Bin Laden’s Library Filled With Porn, According To US Officials | NWI

Osama bin Laden had an extensive collection of porn videos, US officials confirmed as they released a large batch of files seized from the terrorist leader’s Pakistani hide-out. But officials said the collection of porn would stay secret and not be unveiled “due to the nature” of the files which apparently consists of hardcore ‘smut’.

Bin Laden: Image from video seized from the walled compound of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan and released by the U.S. Department of Defense (AP Photo/Department of Defense, File)

The office of James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, said the pornographic material could not be made public, on grounds of taste. It was the first confirmation of previous reports that bin Laden’s X-rated stash included “modern, electronically recorded video”.

ALSO READ: Is Dawood Ibrahim ‘Indian Brother’ Of Osama Bin Laden?

On Wednesday, the Department of National Intelligence (DNI) released a list of books the 9/11 mastermind was reading when he was killed four years ago, as well as a trove of letters he exchanged with family members from the lair.

While it was widely reported that Navy SEALs recovered a large digital collection of sex videos from the compound when they staged a secret mission to kill bin Laden in 2011, the US government says it is not going to describe or release details on any of the pornographic materials.

ALSO READ: Osama Called 26/11 ‘Heroic’, Pune Blast ‘Beautiful’

‘We have no plans to release that at this point in time,’ Brian Hale, a spokesman for the DNI said. ‘Due to the nature of the content the decision was made not to release it.’

Officials also refused to describe what kind of porn was kept in the bin Laden household.

Dead Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. (AP Photo, File)

Just two weeks after bin Laden was shot dead inside his Abbottabad compound, Reuters reported that pornography was recovered from the property. At the time, the collection was described as ‘fairly extensive,’ containing many modern videos.

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the documents, released as online images, were among a collection of books, U.S. think tank reports and other materials recovered in the May 2011 raid that killed bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The information was declassified and made public after a review by government agencies, as required by a 2014 law. Hundreds more documents found at the compound will be reviewed for possible declassification and release, the office said Wednesday, four years after bin Laden’s death.

The documents, as translated by U.S. intelligence officials, mix the mundane language of business — personnel training, budget matters, financing for “workshops and collaborating groups” — with fervent religious appeals and updates on terrorism plots.

A translated copy of an application to join Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network is photographed in Washington, Wednesday, May 20, 2015. The document is among 100 realized by U.S. intelligence officials. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says the papers were taken in the Navy SEALs raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. (AP Photo)

Drone strikes against al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the near-suffocation of the group’s affiliate in Iraq beginning in 2007, and other developments severely undercut bin Laden in the years before his death. The terrorist threat shifted to al Qaeda affiliates in other areas, including in Yemen and North Africa. U.S. officials have said that at the time of bin Laden’s death al Qaeda no longer exercised the same level of control he once had.

A May 2007 letter to bin Laden from “the Jihad and Reform Front” implores him to disavow “the ongoing catastrophes and disasters” committed by al Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of today’s Islamic State group, which strayed from al Qaeda’s orders with its brutal attacks on fellow Muslims.

“If you still can, then this is your last chance to remedy the Jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq,” the letter warns bin Laden.

Al Qaeda did reject the splinter group, but the Islamic State kept growing, and after bin Laden’s death it went on to seize a swath of Syria and Iraq, killing Muslims and Christians, beheading Westerners and drawing warplanes from a U.S.-led international coalition to the region.

At one point, an undated “Report on External Operations” presented bin Laden with a litany of excuses for failure to reach al Qaeda’s violent goals for the year, including orders to kill Jews.

“First of them was bad luck and God wasn’t on our side,” it says, before running through complaints about a lack of well-trained personnel, poor communications, trouble with transportation, insufficient weapons and difficulty evading security forces.

Among the terrorists’ goals was an operation targeting Americans in Denmark.

Three European men were sent to carry out the plan, they report, “but we have lost our communication with them,” and they may have been captured.

Their plan to overcome these obstacles was to “use new methods like using house knives, gas or gasoline or diesel tanks, and other means, such as airplanes, trains, cars as killing tools.”

In a video to one of his wives, also described as bin Laden’s “last will,” he tells her “you are the apple of my eye, and the most precious thing that I have in this world.” Bin Laden says he has no objection to her remarrying after his death, “but I really want for you to be my wife in paradise” and reminds her that a wife who has married twice “is given a choice on Judgment Day.

ALSO READ: Osama A Doting Family Man

Among documents gathered from his compound in Pakistan after U.S. Navy SEALs stormed the building and shot him to death is a lengthy complaint by the al Qaeda leader about working with Arabs, Uzbeks, Turks, “Russians of all kinds,” Germans and others in his global jihad.

“Unfortunately, there is so much chaos on the ground,” he wrote. “In general we suffer from unjustified divisions and alliances, which I call the ‘fake commandants.”

Broadly, the dozens of documents released Wednesday by the Obama administration portray bin Laden as a leader cut off from his underlings, disappointed by their failures, beset by their complaints and regretting years of separation from much of his family. He went into hiding after al Qaeda was chased out of Afghanistan by U.S. forces after the 9/11 attacks.

Focus your fighting on America, not each other, the al Qaeda chief exhorts his followers. In a videotaped will, he urges one of his wives, should she remarry after his death, to still choose to live beside him in paradise.

Despite some surprising quirks in the collection, the overall message of the 103 letters, videos and reports made public Wednesday hews to the terror group’s familiar mission: In the name of God, find a way to kill Americans. Kill Europeans. Kill Jews.

“Uproot the obnoxious tree by concentrating on its American trunk,” bin Laden writes in a letter urging al-Qaida affiliates in North Africa to not be distracted by fighting local security forces and to avoid Muslim infighting.

The infighting, however, clearly annoyed bin Laden, as did the success of American drone strikes against many of his lieutenants.

“The problem of the spying war and spying aircrafts benefited the enemy greatly and led to the killing of many jihadi cadres, leaders, and others,” bin Laden wrote in an undated letter. “This is something that is concerning us and exhausting us.”

He also complained about freelancers and hotheads in al Qaeda.

“They just refuse to be ordered and refuse to listen, obey, or stay where they were placed and insist on being the head,” he wrote. “There are many examples of this, and if you add to them our visible mistakes, shortcomings, and weakness, you get the ingredients for divisions.”

The document collection is sprinkled with telling tidbits. One says that the homemade bombs that Americans call improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are “anti-crusader devices,” or ACDs.

(With AP Inputs)