Bin Laden's porn stash subject of new documentary
The new National Geographic special "Bin Laden's Hard Drive" analyzes the porn collection found in the Abottabad compound of slain terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
BIN LADEN'S HARD DRIVE premieres on National Geographic on Thursday, September 10, at 9/8C.
Peter Bergen, who famously interviewed Bin Laden, is the correspondent and host of the special. More in the press release.
The documentary presents am interesting theory about the XXX stash, writes Nick Schager at The Daily Beast - could Bin Laden have been using the pornography content to send encoded messages, rather than for purely prurient purposes?
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. 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 sex videos (whose origins are unknown, since he didn't have an internet connection) were canny tools used to communicate with acolytes. 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."
More at The Daily Beast: Was Osama bin Laden Sending Coded Messages in Porn?