 Welcome. My name is Brian Fishman. I am a terrorism research fellow here at the New America Foundation and I really I really have a unique pleasure today to host Nellie LaHood from the Combating Terrorism Center up at West Point. Nellie is one of those people that when you get the chance to talk to her about al-Qaeda or politics in the Middle East you never walk away with the feeling that you haven't learned something and I hope that we have that experience here today. It's also a real pleasure for me to to host somebody from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point which is a place where I worked for four years. I still have a an affiliation as a fellow there. It's really a unique institution. Their primary mission is educating cadets and yet they have taken on this role as an organization that does really cutting-edge research on terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. And I think that there's often misconceptions about what the Combating Terrorism Center is. I remember when I was up there and I'm sure this still happens people would come up for a you know they would be looking for a tour or something like that thinking there was going to be some command center with you know flat screen TVs all over the place and flashy information and really what you find are a group of very smart dedicated researchers and academics that spend their days the way dedicated researchers and academics do all over the world which is trying to understand hard problems through hard work. And I think that Nellie is a great representative of that organization and and what it tries to achieve. So it's really nice to have her here today. So Nellie is a senior associate at the CTC. She's also teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point Soch. And she's also and I'll point this out and we'll talk about this a little bit later the author of a great book called The Jihadi's Path to Self-Destruction which I like so much that I assigned it to my class that I taught at Columbia this past semester and I really would encourage you to take a look at it. So without further ado I'm going to turn this over to Nellie. She's going to talk for 15 or 20 minutes and then we'll have a Q&A I hope you will engage in that. The one rule about Q&As in New America please stand up state your name explain your affiliation and then ask a great question and then be part of the conversation. So Nellie please. Thank you Brian. First many thanks for all of you who are interested and came here today and a particular thanks to the New America Foundation and particularly to Brian on behalf of the CTC and the authors of this report. I'd like to note that the findings of the report represent the analysis of its authors. They don't represent West Point, the Army or the Department of Defense and responses during the Q&A are my own views solely. I'm gonna start my presentation with an important qualification followed by a soundbite if you like about the most compelling story of the documents and proceed to give an overview of some of the main findings of the report. In the overview I shall focus on Al Qaeda under the leadership of bin Laden and its relationship with regional jihadi groups and on Al Qaeda's relationship with Iran and Pakistan what the documents tell us about this and of course I would be happy to delve into more details during the Q&A about other aspects of the documents. The important qualification has to do with the fact that the report is a study of only 17 documents captured from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abu Talbad. They consist of electronic letters or draft letters totaling only 175 pages in the original Arabic. In view of the thin volume of the documents it would be irresponsible to claim that they reveal conclusive information about Al Qaeda. Nevertheless the documents are highly valuable and at the very least they demand a reassessment of what has been dubbed as Al Qaeda central and its relationship with the so-called affiliates. This brings me to the soundbite which is bin Laden's frustration with regional jihadi groups and his seeming inability to exercise control over their actions and public statements is the most compelling story to be told on the basis of the 17 declassified documents. Why is this a compelling story? Well that's because it's been assumed that Al Qaeda was able to rebuild across Pakistan's Northwest frontier following the losses it suffered in the immediate aftermath of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and that it has also been able to act as an organization. The intelligence community labeled this revived entity as Al Qaeda central both in reference to the geographical presence of the core senior leaders who was set to report to bin Laden and to seek his approval for major decisions and also to indicate that there is at least a symbiotic relationship between this Al Qaeda central and regional jihadi groups that have been dubbed among other names as affiliates. According to this argument Al Qaeda central gives strategic guidance to its regional affiliates and it's assumed that the affiliates are largely in compliance with Al Qaeda central. Well the documents show that the framing of an Al Qaeda central as an organization in control of regional affiliates reflect a conceptual construction by outsiders rather than the messy reality of insiders. Some of the affiliates sought bin Laden's symbolic blessing when it comes to matters that are symbolic such as declaring an Islamic state and wanted the formal union to acquire the Al Qaeda brand. On the operational front however the tone in several letters authored by bin Laden makes it clear that he was struggling to exercise even a minimal influence over them. He is burdened by their mistakes committed by them and he disapproves of their operations especially those operations that resulted in the unnecessary death of Muslim civilians. Their mistakes he worried distorted the image of the jihadis in the eyes of the public separating them from their popular bases. The documents do not show bin Laden to be in charge of the jihadis landscape rather in 2010 bin Laden is seeking to find ways to centralize and oversee the affairs of regional groups so that there is something called Al Qaeda central came as news to bin Laden and I'm not joking. His blueprint for centralization is in fact in the context of Al Qaeda central in the media and I'm quoting him the expression Al Qaeda central he wrote is a technical time used in the media to distinguish between Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Al Qaeda in the rest of the region. I do not object to using it initially to clarify the objective of the centralization endeavor end of quotation. As to those that have been called the affiliates they have not just been a problem for Al Qaeda in terms of harming its image but they have also caused internal debates among the senior leadership. Three different positions within Al Qaeda can be disowned on the subject. There are those whom one may time the principal represented by Adam Gaddan urging senior leaders to declare their distance and even to dissociate themselves from groups whose leaders do not consult with Al Qaeda and yet still still act in its name. There are others represented by an anonymous author urging the opposite believing that the inclusion of regional jihadi groups in the fold contributes to Al Qaeda's growth and expansion. Bin Laden seems to have represented a third position. He wanted to maintain communication through his own pen or that of idea with brothers everywhere at least to urge restraint and provide advice even if it fell on deaf ears but without franchising the brand. The groups for which there is enough substantive content in the documents to gain some kind of meaningful understanding of Al Qaeda's relationship with them are the Islamic State of Iraq, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, Pakistani Taliban what we call TTP and Al Shabaab. With respect to the Islamic State of Iraq the documents confirm what we knew before namely that its admission into Al Qaeda by Bin Laden the only group he admitted proved to be a liability not an asset to Al Qaeda. An anonymous author describes the leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq to be extremist and their speeches to be repulsive and lacking wisdom. Somewhat revealing is Bin Laden's concern with AQAP which has been considered by many to be Al Qaeda's success story yet Bin Laden comes across as critical of both their words and operations in particular the groups attacks in Yemen, its lack of acumen to win the Yemeni people's support and the ill-advised public statements of its leaders. He was anxious that AQAP was attempting to accomplish more ambitious actions than it was capable of sustaining. It appears that its leader Nasser Al-Wahayshi or Abu Basir had sent a letter either to Bin Laden or to Atiyah in which he wrote if you ever wanted Sana'a today is the day by which he meant that AQAP was ready to declare an Islamic State in Yemen and was possibly seeking blessing from Bin Laden for his takeover plan. It also seems that Abu Basir had requested that a senior leader be dispatched to Yemen to help in the operational work. Well, that's not what Bin Laden had in mind for Yemen. Before