Lawfare results in release of terror manual by US

Sunday Daily Mail:

The amazing series of events that led to an Al Qaeda terrorist manual becoming freely available on the internet can be revealed today.

Only last week a terror suspect was jailed in Britain for having a copy of it and told that its possession was a “serious criminal offence”.

But the deadly document, described as a Declaration of Jihad, is a public record in the US – after being translated from Arabic and typed up for MI5, passed to the American authorities and then declassified by the Department of Justice.

The manual includes advice on planning kidnappings, bombings, assassinations and torture.

It was originally handwritten in Arabic and available only to a very few Al Qaeda operatives and commanders directly linked to Osama Bin Laden.

The terror handbook was discovered in an abandoned flat in Manchester by MI5 and Special Branch officers after a raid in 2000. They were looking for one of the world's most wanted terrorists, Anas al-Liby, who has a £2.5million bounty on his head.

He is said to have been behind the bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 which left hundreds dead and thousands wounded.

In 2001 it was translated and handed to US prosecutors for use in a series of court cases held in the wake of the embassy bombings.

Its use in evidence led to its release to the public by the New York Southern District Court under the US Freedom of Information Act.

It remained on the record despite the 9/11 attacks just months later.

In 2005, the English version of the manual was used as an “operational blueprint” by the July 7 bombers.

It was also used by terrorist Kamel Bourgass, who was behind a plot to launch a deadly poison attack in London and was jailed for killing a Manchester police officer.

And last week it featured in another terrorist trial when Khalid Khaliq – a friend of the 7/7 London bombings mastermind Mohammed Siddique Khan – was jailed for 16 months after admitting having a copy of it on a CD found during a police raid at his home.

The judge in the case said possession of the material required an “immediate custodial sentence”.

An edited version of the manual is still available from the US Department of Justice's website.

...

“The manual was translated into English and was introduced . . . at the embassy bombing trial in New York.”

...

That would be the same trial that revealed to al Qaeda that we were intercepting Osama bin Laden's satellite phone calls to prove his connection to the bombing. He of course quit using that phone in time to do the 9-11 attack without detection. This is what the Democrats want to go back to in order to avoid the PR problem with keeping and trying people at Gitmo. Giving sources and methods of gathering intelligence to an enemy trying to engage in mass murder against us is treating the constitution like a suicide pact.