Osama bin Laden, the man who masterminded the 9/11 attacks on the United States that killed 2,977 people, kept porn videos, animated movies, and memes on his hard drives, the new documentary "Bin Laden’s Hard Drive" revealed. The first episode of the film, made by the National Geographic, was aired on 13 September.
According to the documentary, the pornography recovered from bin Laden’s drive is fairly extensive and consists of modern electronically recorded videos. Does this mean that the co-founder of Al-Qaeda was into raunchy videos? Peter Bergen, a national security analyst and the first Western journalist to interview bin Laden on TV, doubts it. Speaking in the documentary Bergen claims that the Saudi-born terrorist likely used the videos to encrypt messages in their data because he feared that his location would be discovered if he used email.
However, Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and CIA consultant who also appeared in the documentary, did not rule out that bin Laden could have watched the saucy videos.
Other information uncovered from the terrorist's hard drive includes:
- an alleged Al-Qaeda recruitment form with questions such as "do you have hobbies" and "do you want to be a suicide bomber?"
- animated movies such as Ice Age, Antz, Cars, Chicken Little, The Three Musketeers, and Batman: Gotham Knight.
- documents revealing that the former number one terrorist was concerned that one of his four wives had a tracking device implanted into her tooth when she went to the dentist.
- a book titled "Biography: Osama bin Laden" was found on his computer, indicating that the Al-Qaeda co-founder apparently liked to read about himself. In 2011, a video released by the Barack Obama administration showed the terrorist watching pictures of himself on a TV screen.
- memes of the popular YouTube video "Charlie Bit My Finger" were found on bin Laden’s computer as well as cat videos, a video for practicing to count, and crochet tutorials.
In all, the Navy SEALs found 250 gigabytes of data, nearly 47,000 digitals files, more than 100 flash drives, as well as five computers and multiple cell phones. Peter Bergen said the information discovered in bin Laden’s compound paints a picture of a complex man.
"History will remember him for that but, in order to cut through the perception of this ascetic in a cave on a holy crusade, it’s important for us to see how he crafted the videos that went out to his followers. Osama bin Laden’s files left behind an imprint of a complex man, responsible for the murder of thousands of people", Bergen said.
Osama bin Laden is most known for his role in masterminding the 9/11 attacks on the United States, which left 2,977 people dead and more than 6,000 injured. The attack also prompted the United States to launch its global campaign against terrorism. Following 9/11, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban, which ruled the country back then. The war in Afghanistan has since become the longest conflict in US history, costing the country $975 billion and claiming the lives of 2,441 US soldiers. It has also claimed the lives of more than 100,000 lives of Afghan civilians and security forces.
For years, the US tried to capture Osama bin Laden, with the FBI offering a $25 million bounty for information on his whereabouts. In 2011, US Navy SEALs shot and killed him during a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The soldiers then took his body to Afghanistan for identification and later buried it at sea.
