The US authorities have just released details of Osama bin Laden’s library, the books and documents allegedly removed from his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when it was raided by special forces in May 2011. Newspaper columnists have been busily analysing the list for what it might reveal about this mysterious figure–including his devotion to key theorists of jihad, his love of ‘conspiracy theories’, and his peculiar interest in France (reflected in titles like ‘France on Radioactive Waste Management 2008’–we are not talking Toujours Provence).
Like most booklists, this one is frustratingly thin on detail, a bare list of titles and authors, if we are lucky. The research skills of the intelligence experts who compiled it seem rather limited (‘appears to be an academic journal article, origin unclear’ is their comment on one item). The material form of the books is not specified; an article in The Guardian online suggests that many of them were probably PDFs rather than physical books. The same article points out that ‘US authorities have not given any information about where the books were found in the Abbottabad residence – so quite what lay on Bin Laden’s bedside table, in the room in which he was shot and killed, remains unknown – nor have they divulged any details of any marginal notes the onetime civil engineering student might have made’.
That’s true, and a shame, although the list does provide a section of ‘Documents Probably Used by Other Compound Residents’ which includes a handbook of Arabic calligraphy, the Grappler’s Guide to Sports Nutrition and some pages from the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records Children’s Edition. We are not to imagine the terrorist mastermind worrying about the relationship between his weight and his muscle mass while he wields a reed pen to copy down details of ‘the farthest tightrope walk in high heels’, or ‘the most toothpicks ever placed in a beard’.
What bin Laden was definitely up to, according to the Daily Mail online, was pornography–although the American authorities have nobly declined to release any information about this ‘due to the nature of the content’. As the Mail comments, despite the lack of information, ‘the detail painted the al Qaeda leader as a hypocrite, since watching porn clashed with his fundamentalist image’. Yes indeed, that hits the nail on the head. But given that the journalist Seymour Hersh has just revealed the extent to which the American regime may have lied to the public about the raid on Abbottabad and the assassination of bin Laden, why should we believe anything it tells us about what was found in the compound?