Published: May 7, 2011
There were nine children in the household, but it remained unclear how many belonged to Bin Laden and his son and how many to the courier and his brother. Neighbors say the courier and his brother had seven children between them, and so there was no great surprise when Pakistanis found remedies for children’s ear infections, colds and coughs. According to NBC News, the Pakistanis also found Avena syrup, an extract of wild oats that can be taken for an upset stomach but is also sold as an aphrodisiac.
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Contrary to a widely-held belief that Bin Laden was on dialysis to treat a kidney ailment, Pakistani investigators said last week that his youngest wife told them he was healthy. “He was neither weak nor frail,” one of the investigator quoted the wife as saying. She told them, they said, that Bin Laden had recovered from two kidney operations a decade or more ago in southern Afghanistan, in part by using homemade remedies, including watermelon.
Although American intelligence analysts are just beginning to pore over a huge trove of computer files, storage devices and cellphones that the commandos recovered from the compound, they were eager to release the new videos, five in all, on Saturday. They said they did not know when the video of Bin Laden watching himself on television had been recorded, but since there is a brief image of President Obama flickering on the screen, it appears to have been made in the compound sometime after January 2009, when Mr. Obama was inaugurated.
Another of the videos, all of which were provided without sound, showed what an intelligence official said was Bin Laden speaking in a “message to the American people” that condemned the United States and capitalism. The official said the video had been recorded between Oct. 9 and Nov. 5, 2010.
American officials assume that during the last five years, Bin Laden recorded about a half-dozen audio messages a year from inside the house. The messages were meant for dissemination to the outside world, but to avoid detection, Bin Laden had no Internet, e-mail or phone lines that he could use to send them.
Instead, the audio files were evidently stored on a CD or tiny thumb drive and passed from courier to courier until they reached As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media arm. There they would usually be combined with still images of Bin Laden, subtitled translations, quotations from the Koran and other embellishments. The finished product would be uploaded to jihadist Web forums and occasionally delivered to Al Jazeera or other broadcasters.
The messages, the only glimpse the world had of Bin Laden’s thinking while he lived inside the compound, suggest not just a firebrand calling for mass murder — a staple of most of the recordings — but a man, perhaps stifled by monotony, attuned to the news and sometimes attracted to unexpected subjects. It is not known if he had a radio in the house, but his son Omar, who lived with him in Afghanistan until 1999, described his father as constantly listening to the BBC.
In October, when American intelligence was close on the trail of the courier and spy satellites were taking detailed photographs of the house, Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.
In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.
Although the couriers who handed off the thumb drives were outside electronic detection, that did not extend to Al Qaeda’s No. 3, who needed a cellphone and e-mail to carry out plans and give orders to more than one person. As a result, Al Qaeda’s third-in-commands had short life expectancies, the fodder of wry jokes in the counterterrorism field. Two No. 3s were killed around the time Bin Laden lived in the compound — Hamza Rabia in December 2005 and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in 2010.
Congressional officials said they were struck by how Bin Laden’s low-profile, low-tech lifestyle protected him but might have also hastened his death. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said that the lack of a large entourage was obviously intended to attract as little attention as possible.
“If you had 25 18-year-olds with guns, then not only would the C.I.A. notice, but so would the Pakistani military,” Mr. Reed said.
But he said he was also struck that Bin Laden was not prepared for the kind of attack the commandos carried out. “There was no escape route, no tunnels, not even false rooms in the house in which to hide,” he said. “It makes you wonder: at what point did that extra degree of vigilance he had get dulled by routine?
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