Behind the Bastards - Secrets of Osama Bin Laden's Hard Drive

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

What was actually found on Osama Bin Laden's recovered Hard Drive? In Episode 3, Robert is joined by Ify Nwadiwe (Nerdificent) and they discuss the unraveling mysteries of what Osama Bin Laden was really watching. Spoiler Alert: tons of  porn, anime, 'witchcraft hentai' and so much more! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to me Tuesdays on this very network, Nerdificent Mondays, Kennedy Dinner with Matt Niffy talking spicy, and you know, just every night, pretty much not every night. But you can see me at comedy clubs doing stand-ups. Well, we are today talking about a very famous nerd who's not famous for being a nerd, but is famous for blowing up the World Trade Center Tower. Osama bin Laden.

He is our subject for today. Now, when I started working on this podcast, I figured it was going to be like a biographical overview of his weird life, and we're going to talk about all these things from his past and, you know, all the stuff he got up to as a young man and a kid. And then I spent an entire week looking through the archives that the CIA posted of everything that was on his hard drives. And so now this podcast is going to be mostly about that,

because it is, no matter what you've read about it, it's so much fucking crazier than what you would guess. But first, we are going to start with a little bit of an overview of the man, the myth, the big and tall gentleman himself. Osama ibn Muhammad ibn Awad ibn Laden. He was born on March 10, 1957, to Muhammad bin Laden's 10th wife, Aliya Gaman. And as you might guess, Muhammad bin Laden was rich as shit. He was like a self-made man, rags to riches sort of thing,

started off as a day laborer, built a billion-dollar construction empire, then fucked and married, God knows how many women. And the looming tower, Lawrence Wright describes Muhammad bin Laden's household as being run like a corporation. Each wife would manage her children and then report to him about how they were doing, so he didn't have to do any parenting. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a pretty sweet deal.

Here's a great quote. The children rarely saw the great man who was often away on business. Whenever he returned, he would call them into his office and gaze upon his vast brood. During the Islamic feasting days, he would kiss them and give each child a gold coin. Otherwise, he rarely spoke to them. Osama once said, quote, I remember reciting a poem to him and he gave me 100 riyals, which was a huge amount of money in those days. So that was like Osama's dad.

Wow. Yeah, like once a week, he would call them all in and give them coins. There's like an alternate universe where that money he got from that poem made Osama bin Laden become this great poet. He's looked at differently in universe 626, where I'm not a stand-up comedian, I'm a computer programmer, rich off of Bitcoin. I thought you were going to say that you did 9-11 in this alternate universe. Osama bin Laden is hosting podcasts in LA.

I think that's universe 726, where I do it. So yeah, you could describe bin Laden's relationship to his father as distant. It's possible he only actually saw him a couple of times. So, yeah. Muhammad divorced his wife shortly after Osama was born. This isn't a sign that he grew up in a fractured home because Muhammad bin Laden's thing was like marrying and divorcing a ton of women. But then he'd help them pick new husbands.

Wow. Yeah. Which is weird because Osama wound up with his new dad being his real bio dad's employee, which is like a strange situation for everybody involved. Seriously. Yeah. So yeah, he never really knew his dad very well. He was raised by his mom and like the rest of us television.

Yeah. His favorite show was Binanza. His favorite genre was American Westerns, which actually puts him in the same boat as Stalin and Hitler, who were both obsessed with American Westerns. Wow. It's almost like there's something with Westerns, like that ideology. Yeah. And it makes sense that Clint Eastwood is a piece of shit, you know, like that.

It all comes full circle. Yeah. Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, just both big dicks. Yeah. It's, I guess, of course, a bunch of monsters and dictators would love a genre where like the basic premise is like unstoppable killing machine with a gun rides into town and murders everyone who annoys him. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the story of the old West. Although another one of his favorite shows was a Western called Fury, which was about a young orphan who befriends a black horse that helps him heal the wounds of his past. Wow. And Osama bin Laden loved horses.

He was obsessed with horses. We'll get into that in a little bit. It's worth noting that for the last few years of his life, bin Laden wore a cowboy hat every time he went outside. Apparently he thought this would hide his identity from US drones and satellites. I think he was just like, I want to be like the man with no name. Oh yeah. Yeah.

100%. Which is, that's a cool move if you're the most wanted man in the world. Oh yeah. Donning a black cowboy hat. Hell yeah. I support bin Laden in that. Yeah. Bin Laden was a weird quiet kid.

He had trouble making friends and focusing on sports. He always seemed to have his head in the clouds. He didn't really find his crew until high school when he joined up with the semi clandestine Muslim brotherhood. One fellow member said only nerds were in it. It's kind of like an alt-right 4chan sort of thing. There's these weird conservative corners of the nerdy internet where people are just being turned into fascists and whatnot.

100%. Yeah. This was that equivalent of that. There were all these nerds who think that this hard-lined interpretation of Islam should rule the world. Oh yeah. They don't really get along with anyone else. Yeah.

So this is like an old trend in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It seems very cyclical. Yeah. He was stubborn. Like I said, he was obsessed with horses, but he was also excited by danger. There's a quote from his friend Khalifa who said, and this is again from the Looming

Tower, we were riding horses in the desert and we were going very fast. I saw fine sand in front of us and I told Osama this is dangerous, better stay away. He said no and he continued. His horse turned over and fell down. He got up laughing. Another time we were riding in a jeep, whenever he saw a hill he would drive very fast and go over it, even though we didn't know it was on the other side. Really he put us in danger many times.

