extremist sites last night, Al Qaeda warned the U.S. that it had made a 'big mistake' and a 'serious sin' in killing Bin Laden. 
 
 The terror group's media arm, al-Fajr, said the American people 'will pay the price' for the May 2 raid. 
 
 It acknowledges that Barack Obama 'is protected by armies', but asks Americans: 'Who will protect you from our assault?' 
 
 It also urges Muslims to use Bin Laden's death as motivation to carry out attacks, according to a transcript provided yesterday by the SITE Intel group, which monitors militant messages. 
 
 Tensions are still running high in Pakistan where politicians hijacked a parliamentary session in Islamabad to pray for the dead Bin Laden. 
 
 The group, including former minister Atta-ur-Rehman, claimed it was their duty as Muslims to carry out the action. 
 
 
 
 Target: The intelligence revealed Bin Laden was contemplating attacks on trains as well as aircraft - seen here Penn Station in New York 
 
 Maulvi Asmatullah, who led the prayers, said: 'Bin Laden was an international figure and above all a Muslim. 
 
 'I took it as my religious duty to offer prayers for him.' 
 
 The killing of Bin Laden has given Obama's approval rating a huge bounce to the highest point in two years. 
 
 It now stands at 60 per cent with more than half of Americans saying he deserves to be re-elected, according to The Associated Press-GfK poll. 
 
 Al-Qaeda has not named bin Laden's successor, but all indications point to his Number two, Ayman al-Zawahri. 
 
 The question is whether al-Zawahri, or anyone, has the ability to keep so many disparate groups under the al-Qaida banner. The groups in Somalia and Algeria, for instance, have very different goals focused on local grievances. Without bin Laden to serve as their shepherd, it's possible al-Qaida will further fragment. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Bin Laden opposed plot to mow down enemies with tractor fitted with rotating blades 
 
 
 
 Pre-recorded: U.S. officials have released some of the videos recovered from the compound including this one of Bin Laden recording a message 
 
 Osama Bin Laden was vehemently opposed to a sadistic plot to fit rotating blades to a tractor and use it to 'mow down the enemies of Allah', on the grounds that it would cause 'indiscriminate slaughter'. 
 
 This is according to a U.S. official familiar with documents seized in the raid on the al-Qaida chief's hideout. 
 
 A hoard of documents and computer discs taken by U.S. special forces is said to have consisted more of 'strategic musings' than concrete terror plots, the official told ProPublica, the U.S. non-profit making investigative news organisation. 
 
 The documents show he was a fierce advocate of mass-casualty attacks in the west, for instance his attempts to calculate the number of Americans who would have to be killed to force the US to withdraw from the Arab world. 
 
 But, surprisingly, he appeared angry at a suggestion by the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that a tractor or farm vehicle could, suitably adapted, be used in an attack. 
 
 The official told ProPublica: 'Bin Laden said this is something he did not endorse. He seems taken aback. He complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what Al Qaeda does.' 
 
 The tractor plan was mooted in Inspire, an English-language jihadi magazine, by a young U.S. convert and Al Qaeda recruit. 
 
 Bin Laden and his associates also attempted to make sure that their PR machine ran smoothly. 
 
 They repeatedly admonished leaders of affiliated groups such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or Al Qaeda in Iraq for not paying sufficient attention to avoiding targets that could not be portrayed as "legitimate" to the leadership's target audience in the Middle East. 
 
 A series of letters and emissaries were sent to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, warning him to stop attacks on local Shia Muslims and to avoid civilian casualties.
– Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, and current and former US officials are apparently marking the date by revealing more tidbits contained in the 10,000-plus documents recovered from computers, hard drives, and storage devices found in his Abbottabad hideout. Many of them are old-hat (he wanted to kill Obama, he thought about rebranding al-Qaeda). Other highlights: A former intelligence official tells the Washington Post that, according to his writings, bin Laden was none-too-pleased about an idea cooked up by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists: to build a "human lawnmower" out of a pickup truck and rotating blades that could be driven into crowds. Bin Laden "felt it conflicted with his vision for what he wanted al-Qaeda to be." MSNBC confirms that bin Laden was not a leader in name only. "Everything "went through him," down to communications from field ops. The Post notes that he pushed to have oversight over what had become a scattered network of terrorists that had reached Yemen and Somalia. But he sweated the small stuff, too, weighing in on less consequential topics like which crops al-Shabab allies in Somalia should farm. The New York Post reports, by way of the Times of London, that the Pakistani doctor who assisted the CIA in its hunt for bin Laden via a fake vaccination program did more than just that: He helped confirm the presence of bin Laden at the compound by getting his hands on bin Laden's courier's phone number and calling him. The doctor is apparently being held by ISI. And, some quirk: Want your very own piece of where bin Laden spent his final days? The contractor who razed the Abbottabad compound is selling bricks ... for less than a nickel, reports MSNBC.