500 Days (94 page)

5.
Military training:
The organization that wrote the Manchester Manual was militarily unsophisticated; al-Qaeda was not. The document provides a written description about using weapons, but only the most basic—handguns, rifles, and small explosives—are described.
   The first step described in the use of weapons is that the member needs to go buy one. But this would not be necessary for a member of al-Qaeda, which has long maintained weaponry that far exceeds those of some small armies. With bin Laden’s group, the weapons are provided to the members, not the other way around. The purchaser described in the Manchester Manual also had to arrange for a place to store the weapons; al-Qaeda maintained its own weapons caches, including some dug into mountains.
   The first weapon listed is a pistol. The manual offers a history of the pistol, and then discusses the benefits and disadvantages of both the automatic pistol and the revolver. Then, for several pages, it describes different ways to hold either a pistol or a revolver, the position a person should assume, where to place a finger, and so on. Alongside the descriptions are hand-drawn pictures.
   The idea that al-Qaeda members would buy their own weapons and then learn how to use them by reading a manual would probably leave bin Laden laughing. Al-Qaeda trainees do not learn how to fire a gun by reading about it in a book; they attend the camps, are provided with the weapons, and then are guided through their usage one step at a time. They engage in practice against sophisticated targets, and then are taught how to use their weapons in raids.
   The next weapon described in the manual is the rifle, and again, the document provides a history and step-by-step instructions on how to hold and fire it.
   The next sets of weapons are the most basic: knives and blunt objects and poisons. All of the poisons mentioned come from beans, roots, and plants—there is nothing about cyanide, strychnine, or the other most deadly substances connected to al-Qaeda by American intelligence.
   Then, bombs. The document provides a description of how to assemble a fuse with a blasting cap, but then says nothing about the actual explosives required or how the
detonation device should be attached. It is as if the document gave instructions on how to turn a key in a car, but not how to drive.
   Those are all the weapons described, and they are nothing like the al-Qaeda arsenal. There is no mention of how to use Stinger missiles, antiaircraft systems, grenade launchers, assault rifles, cluster bombs, Uzi machine guns, or any of the other deadly weapons that were possessed by al-Qaeda. Indeed, if this document was, against all evidence, written after 1993, at that point bin Laden was already paying millions of dollars in an attempt to purchase nuclear weapons; al-Qaeda had long ago passed the “gun, rifle, and fuse-explosive” stage.

6.
Goals of the organization:
By 1990, the United States had established operations in Saudi Arabia as part of the first Iraq War. Bin Laden’s focus was on driving out the Americans; his goals were directed at outside enemies and remained that way for two decades.
   The Manchester Manual says nothing about the situation in Saudi Arabia. Instead, its goals are quite different: to topple the “apostate rulers” of the Middle East and establish an orthodox caliphate. In other words, this group wanted to overthrow Arab governments that were not sufficiently Muslim and establish an Islamic regime.
   This division of goals—fighting outside enemies or toppling Arab leaders—was the same issue that was splitting bin Laden and Zawahiri at that time. Bin Laden, as I mentioned, wanted to confront the Americans, Zawahiri wanted to overturn the Egyptian government. As a result of that disagreement, the two were not working together when this document was written. If this difference of opinion could divide Zawahiri and bin Laden, it is hard to understand how any government official could conclude that the al-Qaeda leader had suddenly adopted the goal he opposed.
   Finally, there is one bit of information that is crippling to the idea that the Manchester Manual is an al-Qaeda document. The terror group maintained a vast collection of books and documents in its library based in Afghanistan; many of al-Qaeda’s planners and fighters—the ones who would supposedly depend on the “tactics” in the Manchester Manual—consulted the information in that library. But according to two former al-Qaeda members I spoke with, the Manchester Manual was not included in the library. Indeed, that reality was made quite clear in the interrogations at Guantanamo of Abu al-Libi, the operations chief of al-Qaeda. The information is described in the detainee assessment of Abu al-Libi. The primary sources of information from the library that were used to teach guerrilla tactics, al-Libi told his interrogators, were translated military training manuals from the United States armed forces; in other words, the main reading material for learning fighting tactics came from America, not the Middle East. Other influential books from the library, al-Libi said, were translations of Mao Zedong’s works on guerrilla warfare; these were widely used in al-Qaeda training camps. Indeed, excerpts from Mao’s writings were distributed among al-Qaeda members in small pamphlets titled “The War of the Week.”
   If not al-Qaeda, then who wrote the document? While the specific identity will remain educated guesswork, it is relatively easy to narrow it down to a group of interrelated and, at times, contentious organizations.
   The references in the Manchester Manual to an organization called the Ministry of Interior Affairs is significant in determining its provenance. Contrary to the statements of both American and British officials, the sections in the document about interrogation are not instructions on how to handle all official questioning. Instead, they are very specific about the method of dealing with questioning from the ministry. In the introduction to the section on interrogations, the manual says: “The agency that conducts the interrogation is the government’s questioning apparatus that belongs to the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The officers of that apparatus graduate from the police academy.”
   