Which is like, I like that. I mean, that makes me connect to Osama a little bit. He was a fan of the fun. Yeah. All this stuff aside, he had a soft heart for hitting nice jumps off of dunes. Yeah. It was just getting that like it's not really fun if you can't die. Yeah.

Yeah. I identify with that a little. So yeah, Osama married for the first time in 74 when he was 17 years old. His wife was 14, which, marriage and his wartime experiences in Afghanistan didn't seem to change his fundamental nature as a gawky nerd. One person who met him as a young man in Afghanistan said that shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a girl, which is a misogynistic way of saying he was not very aggressive. Yeah.

He was known to cover his mouth with his hand while laughing, which is kind of adorable. His love of horses matured into an outright obsession. One man who met him in 1985 described their first conversation. We were in a prayer hall in a guest house. People asked him to talk, so he talked about horses. He said, if you love a horse, he will respond to you. That's what was in his mind, horses. So just a horse loving dude.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of debate over how bin Laden got radicalized and pushed into an ever more direct confrontation with the US looming tower, which is being turned into a TV show right now and makes the case that Zawahiri, the Egyptian co-leader of al-Qaeda, kind of radicalized him into attacking America. Another book I read for this, just titled Osama bin Laden by Michael Shearer, assures us that that's bullshit, it's a lie in the Saudis pushed to diminish the culpability

of their native son. Bin Laden would have wound up swinging hard for Uncle Sam without Zawahiri's help. Either way. It seems like both of these are just saying not of the US's destabilization of the Middle East has nothing at all to do with it. It's definitely these other people, right? Yeah. It was something other than him just being pissed off at the US, sticking their dick everywhere

and Russia's sticking there. That's one of those things. It's like a kid. When I grew up growing up, I was like, why didn't my 9-11 happen, mom? I was like, well, they were angry at us for letting women be free and we were having alcohol. I was like, no, we keep bombing them. They're pissed at that. Just whenever we want.

This is going to be a small tangent we'll bring you back, but it could have been any country that is screwed over by our tug-of-war with the other superpowers in the world. All it took was just someone with a gumption and just enough anger and you have yourself an Osama bin Laden. Yeah. There was probably 1,000 other people who had the same anger and similar plans and just not the means. One of them happened to be a rich kid who was like, had established himself as a jihadi

leader. It is, if you look at the evolution of terrorism, Osama fits right in. In 72, when he was in middle school, members of the Palestinian terror group, Black September kidnapped a bunch of Israeli athletes at the Olympics. It was the biggest story in the world, people stopped caring and just watching this terrorist thing. So it was like a lesson as a young man that like, oh, media is the biggest thing about committing terrorism.

That's what's important. It doesn't matter how many people you kill, it matters where you kill them and whether or not it gets traction on the international news. Obviously bin Laden was good at getting traction on the international news by the end. He established a press office in the early 90s and he sent out constant streams of messages and declarations in his pre-911 years. The problem was nobody read them. Some of this was down to the fact that he sucked at writing titles.

One article he sent out in 1996 was, quote, message to his Muslim brothers in the whole world and especially in the Arabian Peninsula, which is not clickable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's going to tweet that shit. Yeah. At all.

Like not even a, you won't believe what happens next. Yeah. You won't believe what I have to say to Muslim brothers in the whole world and especially in the Arabian Peninsula. That's a click for me. Yeah. There you go. That's a click for me.

All right. Well, we'll pitch that to BuzzFeed. In 1997, bin Laden moved to Afghanistan. He and his colleagues were free here to set up training camps and practice openly with weaponry. For a while, it was a pretty cool time and Prophets and Princes, Mark Weston describes it. The machine guns his followers used were mostly Russian and Chinese AK-47s, but also included

Israeli Uzzis and American M16s. The militants learned how to use dynamite, hand grenades, mortars, shoulder fired rockets, C-3 and four explosives. Some nights they watched Hollywood action movies, partly to relax but also to gain tips. That actually sounds like a pretty sweet life, like blowing stuff up in the desert all day and watching action movies at night. I know. I love that they use it for tips because I'm sure those tips weren't that great.

A lot of terrorists holding guns sideways. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. I used to imagine them watching true lies and being so on board for that terracity. They're like, oh yeah, that's what we got to do. We got to get us a hairier jet. Yeah.

Watching Die Hard. Die Hard did 9-11. You heard it here, folks. Yeah, Bin Laden was a computer guy. He always had a computer with him because he was a hipster. He used an old MacBook, which he powered using an ancient gas generator that no one else was allowed to use. If you grew up in the immediate post-9-11 period, you might remember those old diagrams

of his fortress in Afghanistan where it would show like he has all these different chambers and munitions rooms and hydroelectric generators. That was all lies. He had a mountain fortress, but it wasn't a G.I. Joe set. It was just like a bunch of caves with a shitty generator and a power book. Oh man, that's so funny. He spent 9-11 in a cave barely able to get a radio signal to hear about the attacks. But when he fled Afghanistan, he brought a media truck with him that had been upgraded

with satellite TV receivers and radio antenna so he could monitor the news about himself as it happened. That was always a priority of him. He wanted to know what people were saying about him and about the stuff he was doing. So post-9-11, Bin Laden is officially famous, but he still frets over his inability to connect with more people on an intellectual level. Folks paid attention to his murders, but not his ideas. Which is a problem all great artists have.

