The events surrounding, and the repercussions of, the terrorism arrests at Nottingham University in May 2008

Dr Rod Thornton, Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham.

Introduction I describe here the events surrounding the arrest of Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yazza at the University of Nottingham. I also describe the related introduction of Module Reviews within the University’s School of Politics and International Relations. These reviews involve a system - with no student input - whereby academics check other academics’ Module Handouts/Reading Lists to see, quote, ‘whether any material on reading lists could be illegal or might be deemed to incite people to use violence’ (See Addendum). This runs counter to the principal of academic freedom. This Module Review process has come about as a direct result of the arrest of Sabir and Yazza.

This is a personal account and should be read as such. It comes from someone who, prior to academic, spent nine years in the British Army as an infantry soldier - including three years in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. I am not some anti-establishment ‘bleeding heart liberal’ whingeing for the sake of whingeing. I am not politically motivated and do not have any particular agenda. I am writing this and taking the general stance that I am because I feel I must stand against what my university has done and is doing. What I relate here is indicative, I believe, of what can happen in our current security climate when fear comes to override common sense. I have been trying to deal with this situation in-house for some months now in the hope that wiser counsels will prevail internally. It appears that they will not. So I am now opening it all out to a wider audience. I apologise for the length of this document but, believe me, I have missed out a lot of other important incidents.

The arrestThe MA student Rizwaan Sabir was arrested on the campus of the University of Nottingham by West Midlands Counter-Terrorism (WMCT) police in May 2008. He was found to be in possession of something known as the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. He was held for six days before being released without charge. I had only met Sabir a couple of times before his arrest. I was to be his MA dissertation supervisor and so he had come to show me a plan of his work. His topic related to the activities of Al Qaeda in Iraq. I did not teach Rizwaan and he did not take my MA module on ‘Terrorism and Insurgencies’; nor did he take any other terrorism-related module in our School of Politics. (He was a research-track student).

Sabir, in pursuit of material for his dissertation, had found the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ on the website of the US Department of Justice (US DoJ). He thought it a good source and mentioned this fact to another lecturer (not in the School of Politics) at our university. This lecturer raised no objections to his using it. Rizwaan then sent the document, in January 2008, to the computer of a friend of his at the university, an

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administrator in the School of Modern Languages, Hicham Yazza. He was the editor of a campus magazine (‘Ceasefire’) and a member of Senate. Yazza, it seems, was acting as adviser to Sabir on his dissertation topic. Yazza’s office computer was shared and, in May 2008, someone else noticed the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ on that computer. The university hierarchy was informed and the police were called in.

Two sets of police arrived on campus within four hours. One was from the WMCT Unit and the other a group of uniformed officers in vans from the Nottinghamshire Constabulary. It was later declared on the university portal to be ‘a joint operation’. The arrival of the police caused some disquiet amongst the student body. Some blogs talked of the police ‘dominating’ the centre of campus. I am unable to say exactly what occurred because I was away from campus at the time. However, the next evening I did see TV pictures of members of the Nottinghamshire Constabulary searching students (whose faces were pixellated out) on campus. Some of these students were, apparently, on their way to exams. I later met, in my role as postgraduate tutor in my department, several foreign students who had been severely alarmed by the police presence on campus.

A statement later was issued on the University portal saying that ‘the police proceedings’ on campus ‘were low-key and discreet’ (University portal, 23 May) and they were on campus merely to ‘make inquiries’ (University portal 27 May). It was stated on several occasions that armed police were not involved. I could not understand, though, how merely making inquiries would involve the searching of students on their way to exams. I then thought that maybe I’d imagined seeing the students being searched so I went to the BBC offices in Nottingham and watched the video taken at the time. Sure enough, there were students being searched and clearly, since the pixellation of faces had been removed, there was some racial profiling in those searches. If Nottinghamshire Constabulary were carrying out random searches of students on campus then clearly they must have thought the threat level was high. And yet the arresting officers from the WMCT Unit were, according to the University’s statement, not armed (‘There was no armed police involvement’. Statement by Management Board 27 May). So they must have assumed that the threat level was low (See below, *‘Talks with police a year later’) The point here is that many Muslim students were upset by the behaviour of Nottinghamshire Constabulary on campus and were even more upset by the University’s downplaying of it. This was the first step in terms of a process of what can only be called ‘radicalisation’ of, it appeared, a good number of our Muslim students. As one student put it, ‘I don’t think the V-C realises what kind of atmosphere he, and the university bureaucrats, have created on campus…the top managers here have created a huge and seemingly impassable gulf between them and the students and academics’ (THE, 17 July 2008).

