Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… August, 2020 July, 2020 June, 2020 May, 2020 April, 2020 March, 2020 February, 2020 January, 2020 December, 2019 November, 2019 October, 2019 September, 2019

The release of the pornographic materials has proven to be controversial. Some groups think the move could backfire as followers could dismiss such a release as a dirty trick. | AP Photo SCOTUS short-lister gets Osama bin Laden porn lawsuit

A judge reportedly on President Barack Obama's shortlist for the Supreme Court now has a somewhat less weighty issue to mull: whether dead Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's porn stash should be released to the public.

The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Monday, demanding that the Central Intelligence Agency comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted last year for pornographic materials recovered during the May 2011 U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington and assigned to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, an Obama nominee who has appeared on numerous lists of judges whom Obama might nominate to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month.

Just days after the assault in which bin Laden was killed, unnamed officials told Reuters that a fairly extensive collection of X-rated videos was found on digital media grabbed by U.S. operatives during the late-night raid.

Last May, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. confirmed that "some pornographic material" was picked up among books, records, thumb drives and other items recovered from bin Laden's compound.

Around that time a men's publication called BroBible filed a FOIA request for the stash. The next month, CIA responded that such records "should they exist, would be contained in operational files" exempt from FOIA. The spy agency also noted that federal criminal law prohibits the mailing of "obscene matter."

Some have argued that releasing the pornographic materials could undermine bin Laden's stature and perceptions of him as a pious figure. However, followers could dismiss such a release as a dirty trick. It could also be difficult to know for certain whether any particular video belonged to him or others in the compound.

The Obama Administration has conducted four releases of information seized in the Abbottabad raid: a public release of documents through the West Point Combating Terrorism Center in 2012, a release of additional records in a terror trial in February 2015, and more public releases of records by Clapper's office in May 2015 and last week.

However, none of those releases included the porn stash. In fact, there seems to be little that has been released in the way of audio or video material, aside from a video of a written note and a description of a video posted on a blogging site.

A provision in the FY2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on July 7, 2014, required Clapper's office to review the "documents collected" during the bin Laden mission within 120 days and make public the portions that could be declassified. (The precise legal requirement is unclear because it was classified.)

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request for the pornography trove and for all indexes or catalogs of it in July of last year. The group's suit says the CIA acknowledged the request but has never offered a substantive reply.

Spokesmen for Clapper's office and the CIA declined to comment on the new suit.