Bin Laden's Hard Drive | Full Episode

[Music] good evening good evening tonight i can report to the american people and to the world the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden the leader of al qaeda osama bin laden osama bin laden osama bin laden has been killed america's number one public enemy was dead killed along with his bodyguards and son it is not so safe house in a nondescript suburb in about about pakistan where he'd been hiding in plain sight for years he was pursued by the most advanced intelligence and counter-terrorism operation in the world besides bin laden's body something else flew back with the navy seals that had killed him the hard drives from his computers the seals were able to get treasure trove for information at the time of their seizure these were some of the most secret materials in the world we know based on the letters that the 9 11 attacks were not sufficient now these hard drives are going to be downloaded and the most notorious terrorist in history has his most private thoughts revealed [Music] [Music] [Music] this is the osama bin laden the world knows stoic armed inscrutable pictured here in a photo found on his hard drives but there's someone else in this picture [Music] me peter bergen one of the very few westerners to meet bin laden i produced the first television interview with osama bin laden in 1997. we were given crude blindfolds heavily armed guys from al qaeda drove us higher and higher into the mountains around midnight appeared osama bin laden i i'd expected this sort of table-thumping revolutionary you know somebody who's super angry he didn't come across like that he kind of carried himself like a cleric he was very low key he didn't raise his voice he presented himself as this modest guy the question is was he really that in reality what are your future plans you'll see them and hear about them in the media god willing [Applause] four years later bin laden delivered on that promise killing almost 3 000 men women and children on 9 11. bin laden is one of the few individuals you can really say changed history and i've spent much of my professional life since the mid 90s trying to work out who exactly he is i thought i found out pretty much everything there was to know about bin laden but turns out that wasn't the case at all [Music] after killing bin laden the navy seal team recovered five computers over 100 flash drives dvds and computer disks multiple cell phones and a handwritten journal from bin laden's about about compound in 2017 the cia declassified and released much of the contents of these drives to the public our whole lives are on our computers now and i think there can be a lot of meaning in zeros and ones bin laden never expected these hard drives to see the light of day so really this is bin laden unplugged there are over 250 gigabytes of data so sifting through this immense amount of files is a daunting task so i need to enlist some expert help so this is all the documents the mountain of documents give us a sense of the scale of how much material there was the cia they listed that they had nearly 470 000 items wow nelly lahood is probably one of the few people in the world who's read all the personal communications in these drives in the original arabic and she's writing a book about them it's very much based on the internal correspondence al-qaeda secrets if you like dr reed molloy one of the leading forensic psychologists in the world who's consulted with the fbi for the past two decades largely focused on threat assessment and threat management dalia mcgowahed an american muslim researcher and director of research at the institute for social policy and understanding we do research and education about the biggest challenges facing the american muslim community ali sufan an arabic speaking former fbi special agent who was the first to find definitive proof linking 911 to the al-qaeda leadership this is a break from the hideout of osama bin laden in kabul i get this brick to be a reminder of what happened on 9 11. bin laden was a man who was pretty careful about keeping his own secrets but fortunately somebody at the compound had a home video camera the cameraman for these home videos never shows his face but looking at this arm it looks like the arm of a young man which leads us to believe that it's harley bin laden bin laden's son who would have been in his late teens early twenties [Music] this was the terrorist mastermind's lair and what's so fascinating is this layer seems so normal i'd even call it boring here we see a clip showing off the [Music] garden here his son helps a baby chick hatch [Music] here a technical difficulty while filming one of bin laden's speeches [Music] hardly the image of a terrorist mastermind appearances are often deceiving however and there's more to these files than first meets the eye a large amount of videos were found hundreds of propaganda videos surprisingly a lot of american and western movies like ice age some japanese anime viral video downloads like charlie bit my finger a reported significant amount of pornography and as well the treasure trove of personal communications the sheer number of people living on this compound makes it actually kind of hard to attach which person belongs to which particular file there were at least 20 people living on the compound complicating the picture milan was using used computers and so when the cia recovered the files some of this material may have been from a previous owner for all these reasons we need to proceed with caution about some of the conclusions we draw from these hard drives but these files are still an incredible resource one of the first questions we're trying to unpack here is what was life like for bin laden living here on the compound you live this very very modest life i mean they were living like medieval peasants almost [Music] from reading a lot of the documents that were recovered they tried to live a normal life osama bin laden was in the