When al-Qaeda courier, interviewed by the Guardian in Pakistan, stated, every time I took a new tape, he told me how important my mission was and how this time the Muslims of the world would finally listen and how I must absolutely deliver the tape to the right people. Which, if you've seen any of those videos, it's just Bin Laden talking to a camera for hours. There's none of the flash, the ISIS videos, where they've got like Dutch angles. See that's where it's the next step.

They have illusion. They're like, see the reason it didn't catch fire is he never took a course in After Effects. Yeah, he didn't have anybody who could do like speed ramping and stuff to like make it look cool. You gotta put that Ali McBeal baby in it and that'll get people listening. Viewed one way, it looks like Osama kind of fell into the trap a lot of celebrities wind up in where they sort of obsess over their media image and flip out every time they're misquoted or misinterpreted.

Osama strikes me as someone who if he was on Twitter would be like James Woods. Just like furious anytime somebody argues with him. Maybe he went on the run when the US invaded Afghanistan, spent like five years in constant movement successfully fleeing from the most powerful war and surveillance apparatus ever conceived. Then he moved to a compound in the suburb of Abodabad, Pakistan in January of 2006. You don't stay hidden for five years in the compound from the United States by staying connected to the internet, obviously.

So his compound didn't even have a phone line, but he still had access to the internet and it was like the courier version of dial-up internet. So he would type out emails to people in like a Word document and he would save them onto a thumb drive and then have a courier drive out to like an internet cafe in another country or just miles and miles and miles away. Then the courier would send those emails, wait for responses, download them back to a thumb drive and then drive back to Bin Laden. But he didn't just do that with emails.

He also like would download other things for Bin Laden too. Oh, yeah. That's a good spicy. Yeah, so you're sitting in a compound that has no phone connection, no television, no internet for five years. You're going to get bored. You're going to ask people to download some stuff for you to watch. And that's exactly what Bin Laden did.

An associated press report on this man-powered internet connection noted that the courier took other data back, which included everything you can imagine, even pornography. Oh, okay. Do we have the type? Do we have any info on the type? Well, so that's a bit. There has been a bit of a battle over releasing what type of porn was on Osama Bin Laden's drive.

Because my guess is Simpson's cartoon porn. It's weird how close you are. Here's how Reuters reported on it when sort of the story first broke, quote, the pornography recovered in Bin Laden's compound in Abodabad, Pakistan consists of modern electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive. The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, these officials said they did not know if Bin Laden himself had acquired

or viewed the materials. So it's a mystery. We know that the non-pornographic videos in movies that he had were about 160 gigs worth. So if they're saying that he had an extensive porn collection, we can assume that the quantity of porn was substantial in the tins to hundreds of gigabits range. His porn was apparently kept in a wooden box. Like we all do. Yeah.

And I shouldn't say his porn because we can't say for certainty who the porn belonged to. And when I first heard that, I was like, OK, so he's probably living in a house with like a fucking hundred bodyguards or something like there's probably like a fucking company of guys there. And who knows who it is, but no, no, no. There were three other men in the house with him, his 23-year-old son and his two couriers who were both in their thirties. So that's a minimum 25 percent chance that the porn is Bin Laden's porn.

I'm going to knock it up to 50 percent because I feel like the couriers, they have access to the internet cafe. They can go. They can go masturbate away from the compound. They can use that time. You know, you go to a internet cafe 24 hour one about 3 a.m. It's partially empty. The guy in the front, he's like falling asleep.

Couriers just make sure they have loose fitting pants. They do what they do. So it's either his son or him. We both. Yeah. So that's, we're going to go back and forth on this because I've got more details to reveal. I've spent probably a good two days just trying to figure out who did the porn and maybe it's everybody's.

Maybe like they, maybe they had like a fucking, like a note on the fridge that was like just right down. Okay. You want, you know, ladies spanking each other like part nine and you want some of that Bukaki stuff and yeah, you want, you want the Mickey Mouse porn? Okay. Well, we'll get some of the Mickey Mouse porn on there. Like, yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that might make sense too. Um, obviously the CIA knows the answer to the question because they know where the hard drives were found. So like if the porn was in Osama's bedroom, then we know what it is. It was in one of his couriers bedroom, then maybe it's a courier was in a son's bedroom,

but they're not telling anyone. Um, they seem to have a weird dedication to hiding the truth, whatever it is about Osama's porn. Uh, we didn't even know for sure it existed until May of 2015 when the office of James Clapper, director of national intelligence confirmed that quote, some pornographic material had been recovered during the raid that killed bin Laden. Um, Clapper spokesman noted we are not going to release these materials due to the nature of their contents.

Um, so in 2015 noted journalistic paragon, bro Bible filed a freedom of information request with the CIA. Wow. Bro Bible. Bro Bible doing hard hitting journalism. Here is a quote from their request. We are adults. We can handle it.

We would like to know what kind of porn the world's most wanted man jerked it to. Does being under the constant threat of capture require extra stimulation? I imagine it would be hard for him to focus on his dick. So I figure he had to watch some really nasty shit. Um, so. It was so funny because I was half expecting me bro Bible. They're like, this is an official request from the government that, you know, they're going to, they're going to have a little bit of professionalism.

Nope. They went the full bro Bible. They are consistently bro Bible. You got to say that for them. Um, they have a brand to protect because what if the CIA released that request and they're like, oh, we don't look bro. We don't look. That's not bro enough.

