Posts
JAMESTOWN MAKES BIN LADEN'S BOOKSHELF
On May 20, 2015,
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released
some of the English-language and declassified documents that were found
in Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound by U.S. Navy Seal Team Six. The
documents included personal letters, physical books, news magazines,
and reports from various governments, research centers and think tanks,
and other organizations. The full list of documents can be found at:
Noteworthy
among the items found in Bin Laden's library were 43 publications from
The Jamestown Foundation, which included 26 issues of Terrorism Monitor (2006-2010), 16 issues of the former Jamestown publication Terrorism Focus (2008-2009) and a 2008 Jamestown Occasional Report entitled: Arming for Asymmetric Warfare: Turkey's Arms Industry in the 21st Century, by
analyst Andrew McGregor (2008). Jamestown's publications are listed in
three of the 40 bullet points in the "Think Tank & Other Studies"
section outlined by ODNI. Materials from other think tanks and research
organizations included studies and reports by the
Combatting Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, Carnegie Foundation,
and the RAND Corporation. Of the organizations listed in the
declassified Bin Laden bookshelf, the closest competitor to Jamestown in
terms of the number of publications in the al-Qaeda leader’s personal
reading collection was the CTC, with over 26 total documents compared to
Jamestown’s 43.
In
reaction to the announcement, Jamestown President Glen Howard said that
“clearly Jamestown was the most closely watched organization in Bin
Laden's collection of think tank documents according to the ODNI
statement. This strongly reflects upon the high quality of the analysis
by Jamestown analysts on al-Qaeda that it would merit the attention of
Bin Laden himself.”
Created two years after 9/11, Terrorism Monitor remains
widely read around the world as one of the premier publications
distributed by the Washington, DC-based research organization.
* * *
Founded
in 1984, The Jamestown Foundation is an independent, non-partisan
research institution dedicated to providing timely information
concerning critical political and strategic developments in China,
Russia, Eurasia and the world of terrorism. Jamestown produces three
periodic publications: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Terrorism Monitor and China Brief. Jamestown research and analysis is available to the public free-of-charge via Jamestown’s website, www.jamestown.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment