Bin Laden bookshelf shows scholarship of American policy

GWEN IFILL:

For more on what was contained in the bin Laden documents, we turn to Brian Fishman, a research fellow at both the New America Foundation and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, and Greg Miller, who covers national security matters for The Washington Post.

Greg Miller, you spent the day poring through all of these documents. What did you see, after having covered this issue for so long, that surprised and enlightened you?

GREG MILLER, The Washington Post:

Well, actually, there was one document in there that really jumped out at me, and it was sort of something just I stumbled through just reading through.

And it was — it's a document — it's a letter, basically, bin Laden sends to one of his wives who had been hiding in Iran. In it, he is making plans or trying to make arrangements for him to join him in Pakistan, in Abbottabad, and he reveals that the isolation there has gotten so bad and the security worries so bad that he had thought about moving, thought about leaving that compound. And this was just months before that U.S. raid.

And it just sort of shows that, you know, if that — if he had followed through on that — and it's not clear that he had taken any additional measures to do so — the post-9/11 history that we're all so familiar with now might have gone very differently.

GWEN IFILL:

Brian Fishman, you have spent a lot of time reading various previous tranches of these documents, or similar documents that have been released.

Some of the letters that are contained in there are mundane. Some of them are chilling. Some of them reveal paranoia.

BRIAN FISHMAN, New America Foundation:

Yes, absolutely.

I think the mundane letters, the sort of banality of the process of organizing a terrorist group like al-Qaida, actually is something that we have seen over and over and over again. After — after we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, we found similar documents with application processes, and saw the same thing, actually, in al-Qaida in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006 and 2007 with their foreign fighters.

The thing that really jumped out to me about these documents is that Osama bin Laden was clearly engaged in the process of managing his network, up until, you know, just a few months before he was killed. We saw a lot of letters primarily to a man named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman in 2010 and even 2011.

And it's interesting that, even as Osama bin Laden became more isolated in that safe house in Pakistan — and, as Greg said, he had concerns about that process — but jihadis and members of the al-Qaida network clearly still saw him as the sort of final arbiter of disputes.

And that's a really interesting dynamic, because only Osama bin Laden sort of had the authority within the movement to play that kind of role. And when we think about his successor after he was killed, Ayman al-Zawahri, it's not clear that he has the same kind of authority in the movement to project that kind of leadership, even though he isn't heard from very often.

GWEN IFILL:

Greg Miller, there have been these questions, as we reported, raised about the circumstances of bin Laden's death, and whether the United States — the way the United States has told the story is accurate, but these documents don't really speak to that.

GREG MILLER:

I mean, to the extent that they — that these are — that these are messages from bin Laden in which he makes no reference to being detained by Pakistani authorities or under their thumb in any way or even concerned about Pakistani agencies like the ISI, I mean, it's — he's communicating with his followers, as Brian said.

He's active until the very — until shortly before the very end. He is trying to run this terror network. He's making plans, expressing ambitions, not behaving like somebody who has been in the custody of the ISI for four or five years.

GWEN IFILL:

And, Greg Miller, why — tell us a little bit about the process here. Why are we just declassifying these documents now?

GREG MILLER:

Well, the U.S. officials said today that this was in the works for some time. And, in fact, this is the second or third time that the U.S. has declassified documents from that compound.

I mean, we saw, right after the raid, there was a good deal of information released. And then, in the years since, even more material has come out. But, I mean, the DNI said today that this is part of an ongoing process and we're going to see additional tranches like this over time.

GWEN IFILL:

Brian Fishman, his view was to focus on the United States, but not so much on what we have seen happen since his death, which is the rise of ISIS and of different groups actually succeeding and eclipsing al-Qaida in the places where he used to control.

BRIAN FISHMAN:

Yes, I mean, I think Osama bin Laden had concerns about trying to establish states, whether it was in Iraq, whether it was in North Africa, in Somalia. He was worried that his affiliate organizations and his followers would get bogged down in sort of the banalities of administration and having to worry about fund-raising and doing those sorts of things, and those would detract from the larger mission, which he saw as getting the United States, forcing the United States to lose its will to support Muslim governments in what he considers the Islamic world.

And so, you know — because what bin Laden believes is that you have to take the United States out of the — or believed — is that you have to take the United States out of the picture before you can topple those governments and then stand up new states and societies.

And he worried that his followers were sort of jumping the gun and trying to establish political hierarchies before the time was right.

GWEN IFILL:

And, Greg Miller, let's talk about those books on his bookshelf that we heard about today. What do they tell us about him? Did he have enough of a grasp of English, for instance, to be able to actually have read those books?

GREG MILLER:

Well, that was one question I had. And U.S. officials I talked to said that they believe he did have the ability to understand and read English at a basic level.

We didn't mention it, but he was clearly a fan of Brian's. He had a number of the center at West Point's reports in his trove. He had — most of these books, obviously, are nonfiction. A lot of them are about U.S. institutions and critiques of U.S. policy, and he's basically a student of U.S. foreign policy.

And it looks like, when you look through these titles, he's trying to search for vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities in everything from the Federal Reserve, to U.S. balloting fraud, to U.S. military strategies, and just sort of messaging vulnerabilities of the United States.

GWEN IFILL:

Greg Miller of The Washington Post and Brian Fishman at the New America Foundation and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, thank you both very much.

GREG MILLER:

Thank you.

BRIAN FISHMAN:

Thank you.