Last week, respected journalist Seymour Hersh published an explosive article that threw much of what we thought we knew about Osama bin Laden’s death into question. According to Hersh (and now mainstream outlets like NBC News), the Zero Dark Thirty narrative that torture led to a courier giving up the Al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts was false. Instead, it was a Pakistani military officer who gave him up for the $25 million reward.
There was also supposedly no “treasure trove” of Al-Qaeda documents recovered from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. As a simple blogger whose geographic area of expertise leans more towards Westeros than the Middle East, trying to determine who’s telling the truth is way above my pay grade. For what it’s worth, the U.S. government just put up a website called “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf,” featuring a large collection of declassified documents and books they say came from the Osama raid.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, from the mundane (a manual for McAfee Virus Scan 6.0, a video game guide for Delta Force Extreme) to the eyebrow raising (books by Noam Chomsky, a suicide prevention manual), and that doesn’t even begin to cover all the correspondence and Al-Qaeda documents.
One of the files that Vox noticed was an official recruitment form for the terrorist organization… a six-page document that looks remarkably similar to a standard job application form, with a few twists. In addition to asking would-be terrorists to list their hobbies, travel experience, and career objectives, the document also casually asks, “Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?” and “Who should we contact in case you became a martyr?”
The document wouldn’t be too out of place at a temp job office. It’s a strange and morbidly funny glimpse into the world of international terrorism, one of many included in the “Bin Laden Bookshelf.” Take a look for yourself, with the added assurance that checking out all these documents on a U.S. government website won’t land you on some sort of secret list. Probably.
(via Vox)