responding to Abu Basir, Bin Laden had written at length to Atiyah about Yemen and told him that in his mind such an Islamic State if prematurely declared before developing a firm foundation is doomed to fail and that it is likely to lead to aborting the work of Shihad. Instead, Bin Laden thought that Yemen should serve as a reserve and support base for Shihadis engaged in warfare on the open fronts, in other words, in countries that are occupied like Iraq and Afghanistan. So the letter addressed to Abu Basir is unambiguous and somewhat condescending in its tone. On the question of declaring a state, the author, either Bin Laden or Atiyah, wrote almost mockingly, well, of course, we want an Islamic State in which we would establish God's law, but only if we are capable of holding on to it. And as if AQAP does not follow the news, the author reminded Abu Basir that if Shihadis were unable to hold on to Afghanistan as an Islamic State in the face of US-led invasion in 2001, the chances of Shihadis holding on to Yemen are even slimmer. As to Abu Basir's request for a senior leader to be dispatched to Yemen to assist in the operational work, this was politely denied, citing security-related reasons, even though Bin Laden was planning to dispatch somebody to the region. The fact that AQAP continues to mount attacks against the Yemeni army and police since the letter was composed suggests that Al-Wahashi, the leader of AQAP, either did not receive the letter or if he did, it displeased him and he decided to ignore its directives. My personal favorite is the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban. The few scattered references in which Bin Laden mentioned the group are far from flattering. He was not informed, by the way, of the group's planned bombing of Times Square by Faisal Shahzad in May 2010. And he was appalled by Shahzad's conduct in his trial, which Bin Laden was following in the news. I beg your indulgence because this is a very neat quotation from his letter that I'm going to relay to you. So this is a letter from Bin Laden to Aqiyah. He says, you have perhaps followed the media trial of brother Faisal Shahzad. May God release him. During which the brother was asked to explain his attack against the United States in view of having taken an oath not to harm it when he was awarded his American citizenship. He responded that he lied when he took the oath. It does not escape you, Sheikh Aqiyah, that Shahzad's lie amount to betrayal and does not fall under permissible lying to evade the enemy during times of war. Please request that our Pakistani Taliban brothers to redress this matter. Also draw their attention to the fact that brother Faisal Shahzad appeared in a photograph alongside Commander Mahsoud, that's the leader of the TTP. I would like to verify whether Mahsoud knew that when a person acquires an American citizenship, this involves taking an oath, swearing not to harm America. If he is unaware of this matter, he should be informed of it. We must act swiftly to remove the suspicion that Shahad has violated their oath and engaged in the Ghadr of Betrayal. The Times Square attempted attack was not the only one that Al-Qaeda had no hand in Pakistan. It is clear from the letters that the groups in discriminant attacks, that is the Pakistani Taliban's in discriminant attacks against Muslims, were of major concern to Al-Qaeda. This led Atiyah and Abu Yahya Al-Libi to write a letter addressed to the respected brother, Hakimullah Mahsoud, the leader of the TTP. The authors explicitly stated their dissatisfaction with the group's ideology, methods, and behavior, and threatened that unless we see from you serious and immediate practical and clear steps towards reforming your ways and associating yourself and dissociating yourself from these vile mistakes that violate Islamic law, we shall be forced to take public and firm legal steps from our side, end of quotation. Al-Shabaab in Somalia do not fare that well either. Bin Laden was concerned over the group's mode of governance, then neglect to build a viable economy, and was also worried about the group's rigid approach to Islamic law. It seems that Abu Al-Zubair, the leader of Al-Shabaab, had sent a letter to Bin Laden in which he requested the formal unity with Al-Qaeda and either consulted with him on the question of declaring an Islamic State in Somalia or informed him that he was about to declare one. Bin Laden's letter to Abu Al-Zubair has echoes of it's not you, it's me sort of excuse. On the question of formal unity with Al-Qaeda, Bin Laden politely declined, citing two reasons. First, he indicated that it would give the enemy the excuse to mobilize its forces against Somalia. Further, without formal unity, it would remain feasible for foreign age to reach Muslims in need in Somalia. The second reason Bin Laden cited is the extreme poverty in Somalia, and he wanted to promote economic development and construction there. So he tells him, I'm determined to urge merchants in the Gulf States, in one of my public statements, to invest in effective and important developmental projects. Thus, the absence of public affiliation, he explained, between the shihadis in Somalia with Al-Qaeda would strengthen the position of merchants who desire to help their Muslim brothers in Somalia. On the question of declaring a state, Bin Laden advised against it, but he said that if you believe that it's necessary, why don't you declare it an emirate rather than a state? What is intriguing about Al-Shabaab and this component of Al-Shabaab is that though Bin Laden denied them public union with Al-Qaeda, Al-Zawahidi granted their wishes after Bin Laden's death in February this year. This has to say something about some tension to say the least among senior Al-Qaeda leaders. So in light of the Al-Qaeda documents, one really has to reassess what Al-Qaeda is today and its relationship with regional shihadi groups. Next, I'm going to talk about Iran and Pakistan. Now relations between Al-Qaeda and Iran appear to have been highly antagonistic. And the documents provide evidence for the first time of Al-Qaeda's covert campaign against Iran. This battle appears to have been an attempt to influence the indirect and unpleasant negotiations over the release of shihadis and their families, including members of Bin Laden's family, detained by Iran. The documents provide insight on Al-Qaeda and Iran starting in 2009 and, of course, not from Iran's side. This was after Iran. We are told to release the group of brothers in several batches. The list included a number of legacy Al-Qaeda members described as mid-level brothers whose ties to the group stretched back to the 1990s. Based on a letter authored by Atiyah, the Iranians were not releasing shihadi prisoners to forge a bond or strengthen an existing one with Al-Qaeda. And it is significant to note that the Iranians do not appear to have made direct contact with Al-Qaeda, at least not in the initial stage. Atiyah's frustration could not be clearer. And I'm quoting him. But the criminals, he's referring to the Iranians, but the criminals did not send us any letter. They do not wish to appear to be negotiating with us or responding to our pressures, as if to suggest that their actions are purely one-sided and based on their own initiative. End of quotation. So the documents are clear about where Al-Qaeda stands in its relationship with Iran. But of course, we don't have anything on Iran's perspective on the matter and the reasons why Iran detained many shihadis and their families without due process for years. Unlike the explicit and relatively substantive references to the Iranian regime, the documents do not have that many references about Pakistan. Although there are notes about trusted Pakistani brothers, there are no explicit references to any institutional Pakistani support. Another reference worth highlighting in this regard is that bin Laden did not appear to enjoy freedom of movement with his family. In his long list of security measures to be followed by his brothers to evade the eyes of the authorities, he wrote to Ateer that it is most important not to allow children to leave the house except in emergency situations. For nine years prior to his death, bin Laden proudly told Ateer that he and his family adhered to such strict measures, precluding his children from playing outdoors without the supervision of an adult who could keep their voices down. So bin Laden, it was said, could run, but he could not hide. Well, he seems to have done very little running and quite a lot of hiding. To conclude, in comparison to regional shihadi groups, bin Laden comes across as an outmoded shihadi. In contrast to their indiscriminate attacks and indiscriminate shihadi, he was more interested in carefully planned methods and operations. The regional group's eagerness to declare Islamic states and their regions was moderated by bin Laden urging patients first to secure public support. And while they aimed to win the short-term battles, his eyes were on the larger prize. He wanted to defeat the United States to undo what he believes to have been, to undo its support for the corrupt Muslim regimes and liberate his fellow Muslims. Bin Laden knew well how to articulate publicly the grievances that he believed Muslims suffer at the hands