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Monday, April 30, 2012

Captured Bin Laden Docs to be Posted Online by West Point's CTC

The AP and other news outlets are reporting that captured Bin Laden documents will be posted online on West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center (which already hosts the Harmony Program of captured documents).  The AP states:
U.S. officials say the public will soon be able to read some of Osama bin Laden's last written or typed words - made available by the U.S. Army's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point military academy this week.
Navy SEALs gathered the documents when they raided bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2 last year.
The trove included correspondence between the terror leader and his far flung affiliates, and a diary written in bin Laden's own hand.
Intelligence officials say the trove shows how the terror group works and evidence that bin Laden was helping plot attacks on American targets.
Jennifer Epstein at Politico adds:
The final words written by Osama bin Laden will become public later this week on an Army website, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said Monday. 
Some of the documents seized curing the raid of bin Laden's Pakistani compound a year ago -- and unclassified -- will be posted online by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, Brennan said during a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
The full text of Brennan's Wilson Center speech is available here (thanks Lawfare).  His exact words on the release of the documents are (my emphasis):
With its most skilled and experienced commanders being lost so quickly, al-Qa’ida has had trouble replacing them.  This is one of the many conclusions we have been able to draw from documents seized at bin Laden’s compound, some of which will be published online, for the first time, this week by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.  For example, bin Laden worried about—and I quote—“the rise of lower leaders who are not as experienced and this would lead to the repeat of mistakes.”