BRITAIN: LEEDS MAN CONVICTED OF POSSESSING TERRORISM MANUAL PUBLISHED BY U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

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LEEDS MAN CONVICTED OF POSSESSING TERRORISM MANUAL PUBLISHED BY U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

Jamestown

34-year-old Khalid Khaliq, a resident of Beeston, Leeds (UK),
confessed in court to owning a copy of I'alan al-Jihad 'ala al-
Tawaghit al-Bilad (Declaration of Jihad against the Country's
Tyrants), a 180-page training manual copied to CD format. The document
was seized in a 2005 raid on the suspect’s home. Khaliq was charged
under the Terrorism Act of 2000 with possessing "a document or record
containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person
committing or preparing an act of terrorism" (Daily Telegraph, March
16). Khaliq indicated the document had been downloaded from an
internet website, but claimed it had been brought into his house by an
unnamed friend and that he had not looked at it (Daily Mail, March 11;
Independent, March 11). After conviction, Khaliq, an associate of
London’s “7/7” bombers, was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

The handwritten Arabic language manual was first seized in an MI5 raid
on an abandoned flat in Manchester in 2000. MI5 translated the
document and supplied a copy to U.S. officials for use in a terrorism-
related trial in 2001. After being used in evidence the manual was
declassified and released to the public by the New York Southern
District Court under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (Daily Mail,
March 15).

The document contains information on weapons, assassination methods,
torture techniques, the use of safe houses, security measures,
behavior in prison, communications, transportation, poisons, counter-
interrogation techniques, use of counterfeit currency and forged
documents, and overt and covert methods of information-gathering. Only
the chapter on bomb-making was withheld from publication on the
Department of Justice website. Some of the manual’s information
appears to have been clipped from American militia movement
publications.

According to the manual’s preamble: “The confrontation that we are
calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates,
Platonic ideals, nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue
of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and
the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.” (http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/
manualpart1_1.pdf ).

Judge James Stewart of the Leeds court declared the U.S. Justice
Department’s decision to publish the document on the internet
“extraordinary” and “not something that would be done in this
country” (Daily Mail, March 11).