of their regimes and Western countries, but his private letters show that saving his fellow Muslims from the indiscriminate attacks of his shihadi brothers weighed even more heavily on his mind. Thank you. This one working? Can you hear me? Good. So I'm going to ask a couple of questions first, Nellie. I had some written down and I just kept writing more down as you were talking. I guess the, you know, let me ask you first about this notion that bin Laden was not in control, right? Because some of the conversation, the policy conversation here in Washington, after the letters were released, emphasized something different. That bin Laden was, in fact, in communication, at least, with elements of the Al-Qaeda empire around the world, right? Various affiliate organizations and these sorts of groups. And there was the assumption, among some, that that kind of communication didn't occur. So how do we understand his ability to communicate and place it sort of in the appropriate context and in reference to his ability to control events in various places, right? Because he was in contact. And that wasn't a foregone conclusion. Well, there was a clear difference between communicating and being in control. The documents are clearly showing that he is not in control. At the very least, it is important to note that bin Laden appears to us in the documents in late 2010. We don't see him before then through these documents. And in 2010, we don't see bin Laden to be in control. If anything, the documents are showing that yes, he is communicating with them, but in many instances, he is very concerned about their own operations, about their own ideology, about their own public statements. So being in communication is completely different from being in control. So the world, if bin Laden was in charge of the jihadi world throughout this time, we would clearly be seeing completely different kinds of operations. And that's not the world that he was in charge of. What would we have seen? We would have seen larger attacks more directed at the United States. So let me be a little bit kind of, I don't want to spare bin Laden now. So on one level, you see bin Laden in these letters calling on these regional jihadi groups to focus their attacks on the United States. At the same time, you can see that he doesn't trust them. So there is something intriguing about one of his letters, the longest letters that he wrote, which is the most reflective one. This is the letter in which he proposes to centralize jihadi activities. And this is really the centralization. His attempt to centralize comes to us in 2010. This is when he discovers al-Qaeda central in the media and thinks that it's a good idea. So what we seem to have in this is that he wants to centralize efforts. We don't know what it was like before then. And we see him, the plan for this centralization seems to refer to this kind of special operation force that he would have liked to create based on the letter from a certain Sheikh Yunus, a very carefully written and very strategically intelligent letter about how we need to police the regional jihadi groups so that we would act ourselves. So my own interpretation is that I don't think that bin Laden would have wanted to trust them on the operational front, but he wanted them to be there for the show. Whether he had the capability to create this special operation force or not is very difficult to say. Having said that, and this is where I think if I were Abu Basir in Yemen, it would have surprised me receiving this letter, the letters from bin Laden, because some of his statements prior to that, he would call on Muslims to rebel against their leaders and so on. So all of a sudden, he is saying, hold. Don't act. So there is a change in bin Laden's mode of thinking between his public statements and what he is saying starting from 2010. It is possible that he thought, well, they can't be trusted, and they're not going to be able to mount the qualitative operations that he would like. For instance, in his letter to Abu Al-Zubair in Somalia, he's very clear, just don't worry about these, unless you can really mount qualitative, big attacks, don't even mount them. So he's way more interested in quality than he is in quantity. And he seems to be somebody who is very patient and would prepare to wait until the right moment. Bin Laden's concern about killing Muslims was not really that much of a surprise. I mean, we've seen concern from al-Qaeda, from senior leaders in al-Qaeda, really going back to, you know, most famously to 2005 with the Zawahiri letter to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, subsequent letters from Atiyyab al-Rikman and Abu Yahya al-Libi to folks in Iraq, and then in some other declassified documents that have since been released in 2008 also in reference to Iraq. This is a major theme of your book, right? This notion that built into al-Qaeda's ideology is sort of this spinning out of control where individuals and affiliates will take up their own initiative and ultimately do things that are not in the strategic interests of the jihadi enterprise or at large. So that's gotta feel good, cause you got one right. But I'm wondering, you know, when you look at these documents, 17 documents out of, according to my colleague Peter Bergen, more than 6,000 of various types that were captured and pulled off of the target. What did you expect? You know, what was confirmed in these documents? And what from these documents surprised you where you didn't really think that al-Qaeda would be thinking about X, Y, or Z? So I had been working, as you know, on an autobiography by a leading al-Qaeda operative by the name Fahd al-Harun. It's 1156 pages and it's been my really education of al-Qaeda. And frankly, you know, when we received the documents that my report on it had been completed and it was reviewed by external leaders, but external readers, so I had to put it aside. And I think it's much more insightful than the 17 documents. So I had this, the documents did not surprise me because I had heard them before from Harun and the report will be published, you know, hopefully next week. So I was very familiar with these dynamics from and inside those perspectives about the fact that these indiscriminate attacks against civilians are not really al-Qaeda's mode of thinking. And it's actually not just indiscriminate attacks against Muslim civilians, there's also concern about other civilians, civilians at full stop. And, you know, al-Qaeda sees itself as targeting military, economic and political targets. It doesn't see itself targeting civilians. And that's why I think we need to be looking, especially after these documents have been released, we need to reassess where al-Qaeda stands, what is really al-Qaeda, and what does it really mean in terms of the rest of the region or shihadi groups. So that didn't surprise me, but I'm somebody who's been, who had this privilege to be reading somebody like Fadal Haruna's work. But I'll tell you what surprised me. I had thought that bin Laden, you know, through a number of primary sources, that bin Laden was actually a very decent al-Qaeda leader. And I can see why. I thought that it was exaggerated in terms of the people who followed him. What really surprised me is no ego. I was expecting to see somebody with an ego in these documents. Well, but that stands somewhat in contrast to the famous video now of him watching himself on TV. It was also picked up in a barba, yeah? But, you know, this was selective views, and of course he is on the news. I didn't see much about him watching himself as a snapper of selective betrayal. But he, in the letters, I was expecting somebody who is thinking, here's, I'm always right, and I'm always there. What comes across is somebody who is very consultative with the people around him. He doesn't say, here's what you need to do. He offers a suggestion. He asks for people's views, for consideration, and to get back to him. In fact, one of the three items that he wants to be part of the oath, the covenant, is for people to be obligated to give advice to their senior leaders. So all this brouhaha about they needed to pledge, members of al-Qaeda need to pledge allegiance to bin Laden's persona, or bay'ah to bin Laden, it's not there. I've read other primary sources of al-Qaeda that we have on the CTC, and the oath doesn't require an oath to bin Laden, a bay'ah to bin Laden. It rather requires a commitment to carry out al-Qaeda's work, but it doesn't, and in his own letters, the three items that they need to be there is the oath for to carry out the work. And the third one on the item, members' duty to give advice to their senior leaders. So there is no ego, there is no arrogance. Well, I didn't see it in these letters anyway. So that was, and in addition to that, he shows he is highly concerned about the safety of his men. He's willing for the work to go slow so long as their security is in check. Those who die, he inquires about their families, tell me more about their families. So I can see now it came closer to me in terms of the sort of leader why people around him followed him, respected him, and thought that he was principled. Well, I mean, that raises, I think an obvious question, which is now that he's gone, we have Daniel Zawahry, who many of