Waging a war against the western world is a busy job, as letters snatched from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hide-out in 2011 and released this week by American intelligence reveal.
You gotta take an “Afghan prisoner” here and there; rent a house in Peshawar to receive the ransom; move the cash only on a “cloudy overcast day”; and “ [exchange]vehicles in the tunnel between Kohat and Peshawar”.
“It is important to get rid of the suitcase in which the funds are delivered, due to the possibility of it having a tracking chip inside it.” It was all in a day’s work for Osama bin Laden. But it wasn’t the tunnelling or cash-running that kept him up at night – the newly released documents suggest. Instead, it was the ruin climate change is raining down on the planet.
In between orchestrating the tactical manoeuvres of what was then the world’s most infamous group of islamist extremists – i.e. “a struggle between two of the largest cultures on Earth” – bin Laden also worried about “catastrophic climatic conditions”.
As Obama hunted Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader wrote a rambling “letter to the American people”. He urged them to wage “a great revolution for freedom” that would liberate their “train operator” President from the oppressive influence of lobbyists and take the sheen off unbridled capitalism.
This fight for freedom “does not only include improvement of your economic situation and ensure your security, but more importantly, helps [Obama] in making a rational decision to save humanity from the harmful [greenhouse]gases that threaten its destiny,” bin Laden wrote.
In a separate letter to Shaykh Mahmud, bin Laden considers which media outfit would be best to cooperate with on the 10 year anniversary of Al Qaeda’s murderous attack on the Twin Towers…What better way to mark that occasion than pointing out that “the world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of [greenhouse] gases”.
Of course, American authorities maintain that bin Laden has since been assassinated, so it’s unclear where the world’s jihadists are at on climate change these days. Unfortunately, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not respond to requests for comment before New Matilda went to press.
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