Interviewed by the policeGoing back a step, though, the day after the arrests three members of WMCT Unit called at my office to interview me. I had plenty of time for the police since I had worked alongside the RUC as a soldier for several years in Northern Ireland. I was sympathetic and we talked for some three hours. They explained to me the nature of the document that Sabir had been arrested for possessing; although at this stage I did not know its name.

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The police did not know how to judge the document. They had no opinion of their own. They asked me if it was ‘legitimate’ for Sabir to be using it. The way the police were portraying the document it sounded to me as if it was something that no student should be using. Indeed, the name ‘Encyclopaedia of Afghan Jihad’ was used by the officers (which did alarm me!) and I got the impression that it was some variant of this particular work. I trusted the police and assumed they would not be arresting people unless the document was indeed a dangerous ‘terrorist publication’ (as per the Terrorism Act 2006). The police and I agreed that the word to use was ‘illegitimate’. A day or so later, I was asked by the police to sign a statement saying that it was ‘illegitimate’ for Rizwaan to have this document in his possession. On this statement was its actual name: ‘The Al Qaeda Training Manual’. This, to my shame, I had never heard of at the time; but it still ‘sounded’ dangerous.

Later, statements began to appear on the University portal from the Management Board that I took exception to. One, for instance, noted (23rd May) that ‘Contrary to claims by some observers within the University, those [staff] involved [in the arrest of Sabir] have in fact been contacted by the University at the most senior level of academic management responsibility and have indeed been offered support and an opportunity to discuss recent events in detail’. I thought this strange; neither I, nor the other two lecturers on campus who I knew had been interviewed by the WMCT police (one for 4 hours in her office on Saturday morning), were ever ‘contacted’ by the University. Moreover, neither the student Rizwaan Sabir nor Hicham Yazza were, during their incarceration or for some time afterwards, ‘contacted’. Nor, indeed, were Sabir’s family who were asked to leave their home in Nottingham (he is a local student) while the police searched it. I became disturbed by what I took to be a blatant untruth and asked, through my then head of department, to see the Registrar. The Registrar declined to see me or to see any of those who had been interviewed by the police. In a subsequent email to me (4 July) the Registrar wrote ‘the police…interviewed a number of University Staff (although I don’t know who they were)’. This I also found disturbing. How could the earlier point be made that ‘those involved have…been contacted…and offered support’ when the Registrar did not even know which lecturers the police had interviewed?

This was the first inkling that the hierarchy of my university was not behaving in a manner that I took to be either sensitive or, indeed, ethical.

Letters to the THEAfter the arrests, some letters were sent to the Times Higher. Three colleagues of mine in the Politics department wrote to the THE saying that academic freedom had been compromised by the arrests on campus (‘The Nottingham Two and the War on Terror’, THE, 5 June). The V-C then wrote back and said that ‘The University of Nottingham has always fully embraced [academic freedom] and continues to do so. Claims to the contrary…are careless, entirely false and bear little relation to the facts’ (‘Freedom Still Reigns’, THE, 19 June). I took exception to what I took to be an unconscionable attack on my colleagues by the V-C. I then wrote to the THE (not a career-booster!) decrying the V-C’s choice of such intemperate language when it was clear he was not aware of all the facts concerning the case (THE, 26 June).

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The ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’My ire was increased when I realised the mistake that I had made vis-à-vis the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. Having found it on the internet I discovered it was mostly a direct copy of old US military manuals of the 1950s. It is a document that was found in Manchester in 2000 by the police and translated by them from Arabic into English. Its real title is ‘Declaration of Jihad against the Country’s Tyrants’ and originated in Egypt in the early 1990s. The words ‘Al Qaeda’ do not appear in it once. It was only given the title ‘The Al Qaeda Training Manual’ by the US Department of Justice who were using it as evidence in the trial in New York of the East African embassy bombers. The name was changed presumably in an attempt to ‘sex up’/’spin’ the document to make it sound more ‘incriminating’ to a jury. Having been used in the above trial the document had, under US freedom of information laws, to be made public. Hence it is now on 6,000 websites (apparently), including those of any number of respected US sites: RAND; US Air War College; Pentagon library; Federation of American Scientists, Columbia University library, etc. Thus all any student has to do, if they did want to access this document that Sabir downloaded, is go along to any university library and just download it from an affiliated site – such as Columbia. It has been variously described as ‘the sole piece of reference material available to the general public regarding the inner workings of Al Qaeda’ (thetulsan.com) and ‘a must read for all military, police, security and any citizen concerned about terrorism and its aims’ (Amazon.com), and a ‘valuable document’. (Norman Cigar, Al-Qaida’s Doctrine for Insurgency, 2009, p.5). It has also come out as two books: The Al Qaeda Training Manual (2006) published by Pavilion Press (available from the likes of Cornell University library), and as Jerrold (or Jerry) Post’s (ed), Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants/The Al Qaeda Training Manual (2004) published by Frank Cass (now Routledge). A hard copy of Post’s work is also available from the US Counterproliferation Center in Alabama.

The US DoJ variant is, in fact, an edited version and has some chapters removed. Of the two books, the Pavilion Press variant has some chapters removed but less than the US DoJ one, and the book edited by Jerry Post has all the chapters present with just a few lines removed about how to make poisons. In a later statement, however, the document that Sabir downloaded – the US DoJ edited version – was described on the University portal as ‘significantly different from documents with the same title which are listed by some online booksellers’ [e.g. Amazon] (University portal, 9 July). This is factually correct and meant by the University as an emollient, but it is nonetheless disingenuous. The only actual difference is that the books contain much more than the US DoJ version, not less. Sabir did not download, as the University was trying to make out, the most ‘dangerous’ version, but in fact the most benign.

Moreover, this document is also cited in many basic textbooks on terrorism. It is considered to be a seminal text in the study of Al Qaeda’s tactical approaches: Rohan Gunaratna makes great use of it (Inside Al Qaeda (2003)); a visit to Wikipedia’s ‘Islamic Terrorism’ provides a link and, indeed, one of the most popular and basic textbooks in

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both the US and the UK (and one of my own core texts), Gus Martin’s Understanding Terrorism (Sage, latest edition 2009), has a 3-page section devoted to the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. Here it actually gives the US DoJ website address to access this primary source (pp.367-9). Students are actually encouraged to access this document!

The ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ is common currency. It is not some secret tome lurking deep within Jihadist websites. It is certainly nowhere near as ‘dangerous’ as any of the dozens of ‘manuals’ one could download from US Militia websites.

I would, though, never recommend any of my students to look at this particular document. I do this only because, to my mind, it has nothing to do with Al Qaeda and is, anyway, full of outdated information that only an idiot of a terrorist would ever use. As the Director of the Royal United Services Institute, Michael Clarke, puts it, ‘I have not seen any Al Qaeda manuals that look like genuine terrorist training’. A much ‘better’ (or should it be ‘more dangerous’?) book is Norman Cigar’s (ed), Al Qaida’s doctrine for insurgency: a practical course for guerrilla warfare’ (Potomac Press/Brasseys 2009). This is much more ‘useful’ to terrorists than is the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. Ironically, though, not only does this book emerge from one of the most prestigious presses in the US, but it also has a foreword by Julian Lewis MP, a UK shadow defence minister!

Universities declaring material to be ‘illegal’Once I’d realised how mainstream this document was I emailed the Registrar (16 July) to say that I withdrew my earlier remark to the police about the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ being ‘illegitimate’. I told the Registrar that ‘had I been aware of the nature of the document…I would not have made the remarks [to the police] that I did’, and that ‘I was wrong to say what I did’. I got the reply (17 July) that ‘be assured there were other police officers (and legal advisers) involved in this matter, beyond those who talked to you, who were well informed about this material’. The inference here being that it was the police and their legal advisers who were now making the judgements as to whether or not the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ was ‘legitimate’ or not. I found this slightly confusing. This was because all the previous police statements in writing had referred to the ‘university authorities’ saying it was ‘illegitimate’. Thus in the letter Rizwaan Sabir received from the police after his release it was stated that, ‘The university authorities [stress added] have now made clear that possession of this material is not required for the purpose of your course of study nor do they consider it legitimate for you to possess it for research purposes’ (Police, 20 May). The V-C also used exactly the same quotation (THE, 17 July) ‘the university authorities have made it clear…’ etc, etc. But I was one of the ‘university authorities’, and certainly the only lecturer who had investigated fully the background of the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. And now I was saying that I was wrong. So, in essence, the ‘university authorities’ were now wrong to say it was ‘illegitimate’. It appeared to be the case, though, from the Registrar’s comments, that it was now the police themselves who were stating that it was ‘illegitimate’. Thus we had come to a situation where the University was saying that it was the police who were responsible for the ‘illegitimate’ tag, while the police themselves were always conscious of saying that it was the responsibility of the University to make that call.

