A few months before Osama bin Laden’s death, Web sites linked to al-Qaeda ran excited commentary about a proposed new killing machine dubbed the “human lawn mower.” The idea was to attach rotating blades to the front of a pickup truck and drive the contraption into crowds. 
 
 While some jihadists admired the idea, one graying veteran of the terrorist movement took a stand against it. That was bin Laden himself, by then living out his twilight years in a Pakistani villa with ample time to think about his legacy. The man who famously ordered jetliners flown into skyscrapers drew the line at cutting down humans like weeds. 
 
 “He was upset about it,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who viewed bin Laden’s writings on the subject, part of a trove of documents seized from the terrorist’s compound in Pakistan a year ago this week. “He felt it conflicted with his vision for what he wanted al-Qaeda to be.” 
 
 Bin Laden’s chances of trying to remake al-Qaeda’s image ended abruptly when Navy SEALs kicked in the door of his Pakistani hideout. But in the year since his death, U.S. officials have gained a deeper understanding of the man, his internal struggles and his plans for the terrorist group he co-founded. 
 
 Although some insights from the documents have been revealed over the past year, new excerpts show the extent of bin Laden’s obsession with ideological purity as he sought to manage the group’s demoralized and scattered networks in his final years. They show him seeking to reassert control over factions of loosely affiliated jihadists from Yemen to Somalia, as well as independent actors whom he believed had sullied al-Qaeda’s reputation and muddied its central message. 
 
 The new details about bin Laden’s final months were provided in interviews with current and former U.S. officials — several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide assessments of documents that are not yet public — as well as a pair of new books that quote extensively from the documents recovered from computer equipment seized during the May 2 raid. 
 
 Bin Laden emerges from these accounts as a chief executive fully engaged in the group’s myriad crises, grappling with financial problems, recruitment, rebellious field managers and sudden staff vacancies resulting from the unrelenting U.S. drone campaign. In some memos he worried about his own security, and in others he fretted about missing a huge potential marketing opportunity: the Arab Spring, with its millions of street revolutionaries looking to reshape politics in the Middle East. 
 
 Reining in attacks 
 
 The Saudi who built the world’s first truly global jihadist movement is viewed as distracted at times by mundane details, such as which crops should be planted by al-Shabab allies in Somalia. He was coolly cordial with his former partner Ayman al-Zawahiri, and increasingly drawn to the ideas of a younger lieutenant who possessed a firmer grasp of the power of the Internet and an ambition to modernize al-Qaeda’s message. 
 
 The new deputy, Libyan-born Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a veteran of Algeria’s brutal Muslim-against-Muslim violence in the 1990s, emerged in bin Laden’s final year as a key advocate for reining in al-Qaeda-inspired carnage in Iraq and other Middle Eastern lands. 
 
 With bin Laden’s support, Atiyah, as the aide is informally known, began trying to codify rules of behavior for al-Qaeda and its affiliates, warning that killings of innocent Muslims would hurt the organization and probably violate sharia, or Islamic law. The killing of Americans — including noncombatants — would meanwhile remain permissible, even obligatory. Bin Laden’s aversion to the “human lawn mower” was noted last year in a report on ProPublica’s Web site. 
 
 “To the end, Atiyah kept trying to rein in attacks inside the Middle East,” said Jarret Brachman, an author and consultant on al-Qaeda to U.S. government agencies. “Both he and bin Laden remained rabid in their hatred for the West. But they felt that attacks within Muslim countries were bad for their public image.” 
 
 Among the documents seized in the raid were thousands of electronic memos and missives that captured conversations between bin Laden and his deputies around the world, U.S. officials say. Because the security-conscious bin Laden had no Internet connection, the documents were hand-delivered by couriers over circuits that would require up to a month to complete. 
 
 Despite bin Laden’s physical isolation, the documents show him as a hands-on manager who participated in the terrorist group’s operational planning and strategic thinking while also giving orders and advice to field operatives scattered worldwide. The exchanges were described in interviews, as well as in new books, including “Manhunt,” by Peter L. Bergen, and “Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa’ida After 9/11,” by Seth G. Jones. 
 
 “He was not a recluse; he was the CEO of a global terrorist organization,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA counterterrorism official and White House adviser on terrorist groups. “He was receiving communications from al-Qaeda’s operatives literally around the world, and he was instructing them to carry out acts of terror.” 
 
 But bin Laden was a weakened leader, presiding over a group that had lost scores of key operatives to U.S. drone strikes while being pursued around the world. Increasingly, bin Laden’s musings about future terrorist strikes took on a fanciful air, given the group’s dwindling resources. Occasionally his talk of bold attacks was met with shrugs and skepticism, said one senior U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the documents. 
 
 “It was a classic headquarters-vs.-field mentality,” the official said. “Headquarters thinks it knows better and instructs the field to do something, and the field manager says, ‘Boss, you don’t know what kind of stress we’re under.’ ” 
 
 Common cause 
 
 Among those offering advice to bin Laden was Atiyah, a rising star within al-Qaeda’s upper echelon who helped engineer the group’s successful suicide attack on a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009. Atiyah had posed for a phony secret video made by a supposed Jordanian spy to win the trust of U.S. intelligence operatives, a key step in luring the agency into a deadly trap. 
 
 Atiyah, slim with a youthful, wispy beard, commiserated with bin Laden about the group’s mounting problems while occasionally indulging in wistful planning for a grand strike against the United States that would reverse al-Qaeda’s decline. 
 
 The two found common cause in their drive to break the group’s affiliates of their use of high-casualty attacks on Muslim civilians. In March 2011, less than two months before bin Laden’s death, Atiyah warned jihadists against bombing marketplaces, mosques, playgrounds and other sites where innocent Muslims were likely to be killed. 
 
 Supervision of such high- 
 
 impact operations should not be delegated to field commanders but rather “assigned to trusted specialized committees of seekers of religious knowledge and military men,” wrote Atiyah, who was killed a few months after bin Laden, in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan last August. 
 
 Bin Laden, in his missives, displayed an increasingly legalistic interpretation of whether a terrorist act is permissible under sharia. When Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in May 2010, his attempt, widely hailed by jihadists, drew a surprising rebuke from bin Laden, who took a rare break from his self-imposed seclusion in central Pakistan to denounce Shahzad. 
 
 It wasn’t the prospect of civilian deaths that upset bin Laden, but rather the fact that Shahzad had planned the act after swearing a loyalty oath to the United States as a newly naturalized citizen. 
 
 “You know it is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemy,” bin Laden wrote, according to a copy of his missive obtained by Jones, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. (Bergen also refers to this incident in his book.) 
 
 Complaining of the “negative effects” to al-Qaeda’s image, bin Laden noted that jihadists already were under suspicion in parts of the world for “reneging on oaths, and perfidy.” ||||| Simply click the Run button at the bottom of your browser. 
 
 By clicking to run this downloaded file you agree to the Microsoft Service Agreement and Privacy Statement . Installation applies to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. ||||| 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 
 
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 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. ||||| 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.”
– 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.