CIA releases new tranche of materials seized in 2011 bin Laden raid
It is the fourth tranche of materials taken from the walled compound.
WASHINGTON (Reuters / AFP) - A computer recovered in the 2011 U.S. special forces operation that killed Osama bin Laden contained a video collection that included kids’ cartoons, several Hollywood movies and three documentaries about himself.
The list of the videos was included in the release on Wednesday by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of nearly 470,000 files found on the computer seized in the May 2, 2011, U.S. raid on the al Qaeda founder’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
It is the fourth tranche of materials taken from the walled compound where bin Laden and his family lived to be made public by the U.S. government since May 2015.
Materials that still have not been released are being withheld because they could harm national security, are blank, corrupted or duplicate files, are pornographic or are protected by copyright, said a CIA statement.
The copyright-protected materials include more than two dozen videos such as “Antz,” “Cars” and other animated films, the role-playing game “Final Fantasy VII” and “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden” and two other documentaries about the al Qaeda leader, the CIA said.
“Today’s release of recovered al-Qaeda letters, videos, audio files and other materials provides the opportunity for the American people to gain further insights into the plans and workings of this terrorist organization,” said CIA Director Mike Pompeo. “CIA will continue to seek opportunities to share information with the American people consistent with our obligation to protect national security.”
The materials released on Wednesday are posted on line - here - in their original Arabic.
They include bin Laden’s personal journal and 18,000 document files, about 79,000 audio and image files and more than 10,000 video files, the CIA said.
The CIA said that the materials, like those released in the past, provide insights into the origins of the differences between al Qaeda and Daesh, disagreements within al Qaeda and its allies, and the problems al Qaeda faced at the time of bin Laden’s death.
Wedding video
According to Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, scholars from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who were allowed to see the trove before it was made public, it provides new insights.
"These documents will go a long way to help fill in some of the blanks we still have about al Qaeda s leadership," Roggio said.
The inclusion of Hamza Bin Laden’s wedding video, for example, gives the world public the first image of Bin Laden’s favorite son as an adult -- an image apparently shot in Iran.
Previous document releases, including letters revealed by AFP in May 2015, show that Bin Laden was grooming Hamza to succeed him as leader of Al-Qaeda’s global jihadist campaign.
But plans for him to come to Bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout seem to have been abandoned after the deadly US raid, and the young man -- now aged 27 or 28 -- is presumed to be in Iran.
According to Joscelyn and Roggio, writing in the FDD’s Long War Journal, one of the newly released documents is a 19-page study of Al-Qaeda’s links to Iran written by a Bin Laden lieutenant.
Last month, at a seminar hosted by the same FDD that had an advance look at the files, Pompeo had promised to release Abbottabad documents that would show Iran-Al Qaeda ties.
"There have been relationships, there are connections. There have been times the Iranians have worked alongside Al-Qaeda," the US spy chief argued. "There have been connections where, at the very least, they have cut deals so as not to come after each other."
This raised alarm bells among critics of President Donald Trump’s new strategy to counter Iranian influence, wary that hawks like Pompeo may be making a case for war. The full extent and true nature of this relationship is unclear and a matter of dispute among scholars and policy-makers.
But the very fact that Hamza and other senior figures appear to be able to live under Iranian protection or custody supports claims that Tehran and Bin Laden had a working relationship.
One document, Joscelyn and Roggio write, recounts how Iran offered training, money and arms to some of Al-Qaeda’s "Saudi brothers" on condition they attack US interests in the Gulf.
But the files also show Tehran and Al-Qaeda sometimes had stark disagreements, and Bin Laden once wrote to Iranian leader the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to demand his relatives be released. "Other files show that Al-Qaeda kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in order to force an exchange," Joscelyn writes.
"Osama bin Laden’s correspondence shows that he and his lieutenants were also concerned that the Iranians would track Hamza or other family members after they were released."
Open conflict
In addition, Roggio and Joscelyn say, "Bin Laden himself considered plans to counter Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East, which he viewed as pernicious."
Nevertheless, they argue, analysis of the intelligence points to Al-Qaeda having been able to maintain a "core facilitation pipeline" on Iranian soil.
Some in Washington are skeptical about the motives behind the release, coming after what the intelligence community had previously said was the last dump from the Bin Laden files.
Ned Price, a former CIA official who was seconded as a national security adviser to former president Barack Obama, said the new documents "don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know."
Instead, he argued on Twitter, Pompeo may have released the files to bolster the case against Iran as a sponsor of terror, pushing the United States closer to open conflict with Tehran.
"These moves suggest he’s reverting to the Bush administration’s playbook: Emphasize terrorist ties as a rationale for regime change," Price warned.
