Any former graduate student who trolled used bookstores in search of bargains while living off of a modest stipend in the days before Amazon.com knows what I’m talking about. The search for book bargains never ends for impoverished grad students. The problem is the kind of books that find their way into used bookstores. Seriously, if you were to go to Half-Price Books in Austin or Powell’s in Chicago’s south side or Capitol Hill Books, this is pretty much the assortment you would find: crazy conspiracy books, past bestsellers, random think tank monographs, and Noam Chomsky. Lots of Noam Chomsky.

This fits perfectly with what we know about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. As The Washington Post’s Greg Miller and Julie Tate report, bin Laden voiced “deep frustration with the isolation at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.” We also know, from multiple reports, that al-Qaeda is a remarkably stingy operation in terms of its expenses and reimbursement procedures.