hideout with his family in isolation of the society that they lived in bin laden and his bodyguards went to considerable length to make this a fortified compound there was very high wall around the compound and everything was about staying inside the compound not going to school not going shopping they were growing their own vegetables they were raising chickens they had cows [Music] they burned their own trash and in a sense it was a sort of a prison of milan's own making that he kind of checked himself into there are a few particular files that at first look like normal home videos maybe bin laden's son just playing around with the camera [Music] but when there's clip after clip of zooming in on the hills around the compound or zooming in on the sky or even following a helicopter you start to realize that they might be on guard on the lookout for anyone who might be looking for them in the context of bin laden we know that he was being pursued by the most advanced uh intelligence and counter-terrorism operation in the world he knows that the whole world is looking for him so he was always paranoid the only way he communicated with the real world is through a courier there is no phone there is no internet there is no telecommunication wiring that's going to the house at one time mahmoud his chief of staff said sheikh it's very difficult for us to send couriers to people around the world can we at least use email and someone laden responded he's like what are you talking about encryption you want to use encryptions against people who invented emails absolutely not [Music] that means that everything we see on these drives that can be linked to bin laden must have been smuggled into the compound on usb drives one set of files seems particularly surprising the cia said there was a significant amount of pornography found on these computer drives what do you make of that nowhere in the letters are such materials requested and they didn't have internet so how could they really be downloading it i don't know if bin laden utilized that pornography but if he did it wouldn't surprise me biology trumps ideology it's absolutely prohibited in islam and i think most faiths and i just want to point out one really important point here whether or not they were watching porn really doesn't concern me that much because they were also killing people and that is far more prohibited by the quran than watching sex we know that al qaeda used pornography to send messages so they embed encrypted messages in pornographic photos there are softwares where you encrypt a message inside a pornographic video or a pornographic picture when you have the code on the other side that porn photo is suddenly a message you don't need to encrypt messages or use couriers if you're just planning a quiet retirement he spent years on the run and billam believed the best way for him to reclaim the world stage was either to repeat or even improve upon what he saw as his greatest accomplishment the 911 attacks what do the billions of zeros and ones on your computer say about you and what do they say about the most wanted man in history among the files found on bin laden's hard drives a striking number of them dealt with what he considered his greatest accomplishment i think everybody of a certain age remembers exactly where they were on 9 11 2001. [Music] for me i was sitting at my breakfast table getting ready to drive across middle america to start graduate school and i look up and see the horrific images on tv [Music] to see this kind of violence was deeply hurtful deeply enraging and then to and then to find out later that it was actually carried out in the name of my faith it was actually harming people way beyond the poor victims that they targeted it was also harming islam i remember it was the first time in my life that i was scared for someone to know that i was a muslim [Music] the man that i had met four years earlier had just overseen the murder of nearly 3 000 men women and children [Music] what could these drives show myself and my colleagues about the man who did this osama bin laden's hard drives contained both incriminating data and glimpses into the banality of evil the key question is which is which watching an old al jazeera documentary about himself probably this is one of those documentaries that he thought misrepresented him he used to monitor this and he used to monitor it very very seriously he's wondering if those glory days for him would be something he would ever return to bin laden seemed to revel in replaying his greatest hits interesting how he's sitting there watching satellite news that gives you an idea about how much he was really concerned about his message and how his message is being perceived around the world after all during that time period that's the only thing he has bin laden had more than just satellite tv to accompany him on his life on the run he also had three of his wives and a dozen of his kids and grandkids looks like these are the grandkids so this my sense is that's the oldest the grandson of osama bin laden he's probably almost 10. inside the compound there was a different kind of osama bin laden and depending on where you look bin laden seems more like a doting grandfather than a fanatical terrorist [Music] sesame street so this is probably the kids we're watching right but this is clearly educational it's translated in arabic yeah i mean it doesn't surprise me that they would have been watching this i think that's a terrible irony with bin laden the children can enjoy western products and at the same time they could be taught to hate the west this contrast between light and dark runs throughout these hard drives there was warmth in in abu dhabi's household there were these poetry competitions that his kids were reciting and bin laden their grandfather distributed prizes afterwards but there was no escaping the fact that the compound was no ordinary home more like a minimum security prison one of the most important