these qualities that you're describing and ascribing to bin Laden are not usually ascribed to Zawahry. He's somebody that has throughout his career as a militant gotten in fights with, you know, supposed allies. He's somebody that is generally speaking not considered as charismatic. And yet he's somebody that the affiliate organizations of Al Qaeda have recognized as the new leader of the organization. Where do you see Al Qaeda going? And again, as we were discussing beforehand, you know, rather than think about Zawahry, whether he's a better or worse leader than bin Laden, how is he gonna be different, right? Where are the sort of personal organizational differences? And what are the strategic differences? And particularly this relationship with affiliate groups and the Pledge of Allegiance by Shabab and being welcomed by Zawahry when bin Laden didn't want to bring them into the fold. Right. So just a qualifier. I don't know enough from primary sources as to how members say if he had group, which he led, or members of Al Qaeda, how they view him. On the basis of the autobiography that I worked on, he doesn't seem to be popular. But I can't really say whether he is the arrogant person or not, I can't say. But to his credit, to his credit, he, you know, bin Laden sacrificed his fortune for the cause that he believed in. And now Zawahry didn't start with the fortune that bin Laden did, but he was a successful doctor in Egypt and he could have had a different career if he wanted to. So in that respect, he continues to enjoy that kind of what shihadis would refer to precedence in shihad, or sabiqah for shihad. He has sacrificed something for the cause. Arrogant or arrogant, I'm not gonna speak about this because I don't know. However, what is interesting about Al Zawahry, unfortunately the documents do not tell us much about bin Laden's relationship with him. He is referred to as Abu Muhammad in a number of letters so we know that bin Laden is in contact with him. But it is difficult to say whether, you know, he was rebuking him in his letters or whether he was supporting him and so on. What does seem to be interesting about this is that bin Laden only accepted al-Qaeda in Iraq into the fold. That was at the end of 2004. And it seems for all intents and purposes that this was a mistake and it proved to be a liability. That we knew before, but we know also from the documents that al-Qaeda in Iraq is certainly not an asset. And I wonder whether bin Laden knew that this is a mistake and he stopped doing this alliance. But all the other regional shihadi groups that have come into the fold of al-Qaeda, have been admitted into the fold of al-Qaeda, have come through Zawahry, not bin Laden. What makes it more intriguing is that this 2010 letter from bin Laden to al-Zubair, Abu al-Zubair, the leader of al-Shabaab in Somalia, is that bin Laden was reluctant to franchise al-Qaeda. He made a mistake once, he's not gonna do it again. So if that is the case, why did al-Zawahry accept the group? Why did he bring them into the fold? Now, there is a sort of a letter, one of the letters which is open to several interpretations. And it could be addressed to bin Laden but it could be addressed to somebody else's. And it seems to be about bin Laden's refusal to admit al-Shabaab into the fold. And this author, or this anonymous author of this letter is critical of the fact that why aren't we including them into the fold? And the more we include in the fold, this is a sign of God that we are expanding and so on and so forth. I have a suspicion that it may be al-Zawahry. And my suspicion also is that it was not addressed to bin Laden but I could be wrong about it and it could be some criticism behind his back. Before I turn it over to the audience for questions, I wanna ask you one more which is about this process, right? This is 17 documents. Reportedly, several thousand were captured. You know, you made, I think, the appropriate provisos about how do you understand 17 documents and placing them into the context of the rest of this stuff that wasn't released and even then what do you not see? There's a lot of context that goes missing but what is the value of declassifying and releasing this information to all of us? This has come up and there are folks that criticize this process and I tend to be very much a supporter of this kind of disclosure. It allows us to have in a public conversation to have a more informed debate but do you think that we can do more of this in the future? And this is something CTC has done in the past. How do we facilitate a process where we can understand these kinds of documents in the future? Well, to start with, the CTC does not have anything to do with the declassification of the documents. I'm not an American citizen and I don't have a clearance. We are an academic outfit. This has been scholarly. It's an academic process. It is not a political process and I think the findings of the report make it more than clear that this is not a political process. The issue of declassifying more or not, we don't know if they've got more. They may well have books by legal scholars that could count as many thousands of documents but it's very difficult for us to be clear on what they have or what they don't have. Now, we have two options. You could say either you give us everything or we're not touching it or you could work on what you have. And I don't deal with this part of the captured battlefield documents. But for my own personal opinion, I've studied, my own academic studies has been with medievalist and we work on sometimes on one text and we know that this text is referring to several other texts. So the best thing that you could do is to do justice to the documents that you are reading. It is very possible that the report gets al-Qaeda wrong but the report I very much hope gets the documents right. So we did what we think we need to do from an academic perspective which is to analyze the documents and let the documents speak for themselves. What happens in the future is really in the hands of the agencies that either have or do not have documents but from our perspective and here, for those of us who don't know much about the CTC, we are purely, we just teach and research. Though we are part of the Department of Defense, if you look through our publications, we all publish with a disclaimer that this represents the author's views, not anybody's views. And frankly, firstly, I'm gonna say that my superiors, I was the lead person on this project and at no point throughout the process did any of my superiors, Lieutenant Colonel Liam Collins, we know him as Liam, at no point did he come to me to say anything other than what is it that you want me to do. Lieutenant Colonel Jeb, who's also our superior, the only thing that I've heard throughout the process is what is it that we need to do? But in terms of research-wise, I didn't have to deal with any bureaucracies, it was purely a textual process and what the government has in mind is something that I can't speak about, why they declassified them. What is what we did do and we didn't have the documents for long and we made the decision that we wanted to release the report and release the documents on the anniversary. We thought that it was fitting, but that was our decision. Nobody put pressure on us in any way, shape or form. My director simply asked me, do you think it's feasible? I said that it was and we met at the deadline, but that's really largely because I was determined that we would meet at that line, but this was our decision and we made the promise that unless we are pleased with the content of the report, we would not release them just for the sake of meeting the anniversary, but this was really our own decision, not a political decision whatsoever. Okay, with that, Jen, do you have a mic? Why don't we start in the back? Please state your name and affiliation. Today, The New York Times had an article about President Obama's National Security Council and the targeted killings and I was curious if you could speak about whether Bin Laden had any fear about targeted killings. Although he died before Anwar Al-Laki was killed last fall, did he have any fears about it, any attempt to react to the targeted killing project because it severely undermined Al-Qaeda in Yemen? Thank you. Yes, I didn't read that report this morning, but Bin Laden is very aware of what is called in technical terms is the OPSEC or operational security measures. In fact, my boss wrote an article in this month that's sentinel about Bin Laden's OPSEC measures. It's the main highlight, the main important thing for him was the aerial, the aerial aspects of monitoring areas of Waziristan and he was super careful about the movements of his men. He doesn't talk about targeting killing specifically, but, or at least anything, but you can see that all forms of security measures that needed to be taken to ensure the safety of his men, they were very much on his mind. Andrea Sten with Huffington Post. Can you talk a little bit about Adam Gadan and the American jihadi or jihadi's plural? And how many, now that Al-Laki is out of the picture, what is the state of American jihadis and is he, Adam Gadan, now number one target? Or can you tell any of that from the documents? Well, Adam Gadan was an