Top 5 revelations from bin Laden's diary

Navy SEALs swiped the terrorist's journal from his Pakistani compound — including musings about mass murder, his indifference to Joe Biden, and "indiscriminate slaughter"

In his short diary, Osama bin Laden calculates how many American deaths were necessary to drive U.S. forces out of the Arab world.
(Image credit: Mike Stewart/CORBIS)

It's not just Osama bin Laden's hard drive and digital files from which U.S. intelligence analysts and translators are racing to harvest secrets. They've also got bin Laden's handwritten diary. The short notebook is short on juicy gossip — "There doesn’t seem to be anything in there like, 'I had trouble with one of my wives today,'" one official tells National Journal — but it does outline bin Laden's goals and strategies for al Qaeda. Here, the five best bits from bin Laden's journal and the intel trove:

1. He wanted to mass-murder Americans on Sept. 11, 2011

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