UK favoured ‘whacking’ Osama bin Laden nine months before 9/11 attacks: Policy papers

Britain’s government had backed plans to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden nine months before the 9/11 terror attacks in the US he masterminded, newly released confidential documents revealed.

According to a Times report, a senior Downing Street official told then prime minister Tony Blair in December 2000: “We’re all in favour of whacking UBL [Usama bin Laden, as he is referred to in the papers].”

The UK’s in-principle approval for the killing of the al-Qaeda leader is in a briefing document given to Blair before the prime minister’s meeting with the US president Bill Clinton, who was about to hand over the presidency to George W Bush.

Bin Laden who plotted the September 11 terror attacks in New York and the Pentagon that killed about 3000 people in 2001 was also suspected to be behind a suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden nearly a year earlier.

In the British policy papers released by the National Archives, John Sawers, Blair’s foreign affairs adviser, who later headed MI6, wrote: “The Americans don’t yet have proof that UBL was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole. They won’t launch airstrikes until they have a smoking gun, and that may not be until after 20 January [when Bush would take over the presidency].”

Sawers said British personnel in Pakistan could be vulnerable to reprisals. “We’re all in favour of whacking UBL but we need a bit of notice and a chance to influence the timing,” he said.

The US declared a war on terror after the 9/11 attacks and led a coalition of international forces to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was killed in a raid by US navy Seals on his hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011 when Barack Obama was the American president.