Oh my gosh. Uh, shockingly, the CIA did not respond positively to this professionally worded information request. They refused to send over bin Laden's pornography saying, quote, with regard to the pornographic material Osama bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist would be contained in the operational files. And the CIA is not required to disclose operational files, uh, during FOIA requests, uh, and operational files include files that either talk about how foreign intelligence or counterintelligence programs work.

So basically if it'll give away something we do in intelligence, they don't have to reveal it. Or if it'll give away a foreign government or terrorist groups scheme that we don't, the CIA doesn't let them to know they've caught on to, they don't have to release it. Which brings me to my first conspiracy theory of the day, uh, and then is the theory that Al-Qaeda's leadership was using coded pornographic videos to communicate with each other and disseminate information around the world. Here is a quote from an MSNBC article at the time, US officials had pursued a probe into

whether Al-Qaeda was using special software that would allow the email transition of porn photos implanted with hidden messages that could be deciphered by recipients with the right code. We thought this was the way that messages were being transmitted, said one official. It sounds crazy, but if true, it actually makes a lot of sense. Jihadis are sort of notorious for having huge amounts of porn on their laptops. Michael Flynn, the totally not disgraced international security advisor, said that some of the laptops they recovered from these guys were up to 80% porn, and while this sounds like a nutty

theory in 2012, police in Berlin arrested a 22 year old Austrian with a digital storage device and memory cards hidden in his underpants. Which if you're smuggling Al-Qaeda porn into another country, don't put it in your underpants. Nobody's going to see a laptop and a thumb drive, I think that's suspicious, but if they find it in your underwear, it's immediately suspicious. That's the worst way to do that. The first law of being a cop is that anything in someone's underwear is illegal. So we're about to break, so we can sing a song for Lady Capitalism, and then when we

get back, we're going to talk about what the German police found in that young man's underpants drives, and then we're going to get into exactly what Osama bin Laden was watching, playing, and maybe fiddling his diddle to while he was hiding in a boat of bad. But first, some capitalism from me. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say, for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. According to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. We are back and we are talking about Al Qaeda's plan to hide operational messages in pornography and the 22-year-old arrested in Berlin with a digital storage device hidden in his underwear. So the authorities find this stuff in his underwear and decide to look into it. They find a bunch of stuff including a password protected folder that includes a bunch of porn.

One of those porn videos was titled Kick Ass and hidden inside the porn video they found another file called Sexy Tanya and this file when opened included more than 100 unencrypted Al Qaeda documents detailing everything from operational procedures to plans for future attacks. So it was like they were basically because videos are so big you can actually like hide a folder of text documents inside of it without it being super obvious and so that's what they were actually doing. So it's possible that some of the porn stashin about Abad was meant for clandestine communication

but it also sounds like there's way too much of it for that to be the only reason. And more to the point, it's not quite true to say that we don't know anything about the kind of porn in the Bin Laden compound. Some of it managed to slip through the CIA's wall of silence. On November 1st 2017 the CIA released 470,000 of the files that were found during the raid that killed Bin Laden. These files represent the collective mass of 100 thumb drives and 10 external hard drives. The CIA's list cut out most of the porn but they didn't get all of it.

Included in the collection that you can find right now on the CIA's website were two very old, very smutty video games, Perestroika Girls and Fantasy 95. I think you would classify them both as weird old Japanese porn games. They weren't the kind of complex weird Japanese porn video games where you play as the principle of like a vampire high school and you have to fuck all of your children before the full moon or whatever. The basic premise of both games is that you hover around a map avoiding gagu's while you gradually uncover crudely illustrated drawings and pictures of nude and semi-nude

women. Presumably most players masturbate once they've uncovered the whole image. I feel like I just have to show you these because you won't understand how bizarre they are. I mean I'm interested to see the kind he has but I'm very, very familiar with hentai dating systems. These are not that complicated. They look like from 94 and 95. Alright, yeah.

Why don't you describe what you're seeing here? Well yeah, it's like an oni head in the middle and it seems like they're making squares. They're making moves. They're making good moves. Uncovering a, like the best way to describe this would be, you know like when people try and make a full 2D picture but with 8-bit technology? Yeah. Oh and she's just scantily clashed.

She's not even nude. This one's not nude. Oh wow. So both of those games are like that and some of them may are nude. I'm showing you a picture here that's like the uncovered picture there and you can see her breasts. So some of them are nudes. It's clearly like the kind of porn video game that you would play in 1994 because nothing

better exists. You know like those playing cards that veterans would jerk off to. It's similar to that. And I have a theory. I think that these smutty video games from the mid-90s actually hold the secret of who all of the porn and the porn stash belong to. So we know that the porn exists. We just don't know if it was Bin Laden's or you know his kids or his couriers.

I think that these games are proof that the porn might have belonged to Bin Laden because Perestroika Girls and Fantasy 95 were both made in like 1994 and 1995 respectively. Bin Laden would have been a mature adult when they both came out with the potential to have access to the internet and with the ability to have access to computers and video games. His son would have only been 6 or 7 years old at the time. And I'm going to guess if his son had porn video games he would have had like Leisure Shoot Larry. Something a little bit more advanced.

These are deep cuts for smut games. These aren't anybody's first pick. So I have to think there's something he came across when he was a young man and was like never got over it. You know like that one vid that you saw when you were in your teens and you're like let me see that again. Let's revisit that. Yeah I think this is that for Bin Laden.

