Bin Laden Hoped "To Rebrand Al Qaeda"

The Daily Telegraph reports:

Osama bin Laden lamented that al-Qaeda was suffering from a marketing problem and wanted to change the organisation's name because the West was winning the public relations fight.

In his final writings, he was concerned the group was killing to many Muslims, which was bad for business, and all his old comrades were dead and he barely knew their replacements.

Faced with these challenges, Bin Laden, who hated the United States and decried capitalism, considered a most American of business strategies. Like Blackwater, Valujet and Philip Morris, perhaps what al-Qaeda really needed was a fresh start under a new name.

The problem with the name al-Qaeda, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.