Documents and videos. Next, well hear their analysis of the relationship between al qaeda and iran as well as al qaeda and isis. This runs about an hour and a half. Well, good afternoon, and welcome to fdd, the foundation for defense of democracies. Im cliff may. Im the founder and president. And im pleased to welcome you today to our conversation, understanding al qaeda through the massive trove of Osama Bin Ladens files. I think you all know the background. In may of 2011 a navy s. E. A. L. Team went to abbottabad, pakistan. They killed Osama Bin Laden. They had a Second Mission to take as much information as they could from his compound. They did so. We should have learned a huge amount of information from that treasure trove, but we didnt because it was under lock and key. Fdds tom jocelyn and bill roseio were among the most vociferous lobbyers and pressurers to release that information, most recently 470,000 documents were released and tom and bill were given an advance look by mike pompeo who took the extraordinary step of saying no, this information should be available to scholars and journalists and others. So with that im pleased to hand the conversation over today to our moderator, kimberly dozier, who is executive editor of the cyber brief, with and who has had a distinguished career reporting on intelligence and National Security issues. She covered the war in iraq from 2003 until she was wounded in a car bombing in 2006. Last thing by way of housekeeping i should note that todays event will be livestreamed. I encourage guests here and online to join in todays conversation on twitter. fdd. And id also ask you to please silence your phones. Kim, thank you very much. Hand it over to you. Thank you very much. So today we have with us three of the practitioners of the dark art of delving into everything al qaeda. Also isis but were going to dwell on al qaeda today. In case you havent met them before we have bill rosio, founder of the long ward journal, which is part of the fdd female now. Rukhmine kalamaki, who is the New York Times specialist on al qaeda, Foreign Correspondent and a. P. Veteran. We worked together there. And tom jocelyn, who i asked him to bring out this notebook. Believe me, were going to start broad but were going to get pretty granular about this stuff pretty fast. Were going to chat for about 45 minutes amongst ourselves and then open it up to questions from you all. So with that, ill start with the broad question. Why did it take so long, tom, to release these documents . Well, anybody who deals with the intelligence bureaucracy knows that theres theyre definitely allergic to releasing anything. And we call generally for transparency on a lot of different matters. We think thats the medias job, to push for transparency, and all these different issues and the complexity of the 9 11 wars, transparency we think helps the public because here we are sitting in 2017 and the u. S. May not have largescale deployments in the country as we did in the past but were still deployed in several areas and more countries now than ever. And understanding this whole threat spectrum and the enemy and how this all evolved we think is crucial for understanding and debating the efficacy of these policies and understanding our enemy. And what better way to see it than through the eyes of Osama Bin Laden and how he saw the world as a primary source on our enemies. But phil and i started fighting for releasing these files in may 2012. At the time the Obama White House put out 17 files from this massive trove. And were sitting there, bill and i are proudly nerds and were sitting there thinking okay, were going to get all these goodies today. And all that comes out with there was a narrative associated with the files that said al qaeda was on the decline, everything was going poorly, there was no cohesion to this international network, you have al qaeda groups in west africa, the heart of the middle east fighting but bin laden had little control out of all of little control out of all of this. Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 captioning performed by vitac