May 21, 2015 3 min read

Visitors to the memorials established at the sites of concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald almost always come away astonished at the meticulous care the Nazis took in cataloging all the items their victims brought with them before they were consigned to forced labor or ushered to the gas chambers.

The Nazis were cruel and heedless when it came to human life, but every pair of glasses and every pair of shoes that arrived had to be precisely recorded. There is perhaps no better representation of what philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.”

Move the clock forward about 60 years or so, and it turns out another group that’s perpetrated its share of evil, al-Qaida, is not a slouch when it comes to banality.

A cache of material seized from the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was hiding before he was killed in a raid by Navy SEALs in May 2011 and declassified this week includes that most bureaucratic and numbingly mundane of documents – a job application. Except it appears to be a job application for membership in al-Qaida.

While you would assume the barriers to entry when it comes to al-Qaida would be pretty low and involve not a whole lot more than just showing up, Bin Laden apparently wanted the terrorist organization to at least have some veneer of professionalism. What better way to accomplish that than rationalizing the selection of recruits and signaling to them that they weren’t interested in hiring any old suicide bomber who wandered in off the street.

It asks first that applicants “Please answer the required information accurately and truthfully” and that they “please write clearly and legibly.” Poor penmanship, after all, can get your application moved down to the bottom of the pile.

Then, after asking about the names of fathers and grandfathers and their occupations, it inquires about hobbies and pastimes, the extent of Islamic instruction, areas of expertise and where a prospective applicant traveled before getting down to the nitty-gritty of whether “any of your family or friends work with the government? If so, would he/she be willing to cooperate with or help us?”, “Have you ever received military training?”, and “Have you ever been in jail or prison?” One presumes a “yes” to the last question would be a plus and not a minus in al-Qaida’s human resources department.

Finally, the application asked “What objectives would you like to accomplish on your jihad path?” and “Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?” For the sake of efficiency, one assumes, the application asks who should be contacted “in case you become a martyr?”

Jon Sopel, the North American editor from BBC News, joked that the application “looks like it has been written by someone who has spent too long working for Deloitte or Accenture, but bureaucracy exists in every walk of life – so why not on the path to violent jihad?”

A few years ago, some British filmmakers created a dark comedy called “Four Lions” about a band of homegrown, wannabe terrorists and portrayed them not as being sinister and cunning, but as bumbling and inept – basically, as dingbats. The al-Qaida application uncovered at Bin Laden’s hideaway suggests the filmmakers might very well have been onto something.