A little late linking to this, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released information of what was found in the compound used by bin Laden. (It would appear the timing is linked to the Seymour Hersh story about the raid that killed him, just published in London Review of Books). This includes what was on his ‘bookshelf‘, though they later clarify that all the English-language texts were e-books – see also news reports such as the one from the BBC. I’m sure there’s a joke to be made about Amazon delivery here…

Here are some of the books:-

• Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert
• Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky
• Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer
• New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin
• Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum

These are an interesting mix, and assuming they were read, would give a range of perspectives from the Washington-insider approach of Woodward, to the critique of US-foreign policy of Blum and Chomsky to the conspiracy theories of Griffin. There was a section of my book Terror and Territory called ‘Reading bin Laden’. Some of the rest of the book might have been called ‘Reading bin Laden’s reading’.