Bin Laden’s paranoid style – and ours

The long U.S. errand into the jihadi wilderness has yielded no end of unintended consequences, from the perversion of our intelligence protocols to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. So it shouldn’t be any great surprise that an investigative journalist’s challenge to the official account of Osama bin Laden’s assassination would yield the unlikely release of what appears to be the late Al-Qaeda leader’s English-language library.

This latest twist in our baroque engagement with the terrorist mindset apparently was triggered by Seymour Hersh’s controversial London Review of Books breakdown of the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Hersh disputed virtually every detail of the U.S. government’s version of the late-night assault, including the notion that the operation yielded a treasure trove of documents about the inner workings of both Al-Qaeda and bin Laden’s mind.

The White House reaction was swift. This week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced that in the name of transparency, it was releasing a cache of documents and other printed materials retrieved from the bin Laden compound. The tossed soccer ball of distraction proved effective: Media outlets clamored over the cache and pondered its meaning.

The news that bin Laden’s bookshelf included a fairly extensive collection of conspiracy-themed works in English — covering everything from the Illuminati to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the surmise that 9/11 was the handiwork of the Central Intelligence Agency — merited special attention. The disclosure about the CIA theory, in particular, set off frenetic alarms in the American community of 9/11 conspiracy theorists: “Osama was a 9/11 truther” ran an excitable headline on radio talk-show host and archconspiracist Alex Jones’ Infowars site, though it’s far from clear how the possession of a few woolly tracts about the federal government’s purported role in the terrorist attacks translates into a thumbs-up endorsement of the arguments they advance. Perhaps bin Laden liked to keep a running clip file on how badly American writers had misinterpreted his group’s most notorious attack.

It’s also quite possible that many of the books in question didn’t belong to bin Laden at all; while U.S. intelligence sources say he had sufficient command of English to read them, the Abbottabad compound, owned by a pair of brothers, had a dozen or so people milling around at any given time. After all, if one hews to the strict literalism of the Infowars set, one would have to conclude that bin Laden was either not a Muslim at all or a grievously underinformed one, given his possession of I.A. Abrahim’s “A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam.” If the premises didn’t belong to the terrorist mastermind, we can’t say whether the suicide prevention guide “Is It the Heart You’re Asking?” did.

Then again, perhaps bin Laden fit the general psychological profile of the emo-teen loner; he certainly had a well-documented penchant for acting out in violent fashion, as troubled gamer kids are widely purported to do. But all due caveats aside, the most striking feature of this collection is how it seems tailor-made to buttress a decidedly conspiratorial cast of mind. In addition to the 9/11 truther studies (which bear unsubtle titles such as “New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11”), there are fairly recondite inquiries into the shadowy Committee of 300 — a cabal of British aristocrats alleged to have been running the world since the early 18th century — and even a 1977 U.S. Senate subcommittee report on CIA mind-control methodologies.

Despite whatever the ODNI or Jones might want us to think that bin Laden’s reading list might say about his unhinged or penetrating state of mind, respectively, there’s another little-noted leitmotif in this reading list: Most of the conspiratorial works from the Abbottabad library are the handiwork of American writers. (Bin Laden also appeared to have a thing for French writers, but only when they execute dry economic history monographs; it was too much to hope that the six-year Abbottabad shut-in would have cultivated a taste for Proust.)

This could have been a canny know-your-enemy strategem on bin Laden’s part. (In which case, Jones and his followers can rest easy; this would still be incontrovertible evidence of their world-historical importance.) But even a forensic interest in the American conspiratorial mind can be eloquent testimony to deeper inner disturbances. In this vein, Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1963 essay “The paranoid style in American politics” holds astonishing currency for the likely mindset of bin Laden — or whoever it was poring through these all-purpose theories of history during those many long, hot afternoons in Abbottabad. The true political paranoid, Hofstadter wrote, is distinguished by the obsessive focus he trains on the all-powerful machinations attributed to his enemy:

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention … This enemy is clearly delineated: He is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving … He wills, indeed, he manufactures the mechanism of history itself or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters and then enjoys and profits from the misery he produces. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: Decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history but as the consequences of someone’s will.

Even apart from the library, there’s some supplementary evidence that bin Laden was in the grip of the paranoid version of how the world works; in a letter to one of his wifes in the ODNI cache, he instructed her to remove one of her dental fillings in case the CIA or some other agency had planted a monitoring device there.

That may be the grimmest unintended consequence in the whole tangled story of bin Laden’s captivity: the grinding isolation of his tenure in Abbottabad — abetted, perhaps, by his impressive collection of books composed in the high American paranoid style — transformed him into the sort of crank who phones in to Jones’ radio show or (for that matter) the kind of nut case who uses the office of the vice presidency to promulgate whole-cloth fabrications about bin Laden being in league with Saddam Hussein. No one has a monopoly on the paranoid style, after all, and it speaks volumes about both the perfect model of malice we made out of the image of bin Laden and the uncomprehending course of our state-based “war on terrorism” that the last act of the bin Laden saga resolved into a terminally truth-challenged blizzard of speculation, fable and conspiracy. Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that a paranoid U.S. policy and a paranoid Saudi terrorist leader would morph into distorted mirror images of each other.