The Bin Laden Porn Stash

Many of us in the terrorism-watching biz were waiting to hear about this, and today the news officially broke. Nestled among the mountains of intelligence recovered from Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compund was a stash of pornography.

The reason we were waiting for this news is that anyone who has taken a peek at a terrorist hard drive has found porn lurking amidst the bits. It's common enough to be a punch line. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Saudi Arabia and beyond, terrorists love porn.

I found the images below in Al Qaeda computer data recovered in Bosnia. I've cleaned them up since this isn't that kind of Web site, but this should give you an idea about what Islamic extremists like -- big fake boobs, Asian women and MMF action.

Click to view images (probably not safe for work)

Oh, but it gets worse. In Iraq, they loved porn so much they made it themselves. Computers captured by the U.S. military from Islamist insurgents revealed unedited footage of homemade child pornography, according to sources who have viewed the footage. Insurgents could be heard on the clips coaching young boys on how to perform sexual acts.

People in the PSYOPS counterterrorism world have long tried to figure out how to exploit these images. After all, they show a level of hypocrisy that is more than epic. The problem, of course, particularly in the Iraq situation, is that analysts can barely stand to look at the material, let alone figure out a way to reference it productively.

The bin Laden porn stash, at last, offers an opportunity to bring this issue into the light. There's a lot more to be said about jihadists and their sexual "issues," and I'm working on a longer piece about this subject, but for now, a little schadenfreude is the order of the day, and the deeper levels will provide much fodder for thought and discussion in the weeks to come.

J.M. Berger is author of the new book, "Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam," available from Amazon.com. For videos and documents related to the book, check out JihadJoeBook.com. Follow @intelwire on Twitter for updates about American jihadists.

Labels: Al-Qaeda, Iraq, Osama-Bin-Laden, Pornography

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

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