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The University, indeed, went further. On 4 August, Rizwaan Sabir was given a warning letter by the Registrar. This stated that it ‘I [the Registrar] had been informed by the Police that it was illegal for you [Sabir] to possess this type of material’. The letter went on to refer three times to the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ as an ‘illegal document’. He was warned in that letter not to access it again as he would risk further arrest. But the most pertinent point here is that the document was now deemed to be actually ‘illegal’, and not merely illegitimate. This is a huge step and I could not believe that it was the police who had said it was ‘illegal’. The Terrorism Acts that exist do not list any documents as being ‘illegal’. It is only a jury in a court of law that can deem any terrorism-related document to be illegal. The police would be only too well aware of this. It is not for them to judge whether anything is even ‘illegitimate’, never mind outright ‘illegal’. Neither is it in the gift of any university to declare something to be ‘illegal’. But this is what this university did – presumably to frighten Sabir. I later learnt that Registrar had not in fact ‘been informed by the police’. And the police were none too happy to learn that he had used their name in vain. The considerable angst that was caused at this university by the Registrar’s letter could all have been avoided. This university need not have had a section of its students radicalised into being both anti-police and anti-university by the contents of this one letter. (See also **‘Legal issues’ below).

This warning letter given to Sabir led to an increased degree of radicalisation among our Muslim students on campus. Things were already simmering in light of several factors: the perceived iniquitous arrest of Sabir and Yazza (it was thought unlikely that a white student would have been arrested in this case); the searches conducted by the police, and the subsequent downplaying messages appearing from management on the University’s portal. In February, I attended a talk on campus where Moazzam Begg (released from Guantanamo), Sabir and Yazza all spoke about how Muslims were being treated unfairly by the University and by the police. They spoke too about the letter in which Rizwaan was told that the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ was ‘illegal’. The point being made in the auditorium by the speakers and by members of the audience (mainly Muslim) was how could this document be so mainstream for students at other universities to freely use and yet Rizwaan Sabir at Nottingham risked arrest by using it? The message was that they, the brown-skinned students at Nottingham, did not have the same rights to access material that privileged, white-skinned students did at other universities. The audience of about 200 were clearly in agreement and the atmosphere generated could only be described as hostile – very anti-police and anti-University. Subsequent events on campus – including a protest over the Gaza situation and the way this protest was ended (involving physical removal of students by security personnel) – then became viewed through the prism of a University already seemingly bent on being ‘hard’ on its Muslim students.

The degree of radicalisation on Nottingham’s campus was, to my mind, the inevitable result of what happens when a university deals with these situations in a manner that, at best, lacks subtlety and understanding. Problems are also then caused for any lecturer teaching subjects such as terrorism at the ‘coal face’. It is all very well for senior management to take a hard line, but someone further down the food chain has to deal

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with the fall-out. Having to teach my courses on Terrorism, I was conscious of doing so against a background of a University portrayed as being anti-Muslim. Thus the temptation for me was to try and portray events such as the Gaza situation in a more pro-Palestinian light. But if I had done that did that then my teaching impartiality, of which I am proud, could be called into question by, say, Jewish students. I felt that the University hierarchy had left me in an invidious situation.

There is, moreover, further fall-out when the police/Registrar declare/s a document to be ‘illegal’. What are lecturers to do when students quote or cite such a document in their essays? As the DIUS guidelines on extremism/terrorism on campus put it, ‘if a university or college suspects that an offence has been or is likely to be committed then a report should be made to the police’. And if the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ is ‘illegal’ it is then an offence to be using it. If I or colleagues do not report any student using it then we would appear to be committing an offence under Section 38B of the Terrorism Act 2000 and would be risking arrest. When I asked my head of department what to do in such a situation he told me to use my ‘common sense’. I will come back to this phrase later.

