Time magazine has a broad outline of the contents of the al Qaeda computer files seized in Pakistan last week.

On a related note, my airplane reading included a fascinating and stunningly detailed article in The Atlantic Monthly (subscribers only) that sheds light on just how important the Pakistani computer confiscation really is. The author is Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison, who bought two of al Qaeda’s most valuable computers for $1,100 from a computer dealer in Kabul in late 2001. One of the computers was used mostly by top bin Laden lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri:

What emerged was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic planners–among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, [Muhammed] Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheik Muhammad…The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many of wchich, it became clear, were part of the group’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort.

Some of the stuff borders on satire. One file offered “tips for the traveling terrorist,” including:

Don’t wear short pants that show socks when you’re standing up. the pants should cover the socks, because intelligence authorities know that fundamentalists don’t wear long pants.

And this:

You should differentiate between men’s and women’s perfume. If you use women’s perfume, you are in trouble.

Internal e-mails reveal bickering over salaries and office expenses (”Why did you buy a new fax for $470? Where are the two old faxes? Did you get permission before buying a new fax under such circumstances?”). Al Qaeda even adopted the parlance of a multinational corporation, Cullison reports, dubbing bin Laden “the contractor;” the Taliban “the Omar Brothers Company;” and the security services of the US and Great Britain “foreign competitors.”

All quite amusing until you remember that the business of al Qaeda is the bloody, unrelenting business of slaughtering innocents in the name of jihad.

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