In May 2000, British police raided the Manchester home of reputed al-Qaeda operative Nazih Abdul Hamed al-Raghie, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Anas al-Libi. On Oct. 15, some 10 days after having been plucked from the streets of Tripoli by US special forces, Libi was arraigned in a New York courthouse on charges relating to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Sometime around the May 2000 raid, Libi went missing, only to turn up again in his native Tripoli in the wake of the fall of the Libyan capital to anti-[former leader Moammar] Gadhafi rebel forces in August 2011. Among the possessions seized from Libi’s Manchester home in May 2000, investigators discovered a 180-page handwritten document that has been widely cited in the intervening years as a supposed al-Qaeda training manual: the famous “Manchester Manual.”
The manual was translated into English and introduced as evidence in the first African embassy bombing trial, which took place in New York in 2001 and concluded with the conviction of four of the men with whom Libi allegedly conspired. It will presumably be introduced as evidence against Libi as well. But for the US government, the manual is a double-edged sword. While it may help to convict Libi, on closer inspection it shows that the jihadist “cause” to which Libi rallied nearly a quarter of a century ago is essentially the same “cause” that the United States and its Western allies have been directly or indirectly supporting in places such as Libya and Syria today.
With its detailed instructions on operational security measures for conspiratorial cells and its lurid descriptions of assassination techniques, it is not hard to understand why the Manchester Manual was of interest to both counterterror investigators and prosecutors. The advice to captured militants to insist during their trial that they had suffered torture at the hands of their captors even became something of a locus classicus in efforts to defend the “war on terror” practiced under the Bush administration. But given all the attention that has been devoted to the manual, it is remarkable how little the actual context of the document has been appreciated or even indeed noticed.
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