The other possibility is that it was one of his couriers. They were 30 and 33 respectively at the time of the raid so they could have been 14 or 17. The youngest of them who would have been 14 when these games came out Abu Ahmad al-Qaidi gave computer training to other jihadi so he was computer savvy. So this might have been his but it's pretty much down to either him or OBL and considering he was an Afghan kid who grew up speaking Pashto and moved to Kuwait as a younger person. I'm going to guess he didn't have a lot of money at age 14 and wasn't playing on the computer.

Oh yeah. I'm not sure but we do have some pictures of Bin Laden at the time and he looks like a man who spent his golden years weekly jerking off to pixelated breasts. I mean. Oh yeah like he has that nerd poncho which is your comforter over your body and a beanie on. That is a sad old man's masturbation case. These pictures are all available on the CIA but we will also be hosting all of these

pictures and links to where you can find the CIA's files on BehindTheBastards.com so you can watch Bin Laden's weird porn obsession along with us. We're going to move on from porn for now though although there's a little bit more of that coming later. I've spent a truly terrifying amount of time coming through the files the CIA did release and the stuff that's there is actually more baffling than his mythical porn stash could ever hope to be. First off I'd like to read a selection of the copyrighted works the CIA found.

Ants. With the Z right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Woody Allen Bugs Life rip off. Oh yeah.

Which. Just blatant rip off. Yeah. Yeah. I love that he would have been a I'm surprised we didn't find B movie on there. Oh yeah. That might have been after he was killed. But he had Batman Gotham Knight which is interesting BBC's great wildlife moments which

I guess everybody likes a wildlife documentary. It also means possible stoner. Biography Osama bin Laden so he was watching documentaries about himself. Man. Cars. So no Bugs Life but he went with cars. But he went with cars. No.

Bugs Life is the symbol of the decadent American regime or something. Yeah. Maybe Ants is more his ideological side. Yeah. Yeah. That's a medium post for someone listening. Yeah because Ants is about overthrowing like military technocracy sort of dictatorship forming in a yeah.

So I can see that. Oh yeah. Chicken Little CNN presents World's Most Wanted which also focused on bin Laden. Final Fantasy 7. Oh. Okay. Something me and bin Laden have in common. Yeah.

Heroes of Tomorrow which I don't know what that is. Yeah. Strange Ice Age Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Man these choices. These choices. In the footsteps of bin Laden a CNN documentary National Geographic Kung Fu Killers National Geographic Inside the Green Berets National Geographic Predators at War which makes sense because they're trying to kill you with drones.

You probably want to watch a doc on that. And then National Geographic World's Worst Venom which between that and the Kung Fu Killers I feel like he was planning another attack with like Kung Fu fighters and bees with rattlesnake venom. He's going to send down ninjas with venom tipped shurikens and that's how he was going to take us out. Luckily we stopped him. Thank God.

A documentary on Peru. The movie Resident Evil which makes me feel a little bit sorry for him if that was one of the things he had to watch. The Three Musketeers and of course the Morgansburg Lock Documentary where in the world is Osama Bin Laden. Oh. Look are they on to me? I know that it was just pure narcissism.

You start to get cocky after they don't catch it for seven or eight years. Look at them. They're searching in all the wrong places. I'm just here masturbating the old 90s games. Once the CIA released everything nerds on Twitter set to work trying to discover if Bin Laden shared any fandoms with them they found a distinct preference for anime including Naruto, Shippuden, Psycho, Ninja, Dikashu Five which I'm guessing is a Naruto thing. I know Naruto, Shippuden, I don't know what the rest of it is but they were like Arabic

dubs of anime which again might have been Bin Laden's it might have been one of his nerdy couriers might have been his kid no way for us to know exactly. They found more ROMs of video games including a save file from Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars. Oh shoot. That was the jam. That was the jam right there. So he had like emulators and stuff and it was a bad dump file so it wasn't a good emulator

like so whoever was downloading this stuff wasn't great at it. Now anyway you may all not know this but I am actually a professional journalist and so when I saw the CIA's dump file I immediately started investigating too. The first search term I entered was the word ass. I found one file titled ass2.wma but further research indicated this was just a weirdly named file for a jihadi video. There was an ass with three asses.jpg but it wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped it was like an Arabic image macro joke with like a cell phone.

So so far I was kind of disappointed but then I searched for butt and I descended into a yarn-wrapped hole of madness. Butt did not turn up any pornography but it did bring up a file called The Art of Crochet by Teresa, Radiant Crochet Butterfly, which is where the butt came from. This has turned out to be one of dozens of crochet videos found on Osama bin Laden's hard drive. As far as I can tell many of these videos are by Teresa Warrior, a semi-popular crochet expert who puts up regular videos on YouTube to this day.

Most of her videos get 60 to 200,000 views so she's moderately popular. This has led to one of my favorite bin Laden related happenings. Random commenters descended on Teresa's videos to let her know Osama bin Laden was a fan because the CIA released a list of stuff last November so like as soon as it happened people are like telling this lady what happened and if you go through her archive of all of her videos you'll find a bunch of commenters being like congrats on being on bin Laden's hard drive and stuff and I found the YouTube comment thread where she first learns about this and it's utterly bizarre so I'm just I'm gonna read this comment thread.

