Documents declassified by the US have revealed that terror group Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden -- once the world's most wanted militant -- remained immersed in books and was a meticulous editor during his final years of hiding in Pakistan.
Bin Laden's digital library was that of an avid reader whose tastes ran from "Obama's Wars" -- an account penned by Bob Woodward on how the Barack Obama administration pushed US troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, to Noam Chomsky as well as someone who had a pronounced interest in how Western think tanks and academic institutions were analysing Al Qaeda, reports CNN.
The CNN report came following the release by the US Director of National Intelligence Office on Wednesday of "Bin Laden's Bookshelf" -- a collection of Osama bin Laden's now declassified documents which have been translated from Arabic to English.
Bin Laden was a meticulous editor, and some of the memos he wrote were revised as many as 50 times. Of the thousands of versions of documents recovered from computers and digital media that the US SEALS retrieved at bin Laden's compound, the final tally numbers some 103 documents.
The new documents show how bin Laden reacted to the events of the Arab Spring, which was roiling the Middle East in the months before his death.
While bin Laden had nothing to say publicly about the momentous events in the Middle East, privately he wrote lengthy memos analysing what was happening, pointing to the "new factor" of "the information technology revolution" that had helped spur the revolutions and characterising them as "the most important events" in the Muslim world "in centuries".
Some of the documents paint an organisation that understood it was under significant pressure from US counter-terrorism operations.
One undated document explained that American CIA drone attacks "led to the killing of many jihadi cadres, leaders and others", and noted, "This is something that is concerning us and exhausting us."
Several documents mention the need to be careful with operational security and to encrypt communications and also the necessity of making trips around the Afghan-Pakistan border regions only on "cloudy days" when American drones were less effective.
The September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, also known as the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property damage were allegedly mentored by Osama bin Laden.
The US officials asserted that the attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
Washington announced on May 2, 2011 that bin Laden was killed in his residence compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by US special forces and CIA operatives.