security measures is not to allow children to leave the house except for urgent necessities such as medical treatments they should not be allowed to be in the yard unless they have an adult with them to control their noise [Music] there was physiological deprivation there was isolation from other individuals including other children there was likely no opportunity for these children to have any kind of socialized experience what what kids deserve and what they need [Music] this boy looks bored with trying to play in an environment of squalor harley bin laden would take one of the grandkids into the yard and show him how to use a bb gun and shoot at birds and capture this all on home video seemingly in an effort to try and pass the time there's a bird in this it tree like they shot it out of the tree oh that's the bird that was shot there they shot the bird seems to be alive still oh that's nothing seems to be the grandson yeah shot it in the head now they're enjoying them now they're indulging i should say bin laden's obsession with a life of violence and murder seemed to be spreading to the children who were living with him beyond the compound walls his violent ideology was also taking hold with horrific consequences these are like child soldiers being forced into combat these files give us a road map into the mind of a mass murderer but they also illuminate how he sees the imagination of so many disciples so what about him inspired this devotion when i met bin laden in 1997 i was struck how the son of one of saudi arabia's wealthiest families was living this very modest life he had abandoned luxury and he was living just like one of his own foot soldiers a lot of these guys who joined osama bin laden and a lot of the qaeda members being humble is something that they didn't see in leaders where they came from being humble is something that they read in history books about the prophet about the companions and osama bin laden dressed like the prophet and the companions and acted like the prophet and the companions and for them they saw humility that they never seen in this letter bin laden is suggesting about how the jihadi leaders must address the public in their public statements when they are presenting public statements and it is important that the spokesman avoid being pompous or arrogant it's interesting how important humility is in the muslim character muslims are taught that one of the worst sins is arrogance so it is interesting to note how humble bin laden projected himself to be but the hard drive data illuminates a contradiction here bin laden lived a very calculated life fully aware that he was on stage at all times on screen he was a self-conscious performer and the files show how hard he worked to maintain his image you can read in some of the documents that recovered in his house that he was so much into his looks on the compound he was using hair dye to dye his beard to kind of maintain a youthful appearance despite his sort of humble affect he was very conscious about his own image and how he presented himself to the world and ultimately he seemed like something of a narcissist narcissism is the felt quality of perfection one of the striking things about these videos was the videos where he would make errors in his speech and they would cut and then he would start again he would often record multiple takes of his speeches so he could get it perfect a quiet cue to cut the narcissism is veiled by a soft-spoken manner he recognized that being humble was actually very commanding for him he was obsessed with his public image the videos recovered from this compound include many copies of documentaries and new shows about bin laden that he seemed to closely monitor what do you make of osama bin laden's statement today an audio tape from osama bin laden osama bin laden osama bin laden and do you know where i could find a solid lot where in the world is osama bin laden if we watch closely we can even discern bin laden's tv viewing habits he seemed to curate for himself what he did and didn't want to see a clue to this is how he watched tv news footage if a female tv newscaster came up on his tv take his remote and kind of flip up the satellite channel find it so it covered her face and when she disappeared he would turn it down and put it back onto a normal screen if there is other photos press conference by president obama or anything else he press the menu button so he doesn't want to see anything else but al-qaeda and but himself the hard drive contained a lot of videos of extreme violence which bin laden may well have been monitoring but many of which are so violent that we can't even show them to you countless propaganda videos many beheading videos even the video of a young boy in iraq beheading a hostage a video of a group of kids kicking at the dismembered leg of an american soldier and celebrating chanting death to america it is robbing them of their innocence these are like child soldiers being forced into into combat that is his mentality he was totally blinded by his war bin laden did much more than simply watch violence he was obsessed with inflicting more of it on the world we know based on the letters that the 9 11 attacks were not sufficient he wanted something bigger and larger with much more impact [Music] while bin laden was certainly on the run he was trying to retain control of his organization he was also trying to recreate what he saw as his greatest accomplishment 911. he thought that the bigger of the attack the more the americans would finally pull out of the middle east the the american public would start voting for people who would have different foreign policy i think that was a very naive view absolutely i mean after 9 11 the united states got more engaged in the middle east than it's ever been in its history [Music] so it completely backfired he's delusional and he's a dreamer what drove bin laden's hatred for the united states in the west i said and i have been not allah allah