Chris Wilson is the commenter. Hi Teresa, thought you would like to know that the file for this video appears within the CIA's published directory of Osama bin Laden's computer files. Have a nice day. Teresa responded. Thanks Chris. Exclamation point, exclamation point. That is pretty cool that Osama bin Laden, his wives and children like to watch my YouTube

channel. I wish Osama bin Laden's family well and hope they are still crocheting. She doesn't know who Osama bin Laden is. Do you think they will talk about this on any TV or the news program? No Teresa, Teresa get out of here. Teresa. I was like no we killed a lot of, we killed a son like his wives are probably not doing great either right now.

I hope the next reply is like yeah they actually captured it on this movie called Zero Dark Thirty. Well Chris responded. Only time can tell and I'm sure they are still at it. Sure they're still crocheting. Apps of video dedicated to him will get their attention. I'm sure countless subscribers of yours would love to learn how to crochet Osama's likeness too.

Oh no. Teresa responds. You mean like I did the Barack Obama crochet so you think they would like to crochet Osama bin Laden? No Teresa. Absolutely. Teresa what are you doing? Teresa you're in too deep.

The internet's wonderful. Bring your head up for air Teresa. So a lot of the videos and PDFs and JPEGs on the dump files are what you'd expect. There's videos like Shelling US Embassy in the Green Zone with two Katusha rockets, videos of convoys being bombed and stuff, US military handbooks, long religious tracks, exactly what you'd expect Osama bin Laden to have on his hard drive. But there's also a lot of weird stuff. There's a documentary called Sex Crimes in the Vatican and the entirety of a 15 part

BBC documentary called The History of Britain, which is just an in-depth history of Britain. I'm going to put my 14 year old cap for all these weird videos. Sometimes you look at any documentary about sex, you can get some extra jerk material in there. You can get some extra, there was one, I think HBO Showtime had this show that was like sex around the world and it was all the weird sex stuff around the world and it was presented as a comedy. But since it was like late night HBO, it was uncensored.

So I was like, bloop, I'd saved them all a VHS. Oh, so your theory is that his sex crimes in the Vatican. Yeah, he was like, maybe they might show a little thing, you know, in there. Well, I bet he was disappointed. Yeah, very disappointed. One of the neat things about the CIA's archive is that all of the stuff that they have on there, you can download for yourself that whole BBC documentary series because it's all on the CIA's website.

So yeah, they've like released a bunch of stuff like ants isn't on there. They just let you know it was on his hard. Oh, they didn't put ants up for down? They didn't put ants up for down. That was what I was going to jump to was like, wow, I can see ants through the CIA's website. I did get really excited when I found what I thought might have been hidden porn in the dump file. The video titled Zome Women Menaged underscore video dot rm.

I figured it had to be like a menage a 12 video and what else could that but instead it was a 30 minute long lecture featuring a guy who looks like Dom Deleuze if he were a Chironic scholar. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah, that's Dom Deleuze as a Islamic religious expert. Anyway, speaking of false positives, I also came across a YouTube rip file titled Girls Fight, which again seems like that might have been porn.

It turned out to be a 30 second video of two little girls, maybe three years old actually fighting each other like pulling herons, shoving and stuff. I think it was like a viral internet video for some part of the world because they weren't speaking English. It was weird, but probably not porn. Yeah. Bin Laden seemed to have a preference for documentaries in his old age, including a Nova special called Welcome to the 11th Dimension that was about complicated theoretical physics shit.

He had another Nova documentary on string theory, so he was nerding out on physics, which is again surprising for Bin Laden. After a few hours of coming through the videos, you start to get the sense that Bin Laden was one of those parents who uses YouTube to help him raise his kids, which is why I'm going to guess he had cars and ants and stuff. He also downloaded YouTube videos that were like twinkle twinkle little star, English learning videos for kids, that sort of thing. He also downloaded a lot of internet meme videos.

My favorite is this bizarre video of a baboon freeing itself from the jaws of a crocodile, which I don't know if we need to watch, but we might as well get a shot. You might as well see that. I might as well see what that's talking about. If it were a hat or a thot, the baboon might sacrifice to live, that's not an option here. Did the baboon claw the croc's eye? Oh yeah, I imagine he showed his son the video and was like, see, people aren't going to have your back, so you got to be able to get out of the jaws of life.

You got to claw America's eyes out with your own feet to escape its mouth and just yank it out. All right, we are going to break again to do some more ads for things that you can buy and spend money on and keep this glorious cycle going so that we can make more podcasts and tell you more things to buy, but when we come back, we're going to talk about Tom and Jerry and more to the point, the weird 1990s very nerdy card game that somehow intersects with some Bin Laden and the 9-Eleven attacks. So all of that and more after some ads.

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We're back and we're talking about the contents of Osama bin Laden's many hard drives. We've gone through a lot of weird stuff so far, but one of the strangest things that I came across while I was spending an entire week browsing Osama bin Laden's media folders was something like a hundred episodes of Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry episodes are by far the most common type of video content I found on Osama's hard drives. If you just want to have all of Tom and Jerry for yourself, you can download Tom and Jerry from the CIA's website.

So the CIA has Tom and Jerry, but they're closing the grip on the ants. They're keeping a tight hold on ants, but they're letting Tom and Jerry out to the world, which I guess go figure. I kind of assumed at first that the videos were for one of his daughter or something, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me that bin Laden would be a fan of cartoons where a wily, cunning, tiny mouse consistently outwits and brutalizes a larger, more powerful cat. Again, it's kind of like the crocodile thing.