interesting surprise in the documents. He has an over 20 page letter and I was highly impressed by his Arabic. This is somebody who is, you know, with the exception of two mistakes that non-native Arabists might make. His Arabic is really spot on and he is giving advice, ideological advice, not just media advice. He is somebody with political views and frankly, he comes across as highly principled in terms of what al-Qaeda stands for and how the actions of regional jihadi groups are undermining the ideals of al-Qaeda and we find him highly critical of both the Islamic state of Iraq as well as the Pakistani Taliban and he comes across seeking complete dissociation from the Islamic state of Iraq and he enumerates with a website about all these attacks that the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban have actually mounted. So, Adam Gadan comes across as somebody who is critical to al-Qaeda, to its sort of the media outfit that is out but he also translates some English books to bin Laden, it seems because in one of the letters, bin Laden is asking that he translates a book, a recent book that was published by Robert Fisk. With respect to other American jihadis, Anwar al-Awlaki does not seem to have made a great impression on Osama bin Laden. In one of the letters, it seems that Abu Basir, the leader of AQAP in Yemen, seems to have suggested to replace himself with Anwar al-Awlaki and bin Laden's response is that, no, no, no, you're very qualified to do this yourself. We don't know enough about him. I would ask you to give me some sort of a bio of him and also he doesn't just leave it at that. He says, why don't you, all of you, the leaders, write me each one of you, separate, sort of your own conceptualization of the situation. It's as if he really wants to kind of take his red pen and grade these papers separately but he seems to be reluctant to embrace Anwar al-Awlaki and he also makes it known that al-Awlaki is not tested on the battlefield and this for him is really where true leadership emerges and al-Awlaki was not tested in his mind. Yeah, Jen, why don't we come up here to the front? Thank you very much. I'm Mr. Halosin, work provides of America partial to the body region service. We have a nine hours of live broadcast to the Pakistan, Afghanistan body region. I myself come from that area and as a school boy I also spent two years in Eptabad just a mile away from that compound which was built later. You know, both as a journalist and just as a Pashtun in the region living on those outskirts so which is a very beautiful area. So I have this question in mind, does this document says how he got to Eptabad from any tracks from those mountains or whatever way he adopted to or somebody who brought him there? And the second question is, while he was in Pakistan, does the document says any communication with the Pakistani Taliban and not only the Tehran Taliban Pakistan but also those based in Lahore? Hafiz Sayeed, thank you. And any communication or any targeted things on there? Thank you very much. Sure. With respect to how he got to Eptabad he doesn't mention it. But it seems that it would have been a very, very cautious because he's very careful about his movement and the movement of his men. I would have expected him to have done his homework before he made the move. And he does seem to have, as I said in my presentation, the support of some trusted Pakistani brothers in the area. How he got there, he says that he, for the past nine years, he was being very careful in terms of his movement. Based on reports that I've heard on the media, not on the documents, is that one of his wives at least gave birth in a hospital. And he does say that only in emergency situations that you should leave the homes. He doesn't specify in the documents, and I'm not gonna pretend as if I know, but I would say that he would have done his homework. He wouldn't have taken high risks about this. The documents that we have, half aside, is not mentioned. So these are the ones that have been declassified. I don't know. So we know that he's been communicating with the Pakistani Taliban. So, but that doesn't mean that he is in charge of them. So we know that he's frustrated. He's, Abu Yahya Alibe and Atiyah are chastising the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. You know, I don't wanna be him reading that letter. It's like somebody, he is failing Islam 101 in their eyes. It's just, they're at the bottom with respect from the perspective of Atiyah and Abu Yahya. So having contacts to go back to the earlier question doesn't really mean that it's in control. Do they seek to build relationship with others? It wouldn't surprise me. But it doesn't mean that this is being in control. So these are two different things. I mean, there is, this is interesting to me, right? The criticism of the Pakistani Taliban, both if I remember correctly for their behavior inside Pakistan, but also for the support of Faisal Shazad in the attack on New York. I mean, there is some hypocrisy there on behalf of the al-Qaida leadership, right? Because Zawahri, Abu Yahya bin Laden himself also have supported attacks on the Pakistani state over the last five years or so since 2007 with the Red Mosque incident. And bin Laden obviously organized an attack that perhaps he didn't justify as against civilians with the 9-11 attack most obviously, but certainly killed a lot of what we would consider civilians. And so I'm wondering whether and how much the, the perhaps, you know, perfectly searching for the right word, perfectly honest analysis that is provided in these letters reflects a post facto sort of ideological justification for what is really a practical analysis that they've been, they're getting beat up because of the killing of Muslims because of these kinds of things. And now bin Laden and Qadhaan are trying to explain that in ideological terms. I wouldn't call it hypocrisy on the part of the senior leaders. I would call it irresponsibility. They've been irresponsible. Irresponsible for the following reason. You can't go in your public statements for the past, at least for the past decade, if not longer, go on and call on the youth to disobey everybody and go and take up shihad on your own terms. They will tell them, shihad is faradayin. It is your individual duty to take up shihad. And I think in one of his public statements, bin Laden kind of gives the age between 15 to 25 as an ideal age for people to take up because you don't have responsibility and so on. So you can't be calling on the young people to act on their own without the benefit, the discipline that you are educating your members of al-Qaeda and the members of al-Qaeda, you know, when you read or the ones that I have read, when you read the way they think in terms of their operational measures, they're really much more interested, are more interested in very special type qualitative operations. You can see their own maturity in terms of the ideological thinking, that ideology is really always in the service of strategic objectives. So they know what they're doing, but you can't call on people, and especially on the youth, to go and act on their own and then come back and tell me later on that, you know, why are things happening the way they are? Well, of course, what else did you expect? So it's as if these kind of leaders, whether it's bin Laden, Abu Yahya or Atiyah, you know, it's as if they're expecting these young men to be philosophers, jihadis, as if they really need to, they are in charge of both the intellect and the operations and so on. So this is where I find their irresponsibility. And now this is a blowback. This is really a blowback for al-Qaeda when they have inspired all these people in their public statements. And now these people are doing it the way they see fit. But when al-Qaeda had its organizational basis, its organization based in Afghanistan and had its guest houses in Peshawar and so on, you could see at the time through the primary sources that they are interested in discipline. They are interested in how you mount lawful jihad. They wanna invest in their people. And they did, they did. But once they lost that base and there's been a vacuum, you've got all these people rising up around the world. And all of a sudden we have these groups that are calling themselves al-Qaeda by inspiration. And when other governments around the world start calling them al-Qaeda, they are unwittingly empowering them because these kids and these groups cannot really, can never aspire to become members of al-Qaeda. They don't have what it takes to be. Al-Qaeda would not admit them into their own, as members of al-Qaeda, if they had the organizational luxury to be based. So what others- They don't kill a lot of people on the way. Oh, absolutely. It causes a lot of trouble. Absolutely, absolutely. But that's not what we see bin Laden and al-Qaeda wants. It's not just killing for killing's sake. It's not a question of they don't mind killing, but only if it is qualitatively so. So with respect to 9-11, they would justify it as an economic target. Now you want a quibble. Where does economic and where are civilian? And I think there is a good reason to kind of all, if you say that this is an economic target, why is the marketplace not an economic target? So you can