The documents, called “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf” by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were found during the 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad where the terrorist leader was tracked down and killed.You can read all 103 declassified (and translated) documents here. Many of the bin Laden documents reference jihad, attacking America, and purported negotiations between al Qaeda, its allies in the Pakistani Taliban and representatives of Pakistani intelligence.The information dump also includes his reading material: English-language books collected from the compound included titles by Bob Woodward and Noam Chomsky, among others. There’s also the “Best Innovations of the Year Issue” from the Dec. 2010 edition of Popular Science.But he also wrote personal letters to his family. Below are snippets from those personal letters that we on the CCTV America digital team found interesting.
In a letter to his wife:
… My beloved wife, Know that you do fill my heart with love, beautiful memories, and your long-suffering of tense situations in order to appease me and be kind to me, and every time I thought of you my eyes would tear for being away from you. …
… I want you to know that I will not marry on you because I will not find a woman like you, and I will remain in the land of jihad until God will bring us together in this world to see you and enjoy looking at you and at my children … Or if meeting in the world is not possible, then I will see you in the thereafter and that will suffice. …
… My will: If I get killed, and you want to return to your family, then that is okay, but you have to raise my children properly, and to watch them, and be careful of bad company for them, especially after puberty, especially the girls …
… As for you, you are the apple of my eye, and the most precious thing that I have in this world. If you want to marry after me, I have no objection, but I really want for you to be my wife in paradise, and the woman, if she marries two men, is given a choice on Judgment Day to be with one of them. …
In a letter to his father:
… What a father you are; you are the greatest. …
… My dear father, I ask you to take care of my wife and children, to ask about them always, follow on their news, and arrange for their marriages and for their needs…
… And please forgive me if there is anything that happened of me that you do not like and relay my greetings to all our family …
In a letter to his daughter:
… How are you and what is your news? By God, I miss you so much. Yes, I miss my pious daughter.
… Please forgive me if I made you mad – and perhaps for having done so frequently.
… I apologize for this brief letter, because the power keeps going on and off.
In a 2010 letter to his sons:
… We are longing to meet with you and hear your news …
… Before Um Hamzah arrives here, it is necessary for her to leave everything behind, including clothes, books, everything that she had in Iran… Everything that a needle might possibly penetrate. Some chips have been lately developed for eavesdropping, so small they could easily be hidden inside a syringe. Since the Iranians are not to be trusted, it is possible to implant a chip in some of the belongings that you might have brought along with you…
Credit: cctv-america