And how should any academic carrying out a ‘review’ of another lecturer’s module react if they did see something like the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ on another academic’s Reading List? If the University – however bogusly – can declare it to be ‘illegal’ (and what else might they declare to be illegal?) then what should that academic do? Academic staff should also not be put in this position.

The Research Ethics CommitteeNext it was the case of the ‘Research Ethics Committee’. One day, in September of last year, our new head of department came to see me in my office. I had never spoken to him before. He said that my undergraduate and postgraduate Modules on ‘Terrorism’ and ‘Terrorism and Insurgencies’, respectively, would be subject to review by a departmental ‘Research Ethics Committees’. This seemed peculiar to me. To start with, I could not see any rationale for it. I had never taught Sabir, nor did I have the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ or the US DoJ link on my Reading List. Moreover, Sabir had downloaded the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ and sent it to Yazza (in January 2008) before I had even met him! And the document in question was certainly not on any list of literature that Sabir subsequently showed me in relation to his MA dissertation. How was I, or my modules, in any way responsible? I was, moreover, not the only lecturer teaching Terrorism courses in my department. Yet no other lecturer was being approached to have their Reading Lists put in front of an Ethics Committee. What was the logic of coming just to me? This, to my mind, was discriminatory. This discrimination has never been explained to me although, when pushed, the head of department did tell me the logic of the ‘checking’ procedure: it was ‘for my protection in case any irate parents complained about what was on my Reading Lists’. I found this to be a dubious reasoning.

I objected strongly to my Reading List going before this Ethics Committee. I felt it undermined my professionalism as an academic and as someone who had dealt with terrorism for real and lost friends to terrorist action in Northern Ireland. If anyone knew about the dangers of terrorism and the pain it causes, it was me. Now, though, it seemed

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that I wasn’t to be trusted to write my own Reading Lists. Such an action, of course, also denied me academic freedom. It contravened the 1997 UNESCO guidelines on the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, which states that ‘Higher education teaching personnel have the right to teach without interference’. What was this if it was not ‘interference’?

[As an aside here, another factor needs to be mentioned that will often surround this kind of case. This is what is reported in the media. And here the University authorities seem to have believed what they read in the media. On numerous occasions in different outlets it was stated that this ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ had been on a Reading List in the School of Politics at Nottingham. Eventually, and for the sake of form, I asked one newspaper, The Guardian to print a retraction, which they did. Despite the idea that the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ was on any Reading List being limited to press alone, the University authorities still seemed to believe what they read in that press and not what their own staff were trying to tell them. Why else would my head of department, the representative of the University authorities, send only my Reading List to an Ethics Committee?]

Despite my objections, my Reading List was put before the departmental Ethics Committee. This never actually went through with the task. Of the three people on this committee, one professor recused himself on the grounds that he was not competent to judge on the content of my Reading List, and a junior lecturer (Vanessa Pupavac) bravely refused to take part on the basis that a fellow lecturer should have the academic freedom to choose his own Reading List. I do not know the opinion of the other professor on the committee. (There is also the point here as to what Research Ethics Committees have to do with overseeing teaching/modules/reading lists. As our University’s document relating to the formation of Research Ethics Committees states, these ‘should have responsibility for developing the governing principles of ethics policy relating specifically to research’. Nothing about teaching.)

The Module Review CommitteeWith a view to forestalling any further action against me, I asked to see our new Vice-Chancellor. I felt that if I explained the situation to him and pointed out the dangers of introducing such procedures then Nottingham University might not be exposed to a great deal of adverse publicity. I was refused permission to see the V-C, but could only get to see the Dean of the School of Social Sciences. She agreed with my head of department and also told me that the process was designed to protect me from irate parents.

