For $11.96 you can buy a copy of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual in paperback on Amazon.com.
One such order was recently placed by staff members at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom to make a point about academic freedom. Earlier this summer Rizwaan Sabir, a 22-year-old M.A. student at the university, and Hisham Yezza, an administrator, were arrested by British police for possession of the training manual and held for nearly a week under the sweeping powers of the U.K.'s 2006 Terrorism Act.
The manual, which contains fairly unimaginative prescriptions for terrorist warfare, first came to police attention almost a decade ago after a raid on the Manchester home of an al-Qaeda suspect. It has since made the rounds of various websites, including the U.S. Department of Justice's, from which Sabir downloaded it for his research thesis into terrorist tactics. |