The writers of the document then make it clear that they are discussing the security sector
in the country where they reside.
It states, “In
our country,
that apparatus has no values or code of ethics. It does not hesitate to use all kinds of torture” (emphasis added).
   The name of the government agency—Ministry of Interior Affairs—helps to narrow down the possibilities of which country the writers are discussing. This type of agency goes by different names in different countries—Ministry of Interior, Ministry for the Interior and Public Health, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Department of Home Affairs, and so on. The Middle Eastern governments that name this group the Ministry of Interior Affairs are Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
   At the time the manual was written, Sudan had adopted an Islamic legal code and was tolerant, and even supportive, of fundamentalist groups; none of that matches the descriptions in the document. Afghanistan, of course, was in chaos and there was no settled “apostate ruler” to overthrow. Egypt and Saudi Arabia remain the only two nations that fit the depiction of the government and the name of its security agency.
   But, as I mentioned before, there is nothing in the manual about Saudi Arabia or America, the focus of bin Laden’s ire in the early 1990s. Instead, the focus of the manual is Egypt. Every terrorist attack it depicts involves that country and its officials.
   The descriptions include mention of the groups involved, including the covert section of the Muslim Brotherhood and a fundamentalist organization called al-Najun min al-Nar (the government translates this to mean “[those who have] escaped the fire,” but I am told the better translation is “rescued from the fire”). These are organizations that were working to replace the Egyptian regime with an Islamic state.
   Only one of the examples listed in the Manchester Manual is given without naming any group as the perpetrator. This attack, the assassination of El-Mahgoub, is also by far the most detailed. For example, it describes the precise number of minutes that separated two convoys of cars, the attempts to flee on motorcycles, the actions of one of the terrorists when a motorcycle broke down, the circumstances surrounding the shooting of a police officer during the men’s flight, and the fact that the identity of the officer was subsequently learned. In essence, the writers of this document had more direct information about the El-Mahgoub attack than about any other. By all appearances, the writers had personal or direct knowledge of the attack of the Egyptian official, additional evidence suggesting that this was written by an Islamist group in Egypt. Also, several individuals mentioned in the manual are cited as “brothers”—every one that I could gather information about was arrested or executed by Egyptian authorities.
   The manual provides an extremely detailed description of the process of arrest and interrogation—what building a suspect is taken to, then where he is moved, and so on. The Middle Eastern intelligence officials said that those descriptions exactly match the process used in Egypt. For this and many of the reasons mentioned above, the officials said there is no doubt that this document is about Egypt.
   The philosophy espoused by the writers also offers clues as to their identity. At the beginning of the manual’s first chapter, the writers make reference to the “state of ignorance” subsuming Arabic society and how the young were lured into this state by the apostate rulers dangling community clubs, fancy clothes, and other Western amenities to persuade them to abandon fundamentalist Islam. This is, almost verbatim, the philosophy espoused by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who served as the philosophical patron saint of the Muslim Brotherhood in that country. The document then cites Ibn Taymiyyah, the religious scholar from the Middle Ages who served as an intellectual foundation for the beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood.
   All of the attacks described in the document were committed by the military unit
of the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-twentieth century or by some of the violent offshoots of that organization that mostly took root in the late 1980s.
   The organization refers to itself twice as Jemaah Islamiyah. The government correctly translates this to mean “the Islamic group,” but apparently without recognizing that Jemaah Islamiyah is the name of an Egyptian terrorist organization. Jemaah has been in operation since the 1970s and is the largest militant Islamist group in Egypt. It is a radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its spiritual leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, known in the United States as “the blind sheikh.” Rahman is currently serving a life sentence in an American prison following his conviction on conspiracy charges involving terrorist plotting.
   There is additional evidence suggesting the manual may be connected to Jemaah. The assassination of El-Mahgoub, which is the one described in the greatest detail, was linked to followers of Rahman. That would help to explain how the writers of the manual knew so much about that attack.
   But there is another step to this identification. While the writers may be part of Jemaah, that organization worked with another terrorist group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, run by Zawahiri. In 1991, Zawahiri took control of EIJ, and the organization lost many of its direct connections with other terrorist groups. The date, of course, closely coincides with the writing of the manual, and may have been produced as part of Zawahiri’s new leadership.
   This does
not
, however, link the manual to al-Qaeda. Once again, Zawahiri and bin Laden were heading in different directions at that time, and the document is focused on the government of Egypt, not something of particular interest to the al-Qaeda leader. Al-Qaeda began to significantly finance EIJ only in 1998, and only then did Egyptians begin to play a large role in the planning of attacks.