I can imagine him looking at this and being like, yeah. Yeah, that's me. Yeah. I'm going to fucking hit America with a hammer and run into a tiny hole, which is kind of what he did. Yeah, he did. So earlier in the podcast, I mentioned that someone in the bin Laden compound was an anime fan.

Gizmodo actually did a pretty decent dive into this with an article titled, Someone at Osama Bin Laden's Compound, Sure Loved Anime. They found a file with what to me looked like a nonsense name, but just a bunch of numbers and letters and then msams-anime, it was an MP4 file. But it turns out that msams-anime.net is an Arabic language anime form in Saudi Arabia. This form includes a lot of fan translations of various animes, and the only one that this could be was from an episode of the series Detective Conan. Also known as Case Closed in the US, 12 episodes of Detective Conan were included in the drives.

I'm going to quote from the Gizmodo article here. In short, a computer recovered at the last place Osama Bin Laden was alive contained at least a dozen non-consecutive episodes of an animated show from Japan in which a boy detective solves crimes. Oh yeah. I remember that show. It was on Adult Swim. He's actually a man, but a spell was put on him, and he turns into a little boy.

Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah. Just for context. I wouldn't want to get that wrong. He turns into a little boy. Much like what happened to Bin Laden. Yeah. So, these drives also included some more porn, but anime porn, an episode of an anime.

I'm just going to pause you. It's called Hintai. Okay. It's very different. Hintai. It's not anime porn, it's Hintai. Well, okay. So, maybe you tell me if this seems like Hintai or just like erotic anime.

Okay. It's called Bible Black. Oh, that is a bit I constantly do, which is it is a very brutal Hintai called Bible Black. Yeah. It takes place in a world where there's a lot of witchcraft in there, and there's like lots of weird aspects to this Hintai, because like, you know, some women, they grow penises, some, you know, explode, like people are getting murdered.

Bible Black is a very popular Hintai. It is Capable H Hintai. Oh, shit. Yeah. Okay. So, you're aware of what this is. Oh, yeah. I've seen Bible Black.

Okay. So, one of... Two things. Me and Bin Laden have in common. Is it the other one, 9-11? Oh, okay. Final Fantasy VII and Bible Black. So this kind of narrows down, I mean, it doesn't necessarily narrow down the rest of the porn,

because I feel like a lot of different people put in requests for, or like everyone in the compound probably put in some requests, but this was a translation of an episode of Bible Black. He wanted, he wanted the, he wanted the story. Interesting. Yeah. He wanted this. Well, it was like, it was like an Arabic dub of it, or a translation of it or whatever.

And so, the anime form they were pulling these from was a Saudi anime form, and the two couriers were both Afghan natives whose native language was Pashto. So I assume they spoke Arabic, but not as native speakers, which makes me think that this Hintai had to be either Bin Laden or his sons, both of whom were Saudis and native Arabic speakers. That's my, that's my read here, is that the Hintai is either Bin Laden's or his sons. So that's where we are so far with that mystery. You can lose a lot of hours in the Bin Laden archive, and it is, it's not uncommon to run

across videos about like American women and Jewish men converting to Islam right alongside funny cat videos from YouTube. He seemed to have a thing for funny cat videos, which we all do. Don't we all? Yeah. There's a number of saved game files for Nintendo games like Mario and Luigi, Partners in Time, and Metroid Prime Hunters. Yeah.

Um, I suspect these were for Bin Laden's son, um, because of a quote I found in the Looming Tower where it basically points out that when they were hiding out in Afghanistan and bored, he would let his younger sons play Nintendo because it would entertain them. So I'm gonna guess the Nintendo games were probably Bin Laden's game. Yeah. Well, he goes out back and check out Bible Black. Yeah. Some of Bin Laden's furiously pounding it to witchcraft anime.

Yeah. Just intense. Yeah. Um, so there are some really strange things in the video archive, and you could just go through and click them and download all these different random files. Most of them will have names that you can't quite parse out what they're about, um, and it's all very strange. One video is just a 30-second clip of a guy walking through a muddy yard.

Like, it looks like the kind of, when you're figuring out your camcorder and you're like, try, like, it looks like that sort of video. Um, one is a three-minute clip of Ron Paul talking about how the war on terror was a bad idea, which is, of course, how do you feel about that, Ron Paul? Of course, Ron Paul wound up in an Osama Bin Laden's archive. Um, there's a discussion with an Islamic cleric about video games. There's a British ad for cyclist safety that asks you to watch how many passes a group of basketball players make, and there's like a moonwalking bear that runs through in the

middle. And like, if you're focusing on the passes, you don't see the bear, and then it pauses and says, okay, did you count the passes right? Did you see the bear? Yeah. And it was like, it was like a cyclist safety video, but they downloaded it from a site called abunawaf.com, which seems to be like the e-bombs world of the Arabic, yeah, parts of the planet.

Um, then I found a video of a journalist being beheaded, and then I found right after that follow- What a wild ride you went on. What? Like, what a wild ride. You're like, okay, we got some Bible back. Oh, this is kind of funny. Oh!

Oh, dear God. Yeah. Um, and then right after the beheading video, yeah, it was Follow Me, which is a British TV show dedicated to teaching people how to speak English through like, lame Monty Python type sketches. Oh, man. And then I ran into Pigeon Impossible, a six-minute animated movie from 2009 about a secret agent with a nuclear briefcase and a pigeon.