certainly go into a legal discussion with them on that basis. And no doubt you'll have plenty to criticize about al-Qaeda's conceptualization of what an economic target. Having said that, you are forced to disarm between 9-11 and say 7-7. Right, these are different. So they're not interested in attacking or soccer matches and so on. This is what makes you kind of wonder or push you to kind of say, is this the qualitative attack that al-Qaeda would want? Would bin Laden be smiling or not? Let me just drill down on a question that I already asked. I'm sorry, I just, how can I not ask the question? Is the, do you see differences between bin Laden and Zawahiri on this specific issue? On the, I mean, both of them are more pragmatic about the need to limit the killing of civilians and focus on what you're calling qualitative attacks. Is that right that at least in terms of that strategic perspective, they're similar even if they disagree a little bit on how they should relate to the potential affiliates? Al-Zawahiri has come out in the past with public statements denouncing attacks against civilians. So he's not somebody who is blood thirsty for civilians for the sake of killing them. Having said that, al-Zawahiri seems to me to be more trusting of regional jihadi groups and is willing to partner with them. I think for the namesake, whereas bin Laden is way more cautious about the kind of groups that he wishes to partner with. Right, okay. Jen, how about up here on the front? This is a, this is a parallel question, maybe redundant what you've just answered, but I'm trying to zoom in on this. The word jihad, of course, means struggle. And of course, killing someone is against the Quran. How would you justify any of the killing, be it 9-11 or any later, how do you, how do you, what struggle is it and who are we struggling against? And how is the cause so powerful that you break with the prohibition of killing innocent people, including children? Great. You are absolutely correct that the time jihad means struggle. And in the Quran, it means both struggle in terms of the spiritual struggle and also as fighting. There is a technical term for fighting, which is qaital. But that's, the Muslims used jihad because the classical, I'm talking about medieval Muslims when they developed the legal literature on warfare. They developed the time jihad because they thought that when you fight to steal it's different from when you fight for God. That's why the struggle for something more noble is the struggle for God, just as a Christian theorist called just war because war is a problem, whereas when you talk about just war, it's very equivalent to jihad. This is the equivalent of jihad from the Islamic tradition. From the perspective of al-Qaeda, when they are fighting, they're not, they don't believe themselves to be fighting to kill for the sake of killing. It's not as if they need to have their fix every day, wake up and kill a few people to have a fix. Al-Qaeda sees itself to be fighting for a greater cause. The cause is to make God's word reign supreme. That would be their language. And they see the world to be a very imperfect world in terms of their own leaders. They believe that their own leaders have been corrupt, have been oppressive and so on. And unfortunately, the politics of the world has been on their side more so than, they didn't need to make a lot of convincing. That's why they think they call on jihad to get people to embrace something that it is bigger than themselves. So that's why they use jihad and they don't say, get up and fight just for the sake of fighting. They do see themselves as fighting for something noble. That's from their own, within their own world and perspective. Now, of course, you will have other Muslims who would tell you that this is not the sort of lawful jihad that we would consider, that this is not what jihad is about and so on. And these are interesting internal debates, but this is, from their own perspective, they don't believe that they are killing for the sake of killing. And that's why Bin Laden is very careful in terms of his, we the jihadis, he says, we don't violate our oath. So he was very, even though he doesn't mind attacking the United States, he says, well, Faisal Shahzad violated the oath. He took an oath not to harm the United States. And we don't want the jihadis to be appearing as those who violate their oath. And in this, he is making an interesting distinction. He's making a distinction between acquired citizenship, between being born as a citizen and between having a visa. If you were born as an American citizen, you've not taken an oath, not to harm the United States. If you acquire a visa to the United States, you're not taking an oath, not to harm the United States. But if you have an acquired citizenship, you do take an oath. And this is where he wants to make it known, that visas and born citizenship are different from when you take an oath. Once you take an oath, you are bound to comply with that oath. So he does have these kind of sort of understandings of legal she had from the classical tradition, from the medieval tradition that he would like to comply with. It's interesting because other folks, the most traumatic and deadly attack by an American citizen in Al-Qaeda's name was that by Major Nidha Al-Hassan, who took an oath when he became an officer, swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. And it would be interesting to know whether Bin Laden felt like that, that fell in the same category. Jen, let's go here and we're just gonna work our way back. Al Richman, former State Department. Brian and Peter Bergen also have raised the views that many files have not been released, have not been declassified. First I'll raise the question, whether or not there's more intention to do so to declassify the reason? And whether or not that's the case, do you have a sense either to conversation with people who were involved in classification or not, what the criteria may have been for the release of these 17 files, but not others? So if you read our report, there is a section called from Abu Taba to the CTC. And this section really kind of describes the process of how the CTC receives captured battlefield documents. We only receive them at the end of a very long process. When everything has been exploited for security intelligence by the government and only when they're done with them and they wanna declassify them, that's when we receive them. We have no say, we don't have, as I said earlier, I don't have a security clearance. So we research and we teach. So we are the typical academic outfit in a liberal arts school, we don't do more than that. So I wish I could have a better answer for you. From our perspective, we have no clue whether they have the 6,000 documents or whether these 6,000 documents include something of substance. Now, I can tell you on the basis of the 17 documents that we have read, these documents suggest that there were other communications during that period that were not declassified. Now, are they available to the government? I don't know, but it could have been that bin Laden destroyed them. So from our perspective, I think we have no knowledge whatsoever, but since you are in the State Department and if you are, you are closer to this, you might wanna ask the DNI's office because we receive these documents from the DNI's office and there would be better suited to give you an advice but I have no clue whatsoever as to what's out there. Oh, okay, sorry. Use your connections and let me know. Some are chatted you from Safe Foundation. You mentioned that you had very limited documents. Now, those of us who are familiar with how the US attorney and their deposition information is given, they fabricated a lot of stuff. Do you suspect any fabrication in these documents by the US government? Because that's not very surprising. And another question I'd like to add to it since you've said whether Osama bin Laden was bloodthirsty or Zohari, can you compare them with our leaders like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama? How bloodthirsty they are because, and finally that oath of citizenship since I'm a, you know, what do you call it, naturalized citizen, I had to take oath, but I did consider my oath to be subject to our leaders behaving in a civilized, but if our leaders behave like a North Hitler, we have the right to abrogate it. I hope so. So on the question of fabrication, this is, I don't know how delicate I need to be about this. So if they wanted to fabricate the evidence, I would have expected them to know how to translate them better. The translation that we received is very weak and the documents, the report is based on my own reading of the Arabic documents. So I would have expected them to have a better translation. So this would be my response. But the other thing, if they really wanted to fabricate them, and one guy in London, Hania Al-Sibahi, who kind of said, you know, some of, he believed, and he's sympathetic to what he had. He's not a member of al-Qaeda, but he's an intellectual kind of thinker. And he says, you know, I suspect that some of them were true, but there is, you know, I can also see that they may have introduced certain sentences here and there. Well, you know, if they want to fabricate