Vox Sentences: What we learned from the Osama bin Laden document dump

"Who should we contact in case you became a martyr?"

bin Laden in an undated photo. (Getty Images)

• The Director of National Intelligence — the top intelligence official in the federal government — has released a set of over 100 documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, following his death in 2011.

  [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]

• Many of the documents are newly declassified as part of the Obama administration's calls for increased transparency in the intelligence community.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• While the release comes very soon after Seymour Hersh's article alleging that the Obama administration account of the raid on bin Laden was a lie, CIA spokesperson Ryan Trapani insisted it wasn't prompted by Hersh at all.

  [AFP / Dan De Luce]

• Hersh's account suggested that the trove of documents recovered from the compound were fabricated, quoting a retired intelligence official calling them "a great hoax – like the Piltdown man."

  [London Review of Books / Seymour Hersh]

• One of the strangest documents included is a job application to al-Qaeda, which is notable mostly for how banal it is. It asks applicants about their goals ("What objectives would you like to accomplish on your jihad path?") and to list an emergency contact ("Who should we contact in case you became a martyr?").

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• In his private letters, bin Laden advised against the strategy of creating an Islamic State in the Middle East, as ISIS is doing today, insisting that the US must be defeated first so that it doesn't crush such a state.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The software manuals found in the compound suggest that al-Qaeda used a lot of Adobe products.

  [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]

• The compound apparently had books claiming that 9/11 was an inside job — implicitly denying bin Laden himself credit.

  [Vox / Phil Edwards]

The ruins of Palmyra

The Roman-era Temple of Bel in Palmyra. (upyernoz)

• ISIS has taken control of Palmyra in central Syria, which is famous for its millennia-old remnants of ancient civilizations.

  [NYT / Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad]

• This has prompted understandable concern given ISIS's history of destroying priceless ancient structures and art.

  [NYT / Rick Gladstone and Somini Sengupta]

• Palmyra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova has called for an immediate end to fighting in the city.

  [CNN / Jason Hanna, Mohammed Tawfeeq, and Mairi Mackay]

• It's also a major strategic defeat for the Assad regime in Syria, since Palmyra's surrounding gas fields supply much of the electricity in western parts of the country loyal to the regime, and ISIS can profit by selling Assad's old electricity back to him.

  [The Guardian / Kareem Shaheen]

• Coming soon after ISIS took the city of Ramadi in Iraq, the victory shows that the group is still capable of advancing on multiple fronts.

  [NYT / Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad]

• That said, the fundamentals of the conflict are still bleak for ISIS, even if it's having a good month now.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• While ISIS is quite wealthy, it's also displayed a great deal of incompetence in handling its finances.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Assistant Attorney General William Baer of the Antitrust Division arrive for a news conference to announce the guilty pleas. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland are pleading guilty to collaborating to rig foreign exchange markets, and UBS is pleading guilty to manipulating the Libor rate in Britain.

  [NYT / Ben Protess and Michael Corkery]

• The five banks will pay a combined $5.6 billion in fines to the Department of Justice.

• The pleas are "the first criminal guilty pleas from big U.S. banks in decades."

  [WSJ / Aruna Viswanatha]

• The banks engaged in what's called "front-running," wherein before placing a large order for a client, banks buy the same investment (currency, in this case); after the large order goes through, the price rises, and the bank makes a guaranteed profit for itself.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• That's illegal in most markets, but not exchange markets, where the potential profits are thought to be small. But colluding to make them bigger, as these banks did, is illegal.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The case for which UBS is getting fined is a little different and has to do with a scheme to rig the Libor (London InterBank Offered Rate), to which the rates for $360 trillion in mortgages, car loans, credit card loans, and the like are indexed.

  [Washington Post / Dylan Matthews]

• UBS was initially given immunity in that case, but due to its involvement in the exchange market schemes, the Justice Department tore up the deal and forced a guilty plea on Libor.

  [WSJ / John Letzing]

• Among other things, the pleas let the Justice Department say that criminal charges have been brought related to bank misconduct — even if they don't have anything to do with the financial crisis.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

Misc.

• If you search Google Maps for "n***** king," the White House comes up, because user-submitted edits are a catastrophe and everything is terrible.

  [Washington Post / Brian Fung]

• Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation as a worthwhile classroom exercise for facilitating discussions about racism among schoolchildren.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• A new study finds that women raised by working mothers earn higher wages, and men raised by working mothers are likelier to help with chores as adults.

  [Working Knowledge / Carmen Nobel]

• Guess what the last name of Nintendo of America's new VP for sales is. Just guess. Did you guess "Bowser?" Because it's Bowser.

  [Washington Post / Andrea Peterson]

• One of the favorite studies of same-sex marriage opponents got ripped to shreds in a new paper, and the details are amazing: "Regnerus also included a bunch of other questionable cases in his analysis … the 25-year-old guy who said he 'was 7-feet 8-inches tall, weighed 88 pounds, was married 8 times and had 8 children,' for example, and another, apparently very delinquent respondent 'who claims to have been arrested at age 1.'"

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

Verbatim

• "Academics have been chewing over the concept of ‘generations’ for more than a century, and have by and large concluded that generational thinking is bogus."

  [Aeon / Rebecca Onion]

• "'I’m really enjoying this national conversation about bods, but I wish it had more quantitative rigor." Well, your wish has come true."

  [NYT / Josh Barro and Justin Wolfers]

• "The unfinished business of feminism, it turns out, has become the unfinished business of business."

  [New Republic / Lauren Sandler]

• "The aca-amoeba envelops the new arrival for a moment and then reconstitutes itself in a loose, where-were-we semicircle."

  [Slate / Katy Waldman]

• "He had negotiated with Republicans. And in so doing, he had … committed the mortal sin of fulfilling what, in an earlier era, had been widely considered the basic job description of an American legislator: He had been 'willing to consider.'"

  [NYT / Robert Draper]