Cenk Uygur host of The Young Turks discuss the treasure trove of letters from Bin Laden’s compound released to dispute Seymour Hersh’s recent article.
Wednesday morning, the US government released a huge tranche of documents found in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad after the raid that killed him in 2011. These documents tell us a lot about bin Laden, from his family down to his taste in think tank reports. And they also show one way in which his strategic vision for al-Qaeda led to a bad misreading of the opportunities created by the Arab Spring — a strategic mistake, in fact, that helped fuel the rise of ISIS as a major global jihadist group.
There’s one undated letter in particular that makes this point clear. It’s addressed to Atiyah abd al-Rahman, a now-deceased al-Qaeda figure who served as a conduit between bin Laden and the rest of the top al-Qaeda leadership. In the letter, bin Laden explicitly warns against creating an “Islamic State” — that is, to do exactly what ISIS has done in the past year.
Bin Laden warns that the United States was still strong enough to bust up any government jihadis founded in the Middle East, so the establishment of an Islamic State needed to wait until the United States had been defeated and forced out of the Middle East.
Read more here: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/20/8631449/bin-laden-isis
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