Anyway, it seemed then that the idea of having an Ethics Committee check my Reading List was dropped. I thought the issue had gone away. I was wrong, however. In a staff meeting in February it was raised again. Just before this meeting closed, a professor was called upon by the head of department to read out the plans for the ‘review’ of all the department’s course Reading Lists! This was something of a surprise as the idea of a blanket review had never been raised before and it was certainly not on the agenda for this staff meeting. Those opposed to the move had prepared no plans to thwart it. Amid general shock, this attempt was fended off on the grounds that it needed more discussion rather than having an immediate vote on whether or not it should be introduced. Now,

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though, it was not to be the School’s Ethics Committee that would do the checking, but a new committee – the Module Review Committee. This was to read all the School’s Reading Lists to check, among other things, ‘whether any material on reading lists could be illegal or might be deemed to incite people to use violence’. (See Addendum below). It would not include any student input in the form of student evaluations of teaching/modules – it would merely be academics looking over other academics’ Reading Lists.

At a subsequent staff meeting and after much vitriol and with the head of department determined to get the measure passed, a vote was taken as to whether the Committee should be formed. The head of department counted the hands and the vote was noted as being 19-12 in favour. This looked to be a very dubious count at the time but we were quickly moved on to other matters. (There were 31 people present in the meeting and yet at least two people abstained! Work it out. Among the voters in favour were three admin staff who did not teach at all (including the person taking the minutes). There were also five Teaching Fellows who needed jobs next year, and a PhD student also seeking employment internally. Both would be unlikely to upset the head of department by openly defying him). It seemed a remarkably way to bring into play such an important measure.

This process of checking Reading Lists has now begun as of June 2009 with last years’ currently being looked over retrospectively and next years’ will be looked at in September. Since my Reading List for last year is freely available I cannot stop it being checked. I will not, however, allow my new Reading Lists for the Autumn semester to be looked over/checked by anybody. It will purely be distributed by me in hard copy to the students themselves. I will be winning few friends amongst the departmental hierarchy when I take such action. Anyway, I can’t make myself any more unpopular than I already am!

Rizwaan Sabir, by the way, is now a PhD student in the department and has, besides myself, another two supervisors. The story of how he got onto the PhD programme is a drama unto itself. Some personal commentsI add here some personal reflections of my own on this matter. Firstly, any lecturer teaching terrorism would be aware of anything that was truly ‘illegal’ (instructions, for example, on making a bomb from household ingredients) or which truly incited violence. It undermines any lecturer’s professional integrity to have outside agencies ‘check’ on what they are doing in this respect. Secondly, the teaching of any subject is better for the injection of some controversy or debating points and this is especially true in the teaching of terrorism. Even the concept of ‘terrorist’ (and, indeed, ‘terrorism’) is subjective. Famous terrorists of the past such as Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat went on to win Nobel Peace Prizes. Nelson Mandela, another one-time ‘terrorist’ and who, indeed, formed a ‘terrorist’ group, once went to prison for ‘inciting violence’. Martin McGuinness, who at one time I dealt with in his role as a leading light in the Provisional IRA, is now a Northern Ireland government minister. With such situations in mind, it is

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only really the experts in the teaching of terrorism who would know how to handle the delicate situations that come with the territory: where to draw the line when controversial issues are involved; where to bring in the aspect of subjectivity; how to construct debates, and where to warn and urge care. Outside agencies ignorant of the nuances involved cannot do this.

If universities think they can arbitrarily declare material to be illegal and expect staff to then censure that material then it is a slippery slope. They cannot be allowed to get away with it.

Most controversially of all, we may end up ‘banning’ certain publications, including books. If we start to remove sources that might ‘incite violence’ then we could start with the Satanic Verses – did that not cause thousands of deaths? Did we ban that? And the same with the Danish cartoons or any number of other controversial publications that in the past have been threatened with banning – from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Some of you will remember the farce that ensued when the government tried to ban IRA leaders from speaking on TV and radio. And are we supposed to take certain websites from our Reading Lists? Should I remove sites such as the likes of RAND and FAS? And are we to say to students, ‘don’t, whatever you do, look at pages 367-9 of one of our core texts because there is something nasty there’. Or maybe, one can say, ‘you can look at this, but don’t download it because then it is “your possession” and you might end up in trouble under the Terrorism Act 2006’. Students will become scared as to what they can and cannot look at/download/disseminate and lecturers will be put in impossible positions.

