GOP lawmaker urges admin to declassify more of Osama's Abbottabad raid documents

A senior Republican lawmaker wants the administration to declassify more of slain Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's writings.

Two years after the raid on Osama's compound by US Navy Seals, only 17 of his documents - described by senior administration officials as the equivalent of "a small college library" - have been made public.

Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is a dangerous thing to put a very narrow political lens on a direction of a group that is this lethal to Americans, its allies, and to Muslims around the world, reports Fox News.

He asked whether there is something they could do better to try and counter their growth industry of al Qaeda affiliates around the world.

This week, the House Intelligence Committee, is doing a "deep dive" on the Osama's documents pulled from the Abbottabad compound, where members of Seal Team 6 retrieved thumb drives and CD's.

A leading author and analyst on the documents, Thomas Joscelyn from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that one of the most commonly reported figures is way off base. Joscelyn said hundreds of thousands of documents and files were recovered in the raid.

In the year after Osama's death, a handful of journalists granted access by the administration to declassified documents described the al Qaeda leader as being in retirement, isolated, adrift and no longer in control of the network.

But Joscelyn, and other analysts, question whether the documents - taken in their entirety - present an intelligence picture in conflict, with the administration's public claims that al Qaeda's core leadership was and remains in decline.

National Security Council Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement that the documents have been instrumental in refining their understanding of the Al-Qaeda and bin Laden's role in it, and has contributed to the analysis the President and senior police makers receive regularly and draw on in making decisions.