them, why should they put that bin Laden is concerned about Muslim civilians? Why should they, there are certain aspects of the documents that are not in the interests of any government, frankly, to portray Osama bin Laden as somebody who is appalled by indiscriminate attacks against civilians. That Adam Gadda, for example, is furious with the Islamic State of Iraq targeting Christian in their churches. Is this the sort of, is this what you expect governments to be introducing, to be fabricating in these? So that's my answer about the fabrication. Personally, I did not, you know, I don't want to claim to be smart, but on the basis of what I read, it doesn't fabrication and forgery does not, does not strike me as a possibility. So comparing to U.S. leaders, this is, these are completely different worlds. One, you know, U.S. leaders or other leaders, they're working, they're working within the governments, they're working within the paradigm of the nation-state. The leaders of the shihadis, they're working on their own as NGOs. And here's where I think on one level, you can say that shihadi leaders have sacrificed more than other leaders. And that's why they have more credits in the minds of the general public, they have more credentials, because here they are, they're not benefiting from anything. But there is something also to be said that you could be easily, you could be a strong critic when you don't have the responsibility to govern. And that's why the shihadis, not just al-Qaeda, are highly, in my own mind, they are some of the best critics of injustice. They are the best critics of governments. But unfortunately, whenever some shihadis, you know, have their own small emirates and declare this, they don't have much to offer on governance. So when they are being tested, they are not living up to the sort of justice that they promise that Islamic teachings of social justice delivers. They're all motivated by social justice. And I can see that very strong theme. But when you put them to the test of governance, they fail miserably. As critics, I'm on their side for about 90% of what they say. So there is nothing, you know, there is nothing that you want to condemn them in terms of their critique of global governance and so on. They've got a lot of legitimate grievances that they articulate, but put them to the test and they fail. And that's, there is a difference between criticizing from a distance and governing. Was there a third section to your? Let's jump on, we got a lot of questions. Jen, let's go here and then back here. John Lum is from the Institute for the Study of War. From these 17 documents, is there anything in them that you would see that could change the tactics and strategies of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, or do you think there's anything that's gonna change these efforts? I'm not somebody who, I see myself as somebody who studies the Shihadi's, not combating them. I know that I am part of the Combating Terrorism Center and I can assure you that the United States doesn't want my help to combat them. I just study them and analyze them for my own academic curiosity. So as an academic, I can tell you that, and as a personal opinion, I could say the following, that all I just, all I would do is just to make sure that some of these regional Shihadi groups have got internet access to download these documents because they speak for themselves. I wouldn't wanna be Abu Basir at the moment and read the fact that somehow he's just so such an undergraduate or below undergraduate in terms of his, in terms of the way AQAP is leading in Yemen. And would you wanna be the leader of the TTP when you read all these documents? So frankly, the documents being apolitical about the documents is a political asset, if you like. So from my perspective as a personal opinion, don't do it. I don't know about what governments, but frankly, the documents are, they speak for themselves and they're way more powerful just to put them, without doing anything to them, just to put them out there. Gentlemen, let's go over here. Tom Parker with George Washington University. You've mentioned that the 17 documents show that there's been criticism of operations that were either aimed at civilians in the case of Iraq or resulted in major civilian casualties. Can you elaborate though, with respect to any reference about criticism or approval of operations that aimed at Western civilians or that resulted in major Western civilian casualties? You mentioned the New York City incident. He criticizes the attacker for breaking his oath, but was there any reference about the operation itself which targeted civilians? And just, and secondly, the quality of the Arabic, I'm just curious about in bin Laden's writings. So with respect to civilians, you've been with bin Laden, for instance. Sure, sure, sure, sure, bin Laden, he talks in one section, he refers, when he's putting the centralization effort in 2010, he says that when mistakes happen, we would apologize even if the victims are sinners. So he would be prepared to talk about sinners. Adam Gadan is alarmed by the attacks against Christian churches in Iraq. So that tells me also that this is not just about Muslim civilians, that that language against civilians, and you also find non-combatants also being part of this. My reading of primary sources other than the documents, al-Qaeda primary sources, suggests to me that civilians, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, are also, they would be concerned about. This isn't to say that they don't wanna kill Muslim civilians, or non-Muslim civilians. They know that sometimes these occur and they occur as collateral damage. But they are not their primary target. They like, you know, when I emphasize about bin Laden and his concern over indiscriminate attacks, please don't go and nominate him for a peace award. It's more about the fact that he's more interested in qualitative attacks. And these qualitative attacks need to have their own proper, lawful target in his mind. And that target is not, the primary target is not civilians. And he does say, and in the process, in one of his public statements, you know, sometimes civilians die. Sometimes Muslim civilians die. And we have to answer to God about this. We've got a responsibility to this. So there is what you would consider a sort of a lawful, some kind of conduct that they comply with. With the Arabic, in some instances, he disappointed me about certain Arabic, but he's Arabic is very, very strong. And I don't wanna pretend as if my Arabic is better than bin Laden, but there were instances here and there. He doesn't use punctuations much, which kind of made me reread certain paragraphs. He's very, he's economical on sort of, but the other thing is, I mean, he was writing for private communication, so he wouldn't have needed to work on this. However, however, there is one publicly available letter which is one of the statements that Al-Zawahiri released after the Arab Spring to the people of Egypt, and this has been edited by somebody. I don't know whether it's bin Laden who edited it. And if this was bin Laden who edited this, his grandma is very good, you'll be pleased to know. He's also very modest. He doesn't wanna come across as as I mean, he wants to be more unassuming in terms of his comments that he was making. So that letter, when it was released by Zawahiri, it didn't take, incorporate the changes. Now, it doesn't mean that Zawahiri was ignoring him. And frankly, if I were Al-Zawahiri, I would have incorporated the changes because many of them are grammatical and so on, but it may not have reached him in time. Jen, let's go in the back and we'll come back to you. Or no, right there, Jen. Yeah. Zahid from the Embassy of Pakistan. Would you think that some of these documents were intentionally left that way by OBL to mislead everybody? It wasn't that sort of a sympathetic person to those causes, but just wanted a legacy? I seriously doubt that there are so many things in these documents that would not be in the interest of bin Laden to mislead. I can see that he would have destroyed many documents. His operational security measures are very sharp. I can understand that he would have deleted as many as he could have. That would have been a possibility. But at the end of the day, bin Laden was trying to be as involved as his situation permits him. He wasn't trying just to busy himself with creating a conspiracy for the rest of us. He's more, he's very detailed about certain matters. So based on my own close reading of these documents, I don't think that it's a possibility. Thank you. Christina Lam from the Sunday Times of London. I wanted to ask you on the authenticity question, what form you've got the documents in? Were they all computer files? Or were there any handwritten letters? And what it was like to actually read a letter by bin Laden? I know we've seen plenty of public statement videos and audio, but to actually have that in your hand. And the other thing was whether there was any mention of the Afghan Taliban and what his views seem to be of them. Great. So I read in the news that there were some handwritten letters. We didn't receive any. The 17 documents that we received are all electronic documents. And I'm inclined to think that they