The porn on bin Laden's computers
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The porn on bin Laden's computers is John Kiriakou's account of a hostile question put to him on Pittsburgh television and the answer it produced. He told it on the DeProgram programme in August 2025, after a viewer asked whether he possessed any of Osama bin Laden's videos. His answer to that was no.

The booking

Kiriakou explains his presence by a personal rule: "I never say no to reporters from Pittsburgh." The programme was on "KDKA TV2. They have a local Meet the Press after the national Meet the Press."

He could not recall the host's name. The second questioner he does identify by office, "the editor-in-chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette", and by disposition: "not the friendliest guy in the world, and he used to kind of zing me every once in a while."

The question

The zinger, as Kiriakou reports it, was "How surprised were you that there was so much porn on Osama bin Laden's computers?" His reading of the intent is that "he wanted to make me blush or whatever."

The answer

Kiriakou answered that he had not been surprised at all, and produced a prior prediction to prove it. "The night that we killed him, a friend of mine from the CIA called me and said, 'How much porn you think is on that computer?' And I said, 'Dude, are you kidding? It's going to all be porn.' And then, of course, it was all porn."

The host observed that bin Laden had four wives. Kiriakou agreed, "yeah, a guy with four wives", and gave the reasoning he says he offered on the day: "When you live in such a repressive culture and you get internet access and nobody else is in the room, you look at porn."

The reaction

Kiriakou's punchline is the studio's silence. "They looked at each other and then the one guy says to the other, 'I think this is the first time that I've done this show in 25 years that I've actually been speechless.'"

The answer is a compact statement of a view Kiriakou expresses often, that the men the CIA hunted were not exotic but ordinary, and that treating their private conduct as revelation misunderstands what was being fought.

See also

- Osama bin Laden
- Cleaning up after Tora Bora
- The lapis lazuli paperweight
- John Kiriakou
