Osama Bin Laden Banned Any Assassination Plots Against Joe Biden
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Osama Bin Laden once ordered al-Qaeda members to avoid targeting Joe Biden while he was Vice President, according to a letter that has re-emerged in the wake of the president’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
In a letter to one of his advisors sent in 2010, Bin Laden reportedly decreed that then-president Barack Obama and General David Petraeus – who commanded international forces in Afghanistan – should be the focus of assassination attempts, with other high-profile military and government figures ordered to be left alone on trips to the country.
While it might seem like Bin Laden was doing Biden a favour, the letter goes on to reveal that there was an ulterior motive to his decision, with the al-Qaeda leader saying that he believed the vice president would not be ‘prepared’ to lead in the event of Obama’s death.
‘Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there,’ he noted per the BBC, before adding, ‘Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis’.
As it turned out, Bin Laden probably should have been worrying more about his own safety rather than his grand plans for engineering a Biden presidency – the letter was sent less than a year before he was killed by US Navy Seals.
The document was made public in 2012, and has been circulating once again among right-wing commentators who apparently support Bin Laden’s view.
President Biden is currently facing criticism from all sides for the chaotic scenes in Afghanistan, and has been forced to defend his decision to announce a full withdrawal of US troops by September 11, 2020.
Biden has been accused of ‘abandoning’ vulnerable Afghans to the Taliban, and has faced questions over the apparent lack of preparation for evacuating international citizens from the country.
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Topics: News, Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Taliban
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BBC
