The White House released more documents that were uncovered at the compound in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was killed in May 2011. Easily the most intriguing part of the collection was a list of books that the Al Qaeda leader was reading, showing an increasing interest in learning about the U.S. and the West.

Bin Laden’s bookshelf did include a long list of books in English, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed. Many of them were more recent ones, too, including Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, Michel Chossudovsky’s America's “War On Terrorism,” and books about U.S. strategic and military mistakes. He was also interested in U.S. history, with books like Robert Hopkins Miller’s The U.S. and Vietnam 1781-1941 and William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Bin Laden also had a copy of Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier.

There were also 75 publicly available U.S. government documents, including The 9/11 Commission Report from 2004. He also had 40 studies from think tanks and magazines, mostly covering terrorism and examinations into the activities of Al Qaeda by the West.

The administration also declassified letters between Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and other terror groups after determining that their publication would “not hurt ongoing operations against al-Qa‘ida or their affiliates will be released.” These documents appear to show that Bin Laden was still actively involved in some way with Al Qaeda operations, even while holed up at his compound.

As previously noted, the release of the additional documents comes just after the publication of Seymour Hersh’s piece on the Bin Laden raid in the London Review of Books. Hersh claimed that parts of the Obama Administration’s narrative about Bin Laden’s death were not true, including the story that Navy SEALs found thousands of documents at the compound. The Obama Administration has called the article false.

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