it's impossible to understand bin laden without reference to his religious beliefs this was a guy when he was a teenager was praying seven times a day fasting twice a week on the other hand he was also a mass murderer what was his relationship to religion given how religious bin laden saw himself it's not a surprise there's a lot of religious material on these drives how great is allah [Music] he would often recite verses from the quran in his letters he would refer to sayings of the prophet muhammad in his speeches he thinks he's religious he thinks he was doing the right thing but he was not a religious authority he was not a graduate of a seminary or any kind of traditional religious training and so we have someone who's a non-specialist making unorthodox interpretations of the faith because he actually starts by acknowledging that islam prohibits the killing of non-combatants in warfare but then goes on to explain in his mind why the political situation that we are living in allows him to violate that rule what he did was to use political justifications to violate a religious edict this homemade video found on the hard drives begins as many of these al-qaeda videos do by quoting a religious verse with chanting in tandem and then the message becomes clear we hit the united states and we scared them then inevitably bin laden himself speaks preaching to his followers [Music] and i think it's a really telling piece of propaganda how it weaves together religious imagery to superimpose them on the tactics and actions of alcada this homemade propaganda was crude but tragically it was also effective he was using religion as a tool [Music] does it mean to control people to make people do whatever you want them to do and the end justify the meaning like any any psychopath justify anything i mean at one point he actually told his commanders don't shy away from shedding blood you know if you look at the crusade do you think christianity is a crusade no the same thing it's people using religion to obtain political goals i think it's tragic that we let a criminal define the religion of 1.8 billion people we would never take the word of the kkk to define christianity it would be ludicrous it would be offensive the quran is a recipe book and it called for a tablespoon of sugar in the recipe an extremist would read that and put a cup of sugar instead so taking what the quran says and taking it to its extreme bin laden didn't do that he read in the quran you need a tablespoon of sugar and instead he put a cup of cyanide that's not an extremist that's a deviant revisionist bilan's view of his religion and violence extended to his own family terrorism was the family calling and he was willing to sacrifice even those closest to him for his self-styled holy war [Music] bin laden fathered some 20 children throughout his life a half dozen were with him in the abadabad compound along with another half dozen grandchildren he was also accompanied by two of his four wives one of which had a surprising role on the compound the very first letter that i write from the cia's declassification is actually by his wife siham the first thing that she writes with daughter i write you in haste because i'm really busy with your father preparing his public statements and saham wasn't the only wife who was helping with less than a year left to live bin laden was joined by the oldest of his four wives korea also known as zoom hamsa his letter to heidi when she was still in northwestern this is the oldest wife the oldest wife in in that letter he says something to the effect that i sent the brother on your end money to buy you a computer and i'm also sending you everything that i've got on my computer to help us with writing the public statement for the anniversary of 9 11. so he was asking her to review his statements and and send me any ideas that you have so that indicates that omaha was in a way his wordsmith he needed her for the message so yes it is surprising that many of those public statements that bin laden delivered to the world were actually written or at least co-authored by his wife you don't see that with other terrorist leaders there was definitely some level of respect there bin laden was looking for guidance and at the same time that he was getting help from his wives to write his speeches he was also heavily influencing the kids who were living on the compound [Music] foreign i mean it's clear that he's being indoctrinated at such a young age in this way and and it's extremely heartbreaking god it's it's a scary but that's just another indication that you know for osama bin laden the only thing that matters is the cause he's recording this video in front of the same wall as bin laden what makes them happier than this kid memorizing a poem about jihad and about war to make bin laden happy i absolutely see this young man as a victim this child and along with probably everyone else in the compound we see in that video a young boy reciting a poem as a jihadist warrior and then we also see that boy smiling at somebody off camera and that tells me that it was likely that he was receiving at least nonverbal praise from whoever was off camera as he did that [Music] as the walls began to close in on bin laden his paranoia began to extend even to his own family i was told that you went to a dentist in iran and you were concerned about a filling she had put in for you bin laden was concerned about one of his wives who was under house arrest in iran for a long period of time that she might have a tracking device planted in her teeth by the iranians the size of the chip is about the length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli [Music] this was a really high level of paranoia but of course he had reasons to be paranoid he was the world's most wanted man and on top of the paranoia the safe space that bin laden had built was starting to crumble in the final months when he was alive the two bodyguards who were his only conduit to the