Newly declassified documents from the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 have revealed the late al-Qaida leader’s remarkable English-language library, including books by Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward and even 9/11 conspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin.
Yet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the files on Wednesday, has not released all the material found in the compound. In fact, there’s a rather notorious stash that the U.S. government apparently doesn’t want you to see: a cache of pornography.
“We have no plans to release that at this point in time,” Brian Hale, a spokesman for the DNI, told the Telegraph’s Raf Sanchez. “Due to the nature of the content the decision was made not to release it.” The Guardian was also told that the pornographic material would not be released.
Reports that pornographic material was found in the compound were first published by the news agency Reuters on May 13, 2011, just weeks after a U.S. military raid on the site left the al-Qaida leader dead. Unnamed officials told Reuters that the pornography was modern and the collection extensive. Officials said it was unclear how it came to be in the hideout, which had no Internet connection.
Reuters also reported that the officials were unsure about the precise location where the material was found or who might have been viewing it. U.S. officials have said that 22 people had been living in the compound, including a number of adult males. U.S. officials later confirmed that they had discovered pornography in the compound.
Although it has never been clear whether bin Laden had been viewing the pornography, the reports of adult videos in his compound prompted a flurry of mockery from the likes of the New York Post and Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” with some suggesting that the reports had been leaked to make bin Laden look hypocritical. (He had criticized the United States’ culture as sexualized in a 2002 “letter to America”).
Some experts pointed out that finding pornography on jihadists’ computers had become common by 2011, however, and CNN later reported on a separate case in which al-Qaida had encoded pornographic movie files with secret documents.
