ODNI Releases Second Tranche of Abbottabad Documents

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence yesterday released a second set of documents recovered during the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The trance includes 113 newly declassified documents, adding to the government's publicly accessible "Bin Laden Bookshelf."

You can access the translated documents here.

According to Reuters, the documents confirm details pulled from previous releases, revealing that in the years just before his death, the former al Qaeda leader and his deputies were "increasingly worried about spies in their midst, drones in the air and secret tracking devices reporting their movements as the U.S.-led war against them ground on." The newswire, which reviewed the documents before their public release, notes that they "depict an al Qaeda that was unwavering in its commitment to global jihad, but with its core leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan under pressure on multiple fronts." Bin Laden was so concerned by drones that he told opertives in Peshawar to not leave their houses "except on a cloudy overcast day."

ODNI describes the documents:

In the weeks following the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan by United States forces, U.S. Intelligence Community analysts sifted through the recovered digital and hard copy materials. Beginning last summer and with DNI approval, the CIA spearheaded a rigorous interagency review of the classified documents under the auspices of the White House’s National Security Council staff.

Osama bin Laden’s handwritten will left millions for jihad. But even in the period shortly before his death, bin Laden placed the utmost importance on portraying his fraying organization as a united enterprise—while his lieutenants privately wrestled with their growing schism from al- Qa’ida in Iraq. As the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, bin Laden envisioned a worldwide media campaign, suggesting his media team work with specific news outlets.

This emergent portrait of bin Laden comes together today via documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released in the second batch of media recovered during the 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, at the compound used to hide Osama bin Laden.