Understanding al Qaeda through the massive trove of Osama bin Laden’s files

On Nov. 17, The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and FDD’s Long War Journal held an event to discuss the findings from the recently released documents from Osama bin Laden’s compound. The event can be viewed in its entirety at the video above.

The conversation featured Rukmini Callimachi, foreign correspondent with The New York Times, whose stories covering her discovery of a cache of al Qaeda documents in Mali made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, FDD Senior Fellows and editors of FDD’s Long War Journal, who were given an advance opportunity to preview the records, images, audio, and video files released this month by the Central Intelligence Agency. The discussion was moderated by Kimberly Dozier, Executive Editor of The Cipher Brief.

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4 Comments

  • Brian L. says:

    Thank you so much for doing this!

  • Joe Ashenbrucker says:

    Is there a transcript or summary?

  • Arjuna says:

    Watched it. Wish I’d heard more talk of the Pakistani ISI role in sheltering him and Al Qaeda, and now Zawahiri.
    It’s helpful for me to think of Osama as the Bill Gates of terror. He created the MS operating system hybrid of centrally-led and decentralized terror cells) that AQ-linked Sunni terror groups around the world now emulate. ISIS to me are the Linux of terrorism, i.e. an open-source operating system. Both systems will run your computer (kill innocent people) and they are interoperable to a degree, just like IS and AQ.
    We have turned the terror war into a self-licking ice cream cone like we did with DoD and its many manufactured threats, except the terrorists will not stand down if we leave them alone. They are on a mission: our submission or their death. Let’s make sure it’s the latter.

  • Robert Bentley says:

    Kudos to FDD, Bill, Thomas, Rukmini and Kimberly for an excellent discussion. Thank you very much for posting the video.

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