Shortly after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who oversaw the first official inquiry, was asked by a reporter if the full record would be made public. “Yes, there will come a time,” the chairman of the Warren Commission responded. “But it might not be in your lifetime.” It will soon be in ours — that is, unless the CIA, FBI or other agencies still holding on to thousands of secret documents from a series of related probes convince the next occupant of the White House otherwise.

Osama bin Laden liked to read about the New World Order — a conspiracy theory that holds that a secretive, rich and powerful group wants to rule the world.

The al Qaeda leader had a lot of downtime during his decade in hiding following his masterminding of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His reading list, as recovered by the raid on his Pakistani compound in 2011 and in part released by the U.S. government on Wednesday, offers some insight into his state of mind.