© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
The vast majority of files found by US officers on laptops taken from Islamic State contain pornography, says Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's spying arm.
Flynn was repeatedly assigned to senior intelligence posts in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, before taking overall control of US military intelligence in 2012. The German newspaper
Bild is now serializing a book detailing his experiences of the War on Terror.
"We looked a ruthless enemy in the eye, the one that raped and exploited women and children, boys and girls, who beheaded people because it pleased him and who watched pornography on his laptop,"
writes Flynn, who retired in 2014.
"At one point we actually had determined that
the material on the laptops was up to 80 per cent pornography. These sick, psychopathic enemies were not only unimaginably hideous, but also treacherous and torn."
Flynn said that seeing the hypocrisy of radical Islamists - ISIS officially punishes porn-watching with lashes - helped him "better understand the adversary," who Flynn says was flexible, ruthless and capable of using modern technology to achieve its aims.
Flynn's revelations tally with previous anecdotal evidence about the viewing habits of radical Islamist martyrs. Famously, a "considerable quantity" of pornography was recovered at Osama bin Laden's final Pakistan hideaway, and there had been previous reference to "terabytes" of explicit content being found on terrorists' computers.
Various explanations have been posited about the prevalence of porn among radicals.
Islamic warriors exist in an environment that is by turns brutal and boring, removing existing social boundaries, and leaving recruits needing an outlet for their stressful existence. Like any army, ISIS is also a testosterone-filled environment, where women are hard to come by.
Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, has also claimed that previous profiling of jihadists revealed that many chose to become warriors in the first place because they are "very badly adjusted in their relations with women," and are therefore "severe onanists."
Several researchers have also suggested that jihadists' porn watching habits - both in their zeal and furtiveness - are not noteworthy, and make them much like the rest of humanity.
'Evil of radical Islam' Flynn, who left his agency abruptly,
under a cloud of speculation that he clashed with superiors and his team over his aggressive reform of intelligence methods, also reserved harsh words for President Barack Obama's treatment of radical Islam.
"Leading US decision makers have shied away from any criticism of Islam since 9/11. Instead, they emphasize that Islam is a "religion of peace" despite evidence to the contrary. This denial of the existence of jihad has led to President Obama making an absurd claim that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam," writes Flynn.
"We will not win this war, if we will deny [the processes] that massively develop under our very nose," he added, stressing that "it is high time we condemn the evil of radical Islam."
Despite being a lifelong Democrat, Flynn has endorsed Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, and has even been touted as a potential running mate for the billionaire.
By all means lets condemn radical Islam...right after we condemn radical Christianity and radical Judaism. They all go hand in hand as far as I'm concerned. It seems that Mr Flynn didn't quite get the whole how or why behind the idea of IS. Of course there are laptops full of porn...it's what all real Muslims crave, what an idiot. I don't suppose the genius ever had a thought that maybe, at most, these were MINOs(the definition of Takfiri), being that most are paid mercenaries. He's POed at Obama for following the path laid out from at least 2001? This guy is supposed to be intelligent and has these issues? Someone needs to let him in on the fact that it's Zionists and their Christian lackeys that created this monster, with help from their Wahhabist cohorts...you know the ones we've been in bed with for how long now?...and he was on Trumps short list? "We will not win this war, if we will deny [the processes] that massively develop under our very nose,"...DUH! Look around you, Flynn...you're an imbecile in the middle of the viper nest.