The Full AlSabri Opinion Released

The D.C. Circuit in Alsabri released its full opinion, available here (thanks Lawfare), late last week. It is unredacted and also unsurprising.

As revealed its the earlier one-page judgment, the Circuit upheld Judge Urbina's lower court decision that held that Alsabri was lawfully detained.  I previously discussed Judge Urbina's evaluation of the 92-page collection of captured documents, AFGP-2002-800321 (originals and translations), including his assessment of the authenticity and reliability of the documents and the importance, in my view, of separately considering the context of individual pages and the value of consulting the original documents. I ended by stating that it was "unclear what, if anything, the D.C. Circuit might make of these issues."

In its opinion, the D.C. Circuit does briefly discuss the captured documents, but largely avoids substantively examining the issues they raise in any depth by applying a highly deferential "clearly erroneous" standard to its evaluation of Judge Urbina's decision.  In a passage that seems to confirm that only English translations were consulted, the Circuit summarizes that:

the government introduced evidence that Alsabri did in fact receive weapons training. The principal evidence was an English-language translation of a 92-page collection of documents that the government maintains were internal Taliban or al Qaeda records. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) record, which the government submitted as a supplemental exhibit, indicates that the documents were captured by Coalition forces from the "Director of Al-Qa'ida Security Training Office," and are "similar to other materials recovered from enemy forces."

The Circuit then notes that "Alsabri contends that the district court erred in concluding that the records of scheduled and completed training refer to him." It does not engage the arguments in detail, however, but rather simply holds that "the district court did not clearly err in finding that the documents refer to Alsabri."

In a footnote the Circuit Court also notes that Alsabri specifically took issue with Judge Urbina's characterization of a list of "arriving brothers" as a "training roster" when not even the government had argued that the "arriving brothers" were necessarily "arriving" to a training camp.  On this point the Circuit commits, in my view, the same error as Judge Urbina and assumes that because the 92 pages of documents form part of AFGP-2002-800321 in the Harmony database they necessarily are related to one another rather than being, as Alsabri had argued (and the originals provide some support), a "hodgepodge of materials."  Specifically, the Circuit states that "[g]iven the context provided by the remainder of the documents" Judge Urbina's "characterization of the list is not clearly erroneous." The "context" on which the Circuit is relying here may unfortunately be nothing more than an artificial context created by the individual that chose to scan these 92 pages together as one file and assign one Harmony number (for an explanation of that process, see the Standard Operating Procedures for the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar available here).

The Posted Bin Laden Documents

As nearly every news source has reported, West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) this morning posted 17 documents seized from the Abottabad compound.  They are numbered SOCOM-2012-0000003 to SOCOM-2012-0000019.  You can download them as zip files here or individually from the CTC's Harmony Program here and the CTC's summary of the documents is here. I have also added the SOCOM documents to the Captured Documents Index.

The small number of documents released, which the CTC's own report - "Letters from Abbottabad" - characterizes as "only a fraction" of the seized documents, is a bit disappointing.  This has led to, and will lead to more, complaints (whether accurate or not) that the released documents were carefully cherry-picked to support a certain narrative about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Interestingly, the CTC also posted some newly public AFGP Harmony documents that are cited in its report, which I link to below for convenience and have also added to the Captured Documents Index.

AFGP-2002-800636

AFGP-2002-600177

AFGP-2002-600046

AFGP-2002-000232

Introducing the Captured Documents Index

In advance of tomorrow's release of captured Bin Laden documents by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), I've gone live with a Captured Documents Index that I've been compiling for while (a permanent link to it is also now on the right side of the Document Exploitation blog screen).

The Index is incomplete (many more documents to add) and it is still very much a work in progress, but the long-term intention is to provide, in one place, a list of (and, where available, links to) the wide variety of captured documents that have been released or cited publicly.  I have put it up today in the event that some of the documents (which include, among other things, copies of passports that purport to belong to Bin Laden's family, which were filed in a military commission case) might be useful in analyzing tomorrow's release of Bin Laden documents.

A few initial notes on the Index.

• Coverage is currently limited to Harmony era (largely Iraq/Afghanistan) documents and is organized by Harmony number for reference and convenience.  The fact, therefore, that Harmony AFGP documents from Afghanistan are placed between 2RAD and BIAP documents captured in Iraq should not be read as any comment on the relationship, or lack thereof, between Saddam and al Qaeda.  For more on Harmony and its numbering system see the CMPC SOP or this Army DOCEX manual.

• In most cases the Harmony number is a hyperlink that allows you to download the document itself from either its original online source or from a new link (for docs whose original source is more difficult to access). Sometimes there is both an Arabic document and an English translation, sometimes there is only one or the other, and sometimes there is simply a description of the document.  

• The documents and descriptions come from a number of places including the 2006 Iraqi Freedom Doc Dump (despite the fact the portal was shut down in Nov. 2006, many of the posted docs remain available online in, among other places, the Internet Archive), West Point's CTC's Harmony Program, Guantanamo case filings, military commission filings, the five-volume "Saddam and Terrorism" study by the Institute for Defense Analyses from 2006, and other sources. Documents and descriptions are sourced both for verification purposes and to provide full credit for the individuals or organizations that posted them.

• The Index does not (yet) include documents from the extensive collection of Iraq and Afghanistan documents at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC).  An index of documents in the CRRC's Saddam Hussein Collection and its Al Qaeda and Associated Movements Collection is available here and here.  The CRRC has also posted a number of documents online (see here, here and here).   

I have plans to make the Index more complete and improve it over time, but any suggestions would be gratefully received at docexblog@gmail.com.

Bin Laden Docs to be Released Thursday, May 3rd, 9AM

A quick update from West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) which announces that it will be releasing "Documents from UBL Compound" along with "a short report" by the CTC "contextualizing the documents and providing an overview of their most salient themes" on Thursday, May 3rd at 9am EST.

Al Qaeda Documents Encoded Within Seized Pornography

CNN reports today that included among digital storage devices seized from an individual by German police was a pornographic video in which "more than 100 al Qaeda documents" were encoded.  CNN explains:

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" -- and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence -- more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

In a recent post, I mentioned earlier assertions that "terrorists" had been communicating with each other via hidden messages encrypted in pornographic videotapes in order to make the point -- that is all the more relevant in light of today's CNN report -- that the level of sophistication attributed to "terrorists" or "jihadists" is often wildly inconsistent.  I contrasted the example of encrypted pornography with the statement in a recent article by a military intelligence officer on the exploitation of captured documents that the "true significance of DOMEX lies in the fact that terrorists, criminals, and other adversaries never expected their material to be captured."  The latter assumption, particularly in light of the former example, seems to me to be dangerous, especially if applied indiscriminately.

Some individuals who are accused of being "terrorists" are sophisticated while others are not, but I have often feared that final conclusions about the significance of seized materials are often driving the level of sophistication attributed to the "terrorist" rather than the other way around.  This presents significant dangers in both directions. Sometimes the owls are not what they seem and sometimes pornography is just pornography.