This is not, of course, a Sherlock Holmes mystery; whether the document was written by Jemaah, EIJ, or some other group, the significant point is that it could not have been an al-Qaeda manual. Beyond all of the factual issues, there is also the problem that the manual is amateurish. Again, contrary to the representations of various governments, there is virtually nothing in its pages that isn’t basic.
Don’t set up training near a police station, hold a gun like this, rent ground-floor apartments to allow for easy escape
—these are hardly the musings of a terrorist mastermind.
   This analysis establishes four facts: that the Manchester Manual is not an al-Qaeda document, that it was written in the early 1990s, that the authors were part of a jihadist group looking to overthrow the government of Egypt, and that the goal was divergent from the aspirations of bin Laden at that time. Only by recognizing those points can the failures of the American and British governments in dealing with this document become clear.
   Because this manual was written at a different time by a different group with different goals than Western officials believed, American and British policies were driven by a fiction. Challenges that did not exist were reviewed and countered with policies that were not necessary. False arguments were offered up to address criticisms. It was as if the Pittsburgh Steelers prepared for a game against the Dallas Cowboys by reviewing the playbook from Tuscaloosa High School; the meanings and threats were all misunderstood.
   The majority of the problem came from the sections of the manual about interrogation, resistance, and responses. As the governments have said, the document
does
provide information about each of those areas. One of the points most often repeated by the Americans and the British is that the manual says Islamists who have been arrested should falsely proclaim in court that they had been tortured.
   It says no such thing.
   
The interrogation section is not suggesting that captured members of the group make
false
allegations of torture, or employ
general
resistance measures—it is examining torture and resistance
in Egypt.
It is written by Islamists who, the writing shows, have been exposed to the torture inflicted universally by Egyptian security officers on suspected Muslim terrorists.
   Again, this is made clear simply by reading the document. As mentioned above, in the interrogation and investigation section, it is discussing the “Ministry of Interior Affairs” in “our country.” That is not some general reference to law enforcement and intelligence groups around the world.
   It lists the forms of torture to expect: hanging by feet, beating with thick wires, pulling out nails, shocking with electric current, burning with fire, hitting the genitals, dragging over barbed wire, and eighteen other tactics. These are all cited by human rights groups as the tactics used by Egypt. Nothing like the torture of the Egyptians was ever inflicted by the Americans and the British.
   The document provides specific examples of Islamists who were tortured—of course, all of them Egyptians (it does cite a book by an Iranian torture victim and instructs the members of the group to read it). And, as mentioned above, it provides a step-by-step description of the arrest and interrogation process, including an explanation of where torture would take place and when.
   Eventually, if there are criminal charges brought, the suspect would be taken to court. And it is there that he is supposed to make his first public proclamation of having been tortured. “At the beginning of the trial . . . the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security (investigators) to the judge . . . complain to the court of mistreatment in prison . . . the brother has to do his best to know the names of the state security officers who participated in the torture and mention their names to the judge . . . during the trial, the court has to be notified of any mistreatment of the brothers inside the prison. . . .”
   This is not some arbitrary instruction intended to make the Egyptians squirm from false accusations; it is the best way to
make the torture stop.
Regardless of what investigators do, Egyptian courts are not tolerant of torture. Indeed, after the Islamists made repeated and vocal accusations of abuse to the court in the case arising from the assassination of El-Mahgoub, the court investigated and concluded that the men had been tortured. As a result, their confessions were tossed out as unreliable. So, by complaining of the torture to the courts, a detainee in Egypt is acting in the way most likely to make it stop. That is all the section on making public accusations of torture is about. That has nothing to do with the American and British interpretation about making false accusations, which simply does not match the text of the document.
   In the end, the evidence is overwhelming that the Manchester Manual is not an al-Qaeda document and that its contents have been misinterpreted—or misrepresented—by Western officials. Moreover, while the document was found in the computer of a man associated with al-Qaeda, his strongest connection was to a Libyan terrorist group that, unlike al-Qaeda, is primarily focused on overthrowing that country’s government. Unfortunately, the American and British governments fell into a common trap—assuming that all terrorists are al-Qaeda, when, at least at the time when the Manchester Manual was written, they were competitors for money, attention, and followers.