were electronic in the original. The reason I say, and I could be proven wrong, but the reason my own textual analysis shows firstly, it's not a standardized formatting for all the letters. So some letters have different format from others, which tells me that if they were writing them in the government, they would have just used one standard formatting. But also, more importantly, in the content of these letters, they do discuss that they are actually sending these letters through either thumb drives or, in one instance, memory cards, which I suspect has to do with phone memories. Don't ask me how this happens, because I'm terrible with technology. But the content of these letters suggests that they were communicating via electronic letters. So that's one aspect. How to describe working on bin Laden's private letters? I was telling Ryan earlier, I had my sleepless with Osama a few weeks of my life, where normally somebody doesn't go on for a few weeks on three to four hours of sleep every day, but I was able to. It's because it was an exciting project. And for the rest of the center as well, not just me to be able to be working on this project from my own selfish interest, it was interesting to be part of shaping a new discourse. And I think a new discourse needs to be shaped about what al-Qaeda stands for. And we need to be driven more by primary sources when we discuss al-Qaeda than we have in the past. Jen, right up here? Yes, of course. I'm sorry. There was in one reference, where in one letter, when Osama bin Laden is telling Atiyah about the security measures of people coming from Iran, the sort of safe locations you need to provide for them, and some of them, they may not necessarily have been al-Qaeda, but you need to look at those with special talents, try to work on them here, and others you may want to send to fight alongside the Taliban brothers. So there is one reference which suggests to me, it could be not the Afghan Taliban, but I suspect that this would be in reference to the Afghan Taliban. Jen, right here. Hello, my name is Dan Starkman. I'm a student. My question is regarding how bin Laden thought about civilians versus legitimate versus non-legitimate targets, specifically with regard to the World Trade Center attack. Do you think that the workers in the towers were considered to be collateral damage of a symbolic attack or rather essentially legitimate targets as part of economic apparatus of domination of the United States? From their perspective, that was a legitimate economic target. Now, this is where I was saying earlier, this is where it becomes problematic for al-Qaeda to include. I can understand military and political targets. I can see how they could really have a clearer distinction about these from civilian targets. But economic targets is problematic. Why if I'm somebody who is not disciplined in al-Qaeda and not why would I want to attack the store, next store, a grocery store? That is an economic. So now, in their own mind, I can see the spirit that is driving their own kind of writings is that they would prefer these highly symbolic economic targets. And the 9-11 really represents that. If I were to have a legal conversation with them, even if I were to agree with them, even if they were to convince me that this is an economic target, what about the people on the plane? This is where you would want these are, how did you really come to the terms to get those people on the planes who are obviously not, they are civilians. They may not necessarily all be civilians. But there is something problematic about the legal discussion that you would want to have with an al-Qaeda person on the legal committee that sort of legitimated the 9-11 attacks. Jan here. Hi, I'm Yoshimi Kaema. I'm visiting Thoreau with CSIS. I just read the executive summary of your report and learned that Bin Laden had a very positive view toward Arab Spring. But on the other hand, some American media says that the thought of al-Qaeda was discredited because of the Arab Spring. So I'm wondering how I can understand the difference. Great. So Bin Laden released a public statement before this letter. And some of it actually is from that letter, passages of it from his private letter, which tells me that he himself was genuinely pleased with the Arab Spring. At the end of the day, what the Arab Spring proved is that the political story that led many members of the shihadis to take up shihad was actually being settled through nonviolence or in some areas. I think we could now talk differently about this. But initially, at the time when Bin Laden was writing, it caused him, he was genuinely pleased with this. And he thought of it as being the most important event, a formidable event in the modern history of Muslims. And the program that he put together in that letter, which was written within a week or so before he was killed, was that he was not interested in shihad in those regions. He wanted shihad to continue to be important for Afghanistan. But in these regions, he wanted to direct the attention towards more preaching and sort of an intellectual role for al-Qaeda from that respect. Now, so what you said earlier is both true and wrong with respect to whether the Arab Spring killed al-Qaeda or not. So they were pleased with the Arab Spring. But at the same time, the shihadis and the initial stage of the Arab Spring, they were spectators. And there is something very powerful about what happened during the Arab Spring that undermines al-Qaeda's narrative. Al-Qaeda's narrative and broadly the shihadis, if you like, is based on what I would term three articles of faith. The first one is that our rulers are corrupt, they would say, and oppressive. And they don't govern according to the social justice that Islam preaches. Second, let's not talk about democracy and so on. The Western world is very interested in supporting these dictators in power. And third, the only solution is shihad. So these three articles of faith, and this is my terminology, have been undermined by the Arab Spring. Firstly, the rulers are falling. The Western countries seem to be supporting the people, are siding with the people, not with the dictators. And the third, they're falling not because of violence, but they're falling because of non-violence. These are really important in terms of how the narrative was faced when the Arab Spring started. Now, there have been discourses on shihadi websites in terms of, initially, they were taken by surprise, especially that, what does it really mean? Can we be non-shihadi-shihadis? It says, what does it really mean to have this shihadi identity in this age? And you have those who kind of come out and said, well, these were the exceptions, not the norms. Libya was not a non-violent. Qadhafi did not fall because of non-violence. And you have also at present in Syria, and Brian wrote an excellent article in the Sentinel about the complexities of the situation in Syria, who, you know, that there are some kind of shihadi groups that are appearing, and they are separate from the opposition groups. But, you know, it's looking murkier, much murkier. The events of the Arab Spring are no longer the Tahrir Square, they're not all having the Tahrir Square is not being replicated everywhere. And so that is, you know, the shihadis have got plenty of time to go between, between when the world looks, you know, well, if ever the world would look the same way they envisage it. So, if things fail, they could easily come back and say, we told you so, and the shihadis is the solution. So it's both right and wrong with respect to the Arab Spring. There is something very powerful about the Arab Spring. And yes, indeed it undermines the shihadi narrative. But on the operational level, on the level of what is happening in various parts of countries that are undergoing Arab Spring today, it's more complicated than the Tahrir Square. We have time for one more question. Yes, ma'am. I'm Chantal Valeri. I'm a journalist with AFP, the French news agency. And I would like to know if he mentioned KSM in his documents. No, he doesn't mention KSM, but I, you know, it's not something, because the documents really are that bin Laden, that we see bin Laden, are really in 2010. So no doubt his 2003 letters, if they exist, there would be a mention of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in them. But it doesn't, it's not really unusual. I didn't expect to find Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in letters that are authored in 2010. So the absence of KSM is, to my mind, is not. Because these are private communications related to the situations at the time he was writing or within months of writing them. So his absence doesn't say anything to me. All right, I think we've gotta wrap it up there. Nellie, when is your new piece coming out? I believe next week. Next week? Okay. On a... It's called Beware Imitators. Beware Imitators, okay. And that'll be on the CTC website. Okay. Well, Nellie, thank you very much for coming in. Thank you very much to the entire team that helped put together this report and sort of process these things at the CTC. To everybody that dealt with these documents before they got to you, please release more of them. And with that, thank you very much for coming. So... Thank you. Thank you.