Oh, I hate that. I'm going to get stoned and watch that later. Yeah, you can download it from the CAA's website. Yeah, CAA is going to be just really fueling my... If you are too poor for Netflix, the CAA has your back right now with a very specific type of content. Oh, man. Um, my favorite thing from the archive, however, is not a video or a save game file or pornography.

It's an issue of a newsletter titled Smoking Gun, proof the Illuminati plan to bring down our culture. It was written by The Cutting Edge, which is like a hardcore Christian organization. They have newsletters and a website. They put out books. Their big deal seems to be prepping people for the New World Order, which they've done since the early days of the internet. They're still around today and still claiming the end is nigh, just as they were when Bush

was in office. They've written, like, books about how Harry Potter is trying to, like, convert kids to witchcraft and stuff, like, they're those people. And this particular document, which, as far as I can tell, is the only document of theirs that Bin Laden had in his possession, is a far-right tract claiming that the end of the world is coming. The Antichrist is about to be born and usher in a liberal, fascist health state. And the clues to all this, to the Illuminati's plot, were laid down in a card game published

by Steve Jackson Games, called Illuminati New World Order. As you may know, Steve Jackson Games are the guys who make munchkin. They make great games, wonderful company. In 1990, while working on a cyberpunk game, their offices were raided by the FBI. It had something to do with, it is a wacky-ass story, it had something to do with shit they were writing about hacking for, like, basically, a shadow-run D&D-style type game. It's a long story, like, all of their computers were confiscated by the FBI. They had to, like, fight the bureau to get their shit back.

It almost bankrupted the company. But shortly after all that happened, in, like, 93, they released a card game called Illuminati, which is, have you ever read the Illuminati's trilogy? No. It's by a guy named Robert Anton Wilson, another guy named Robert Shea, who were, like, both editors at Playboy. And it's a silly book, a gigantic silly book, about, like, what if all of the conspiracy theories and history were simultaneously true, even the ones that conflict each other?

So it's, like, that kind of wackiness. And the card game is based in that. So you take control of a conspiracy, like, the followers of Cthulhu or the bankers of Zurich or, like, one of these global conspiracies, and everyone picks a different conspiracy and you fight it out with cards like George Bush, the CIA, the Pulitzer Prize, like, all of these different, like, things that, yeah, so you're basically building a conspiracy. They've got, like, cards that are mind-control lasers and stuff. The game has a really light tone.

There's a Hillary Clinton card, and she's holding, like, a rope, and it's attached to, if you pull up the Bill Clinton card, it's attached to a leash around his neck. So it's, like, very tongue-in-cheek, very silly game. The argument in the tract is that Steve Jackson stumbled upon the truth about the Illuminati and hid all of the secrets about them in this ridiculous card game. He hid info on things like weather-control satellites, like, making them his cards. Like, it's stuff like this. Well, they'll be looking at, like, a card that says weather-control satellites, and

it'll be, like, the card will state, like, you can use this on any land you control, and then, like, the tract will be, like, see, this is proof that the Illuminati has the ability to control the weather in all of the parts of the world that they dominate, and, like... Oh, that's... It's... Oh, my goodness. It's completely bug-fuck nuts.

I can't imagine why Bin Laden would have a far-right Christian tract about this really weird card game in his reading folder. I think... My only guess is that the Illuminati is real. Well... So that does seem a little bit plausible when you go far enough down the rabbit hole of studying these cards, because the addition of the game I have, because I've played this game since I was a little kid, came out in 1995.

One of the cards in that game is a card called Terrorist Nuke, and why don't you take a look at the illustration on the Terrorist Nuke card released in 1995? What the fuck? You're gonna describe that card to me? The Terrorist Nuke card that was designed in 1995 has two towers, and one of them being hit, and even though it's supposed to be a nuke, it's not a nuclear explosion. It looks as if it was hit by a plane. And it's the tower that got hit first in reality, and it's exploding right in the place where

the tower got hit. That's so weird. And Osama Bin Laden was reading conspiracy theories about this card game in the last years of his life. Wow. Well, damn, the Illuminati's real. We figured it out. It'll be our last podcast before we are taken out by the CIA.

Yeah. Sorry. Nice knowing all of you. Yeah. Sorry we brought you in for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know. We're going down.

We're all going down. All of the pictures, including pictures of the Terrorist Nuke card, will be available on BehindTheBastards.com, so you guys will be able to check out all of this craziness. We want you to see it too. It is truly bizarre and inexplicable. That is it for today's episode of Behind the Bastards. I have been Robert Evans. You can find me on the internet at IWriteOK on Twitter.

OK is two letters. You can also find my book, A Brief History of Vice, on Amazon. Ify, you want to plug your stuff? Yeah, I'm Ify Wadiway on Twitter and Instagram, I-F-Y-N-W-A-D-I-W-E. You can get my album. It's on anywhere you can buy comedy albums. It's the Community College Dropout. You can listen to Nerdificent wherever you're listening to this podcast every Tuesday with

how stuff works, Candy Dender every Monday. It's a fun time. And you can follow Behind the Bastards, if you want to find us on social media, we're at atbastardspod. You can find us again online at behindthebastards.com and we will have all of these wacky images and videos up there. So check us out. This podcast drops every Tuesday, so we'll be back next week with another crazy story

about someone just as terrible as Osama bin Laden, maybe even worse. I'm Robert Evans, my buddy Ify, and we are out for the week. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.