RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Miami Herald reports this morning:

A copy of Al Qaida’s fiery magazine Inspire somehow got inside the prison camps at Guantánamo, a prosecutor disclosed at the war court Wednesday.

Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart blurted out the embarrassing disclosure in defending the prison camp commander’s plan to give greater scrutiny to legal mail bound for alleged terrorists. She was discussing a system used by civilian lawyers to send materials to Guantánamo captives who are suing the U.S. for their freedom through habeas corpus petitions in Washington, D.C.

An al Qaeda lawyer, Shayana Kadidal of The Center for Constitutional Rights, suggested that an interrogator may have provided the magazine to a detainee to curry favor with a captive. This is simply preposterous. No interrogator in his right mind would give a detainee a copy of Inspire—because the magazine is much more than an al Qaeda “propaganda magazine.” It is an al Qaeda terrorist training manual, replete with detailed instructions for how to commit terrorist attacks against the United States.

Each issue of Inspire includes a section called “Open Source Jihad,” which the editors have described as “a resource manual for those who loathe tyrants; including bomb making techniques, security measures, guerilla tactics, [and] weapons training.” Recent issues included:

•     Detailed instructions for how to “use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah”;

•     “How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” which provided detailed instructions for constructing a pipe bomb “from ingredients available in any kitchen in the world.”

•     A detailed guide for “Destroying Buildings,” with advice on the “best gas to use” and instructions on how to find “the center of gravity … the points in the building that if destroyed would cause the fall of the building.”

•     A series called “Weapons School: Training with the AK,” which instructed jihadists “on the basics of the AK, the weapon’s capabilities, how to open the weapon and clean it, shooting positions, the types of bullets and the add-ons.”

Guantanamo officials regularly black out sections of USA Today before giving the paper to detainees. It is unthinkable that an interrogator would have provided a copy of Inspire to a detainee with these kinds of detailed instructions for carrying out terrorist attacks.

The fact that lawyers are passing on such information to detainees is appalling but not surprising. And it provides yet another reason why Congress was correct in preventing President Obama from transferring Gitmo detainees to the United States. If detainees can get their hands on a terror training manual at a remote detention camp in Cuba, imagine the kinds of communications they would be capable of if they were in federal prison in the United States.