“Bin Laden's Hard Drive” reveals another side of his life
Shafaq News / The hard drive of Osama bin Laden's computer was among the things that the US Special Forces confiscated from the residential complex in which the leader of Al-Qaeda was holed up, following his death, but some of the contents of the disk were a surprise.
The new National Geographic special "Bin Laden's Hard Drive" premieres on National Geographic on Thursday, September 10 analyzes the porn collection found in the Abottabad compound of slain terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
The revelation that bin Laden had a lot of smutty videos and images on his hard drives isn't new; it was first reported by Reuters back in 2011, and has since been described by officials as "fairly extensive."
Bin Laden's Hard Drive host Peter Bergen—a CNN national security analyst who, in 1997, was the first Western journalist to interview bin Laden on TV—says that "a significant amount of pornography" was retrieved by the Navy SEAL squad. Alas, his hour-long TV special (airing Sept. 10) doesn't provide any more details about precisely what kinky craziness bin Laden was watching—or, for that matter, whether he was watching it at all.
Daily beast website explained why bin Laden’s laptop contains Porn videos saying that “Although porn was definitely on his drives, the actual consumer of this X-rated stash remains something of a mystery. And the fact that many of bin Laden's computers had been previously owned by others leaves some doubt as to whether or not he was even the one who compiled it in the first place.
More interesting is Bin Laden's Hard Drive's suggestion that maybe the terrorist leader's Pornography videos (whose origins are unknown, since he didn't have an internet connection) were canny tools used to communicate with acolytes.
The website added, According to his letters, bin Laden feared using email as a means of spreading his message, because encryption couldn't be trusted; this is why most of his interaction with the outside world occurred via couriers.
However, the idea is raised by Bergen's show (directed by Aaron Kunkel) that the al Qaeda bigwig might have been hiding encrypting instructions in his pornographic files—a devious means of avoiding detection by marrying murderous commands to the very sort of sinful content he purportedly decried.
Then again, as forensic psychologist and CIA consultant Reid Meloy states, it could have just been that, for all his outward claims of humble, righteous piousness, “bin Laden was a normal guy who occasionally wanted to get his rocks off”, since "biology trumps ideology."
