Bin Laden's reading habits revealed
May 22, 2015  00:15
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On Wednesday morning, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unprecedented number of documents from what U.S. officials have described as the treasure-trove picked up by the SEALs at bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.

Bin Laden's digital library is that of an avid reader whose tastes ran from "Obama's Wars," Bob Woodward's account of how the Obama administration surged US troops in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, to Noam Chomsky as well as someone who had a pronounced interest in how Western think tanks and academic institutions were analyzing al Qaeda.

Bin Laden was a meticulous editor, and some of the memos he wrote were revised as many as 50 times. Of the thousands of versions of documents recovered from computers and digital media that the SEALs retrieved at bin Laden's compound, the final tally numbers several hundred documents.

The new documents show how bin Laden reacted to the events of the Arab Spring, which was roiling the Middle East in the months before his death. While bin Laden had nothing to say publicly about the momentous events in the Middle East, privately he wrote lengthy memos analyzing what was happening, pointing to the "new factor" of "the information technology revolution" that had helped spur the revolutions and characterizing them as "the most important events" in the Muslim world "in centuries."

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