outside world were beginning to turn on him sadly i came to realize that they have reached the level of exhaustion that they are shutting down and they ask to leave us all there's an irony here which is bin laden is the leader of this global terrorist organization and yet it looked like he was going to lose the two bodyguards that were his main connection to the outside world day by day bin laden's world began to constrict the walls were closing in around him this particular paranoid did have real enemies and those enemies were slowly drawing near so he was even planning to move apparently to a different location and the navy seal still came down but who really was the man behind those walls the drives could only tell me so much my journey started with an interview and now it needs to end with two more with two men who can give us a whole new perspective on what we found on these hard drives osama what the hell what happened to him become like that warrior leader actor family man mass murderer osama bin laden like his hard drives contain multitudes a forensic search for the real osama bin laden by sifting through his words images and home videos can only get us so far now i want to take it a step further and discuss what we found with two men who knew him well abdullah nas fought side by side with bin laden in afghanistan was one of his closest friends in the 1980s and abdul bariatwan is the only journalist who has spent days with bin laden at his mountain stronghold what was your impression of him as a person to be honest as a person he impressed me he was modest by nature he wasn't actually acting for it to to impress me what was he like ordinary guy for me i recognized many positive sides of of osama which is he talks less he he know he knows what to say he knows how to say it but he's humble so what was osama like with his family usama it's someone you feel it's close to his sons his children in the computer what we found is that the two wives the two older wives were helping him with his speeches so you surprised by that they were uh schoolers they were highly educated they got phd yeah so and they believed on him so i wouldn't be surprised if they actually helped him what was osama's relationship with religion with faith or with religion both you can maybe sometime find someone faithful less religious someone completely religious but not faithful the most important to be faithful yeah when you are faithful let alone you are muslim or non-muslim the faith lead you to the honesty lead you to be peaceful usama still remembers some moment of his faith what the hell what happened to him become like that i don't know i don't know sometimes that's the only answer he's a strange combination of things because he's this modest retiring humble soft-spoken guy yet you know he's killing thousands of people civilians so what is that complicated yeah to be honest it never occurred to me this man actually will be the most dangerous wanted man on earth and i don't believe he wanted to be that [Music] this is one of bin laden's grandsons [Music] [Music] you know the conclusion i reached i reached now the main challenge is not to make these generations ready for a fight to be martyred to be martyred so it's easy to recruit somebody to become a modder what the harder thing is the harder part teach him how to build peaceful society so what's bin laden's legacy it's a lot of violence and kind of meaningless violence he also blew up his own family a number of his children have been killed in the year since 9 11. many of his associates are dead or in prison or have disappeared certainly hasn't created a more safe world or more stable middle east i think his legacy is a legacy of death the legacy of destruction leaving a trail of broken lives and today al-qaeda has way more people who adhere to the philosophy and the ideology and the narrative of osama bin laden that they had on 9 11. i believe isis is part of the bin ladenism and the navy seals took down the messenger but the message still lives on the other hand bin laden's ideas have been firmly rejected by 99.9 of muslims around the world when you look into what's happening in the arab spring you don't see al-qaeda flag you don't see bin laden's photo you see people who want democracy you know who hate democracy you see people who want freedom you know who hate freedom in the political sense osama bin laden he sent a lot of other people to their deaths he didn't die a heroic holy warrior on the front lines he ended up in a pretty comfortable compound surrounded by his wife and family kind of ended with a whimper as opposed to a bang osama bin laden's digital files left behind an imprint and we're left to determine the meaning how do you feel about him now i think he will end up as a footnote in history he was a complex personality i absolutely feel that bin laden hurt muslims you have to hold this quiet respectful manner to other people at the same time that he was a global terrorist osama bin laden is not the first one of history who declared war against the established orders of the time and he won't be the last when you come to responsibility when you come to the blood of innocent there is no gray area even you are my friend i still remember you are humble you are nice you are honest that all will go when you commit one drop of innocent blood bin laden is one of the few people you can say change the course of history but he did not leave the world a better place and he'll be remembered for that [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: National Geographic

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Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, osama bin laden, osama bin laden death, osama bin laden raid, osama bin laden raid full video, osama bin laden family, osama bin laden death announcement, osama bin laden documentary, osama bin laden death documentary national geographic

Id: 4W_P_Yxhnt0

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022