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Monday, April 15, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Watchdog Demands Look at Bin Laden’s Porn

WASHINGTON (CN) - Judicial Watch sued the CIA for a look at the pornography allegedly found on Osama bin Laden's computer after Seal Team Six killed him in its raid on his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan.

Reports that the terrorist leader kept a significant stash of pornography on his computer trickled out within weeks of May 1, 2011, raid, and inspired multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.

Vice News reporter Jason Leopold, whose pugnacious demands for records allegedly led some federal officials to call him an "FOIA terrorist," reported that the men's interest site BroBible sent a quirky pitch to the CIA early last year.

"We are adults," the website's editor David Covucci wrote in May 2015. "We can handle it. We would like to know what kind of porn the world's most wanted man jerked it to."

Bringing attention to the effort in June, Leopold wrote that Vice News had filed its own request to the Director of National Intelligence.

Judicial Watch joined the fray five days later, in a June 15, 2015 request that the CIA provide it with all "pornographic material collected during and/or after the U.S. military operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan" and with a catalog describing it.

Judicial Watch attorney Michael Bekesha sued the CIA on Monday in Federal Court, saying the agency has stonewalled the FOIA request.

It's not Judicial Watch's first request for images and information about the bin Laden raid.

In 2012, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg rejected its demand that the CIA provide it with photographs of bin Laden's death .

"A picture is worth a thousand words. And perhaps moving pictures bear an even higher value," Boasberg wrote in the opinion. "Yet, in this case, verbal descriptions of the death and burial of Osama bin Laden will have to suffice, for this court will not order the release of anything more."

The group lost its bid to lift the Navy's redactions in emails describing bin Laden's funeral a year later.

The porn hunt case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has been named as among those President Barack Obama is considering for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

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