Reading Bin Laden's library and documents

[davidbfpo]

Several pointers to the publicly released "treasure trove" from OBL's home @ Abbottad, which may help.

The documents themselves:http://www.odni.gov/index.php/resour...f?limitstart=0

Via WoTR a guide by Clint Watts:http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/con.../?singlepage=1

The Soufan Group's comment ends with:

One can learn a lot from a person’s reading habits, and bin Ladin is no exception. Everything he appears to have read was in furtherance of al-Qaeda and bin Ladinism. Superficially it might appear—from papers on Iranian nuclear sites to French economic statistics—that bin Ladin was grasping at straws, and in a way he was, given how desperate he was to get back in the win column. But to the end, he remained single-mindedly focused on learning the best avenues to inflict the most pain on the West, and his death has done little to change the damaging trends of his ideology.

Link:http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrie...-read-and-why/

[davidbfpo]

Now this is an interesting article. Did politics intervene to alter the picture?
Try this:

A comprehensive and systematic examination of those documents could give U.S. intelligence officials—and eventually the American public—a better understanding of al Qaeda’s leadership, its affiliates, its recruitment efforts, its methods of communication; a better understanding, that is, of the enemy America has fought for over a decade now, at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Incredibly, such a comprehensive study—a thorough “document exploitation,” in the parlance of the intelligence community—never took place.

Link:http://www.weeklystandard.com/al-qae...article/804366