And if, say, we were to remove material from reading lists then we could get into situations where students studying at two different universities will have differential rights of access to sources. We then could create two-tier (or more) systems of the ‘liberal universities’ and ‘the not so liberal’. And what of other courses where material might be ‘illegal’ or ‘incite violence’? What of Film Studies, Sociology, and any number of other courses? What if one lecturer on a Module Review Committee thinks that so-and-so film or book is likely to incite violence? You can see where all this might lead.

And I come back to the idea of ‘common sense’. My head of department has said that we should use ‘common sense’ when marking essays where students have innocently referenced the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ in their essay. However, when I asked him why I wasn’t trusted to use my ‘common sense’ to write a Reading List, he failed to answer.

My next point is probably the most important. It is a given that all those involved in counter-terrorist activity are aware of the danger of making the situation worse; of over-reacting. All terrorists want to spread fear - ‘terror’- that is their ultimate goal. They can only ever kill or maim a relatively small number of people. But killing is not their real aim; the aim of any terrorist organisation is to put many, many people in fear of their lives. It is the Sun Tzu rationale of ‘scare one, frighten a thousand’. Thus governments constantly caution against panicky, ill-thought out reactions to terrorist attacks. As the

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UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions put it, today’s terrorism ‘might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. I think it is important to understand that this is one of its [i.e. terrorism’s] primary purposes’. (The Guardian, 24 Jan 2007) The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband concurs. In a recent statement (The Guardian, 15 Jan 2009) he noted that:

The call for a "war on terror" was a call to arms, an attempt to build solidarity for a fight against a single shared enemy. But the foundation for solidarity between peoples and nations should be based not on who we are against, but on the idea of who we are and the values we share. Terrorists succeed when they render countries fearful and vindictive; when they sow division and animosity; when they force countries to respond with violence and repression. The best response is to refuse to be cowed.

It is not just governments that should refuse to be cowed; universities, too, have a responsibility to show that the terrorists will not induce ‘fear-driven responses’. We at universities cannot act in the way that the terrorists want us to act. The introduction of module reviews is nothing but a ‘fear-driven response’. I am not going to do the terrorists’ job for them by accepting them.

And, finally, we come to one of the ‘values’ that Miliband points to: academic freedom. Outwardly, of course, our university presents itself as a supporter of academic freedom. Our (former) Communications Director said ‘we embrace academic freedom’ (University portal 23 May). And our own (former) Vice-Chancellor, Sir Colin Campbell, wrote in relation to the Sabir case, ‘there is no prohibition on accessing terrorism materials for the purposes of research’. But there does seem to be a prohibition, otherwise Sabir and other students could download what they liked and we would not need module reviews. I, as a lecturer, am being given contrasting directions: on the one hand, I should be a party to upholding and ‘embracing’ academic freedom while, on the other hand, I should be accepting module reviews. I prefer to follow the line of Bill Rammell, the former Minister for Further and Higher Education, when he said ‘I will suggest that in academic freedom lies one of the most powerful means at our disposal to refute violent extremist views on campus. And further, I believe that unless it is used actively to challenge those views, then academic freedom will find itself undermined by violent extremism’ (DIUS website, 27 Nov 2007).

All that I relate here is, I fear, not just an academic bun fight of no consequence. When universities say to their students that they should not access/download this or that, or when they begin telling their lecturers that they should not teach this or that, or when they begin to pass judgement on what should or should not be on Reading Lists, then we are, as I have said, on a slippery slope. And on a slope that leads ultimately to the terrorists ‘winning’. That cannot happen.

* Talks with police a year later

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In discussions with the police in May 2009 I was given the reason as to why the WMCT were unarmed (low-threat) while the Nottinghamshire Constabulary carried out searches of the bags of non-white students on campus (seemingly high-threat). I was told by the officers that while the WMCT and elements of Nottinghamshire Constabulary (forensics, etc) were involved in the terrorism case there was, simultaneously, an operation by Nottinghamshire Constabulary who were looking for burglars on campus. Hence they were searching the bags of ‘suspected burglars’. It was all a coincidence. Make of that what you will. But at no time has any University statement talked of the two simultaneous operations. The mantra has always been ‘a joint operation’ between the two forces in the arrest of Sabir and Yazza.

It is also interesting in talking to the police in terms of their views of certain materials. They look upon ‘terrorism-related documents’ (including textbooks/books!) as aids to the terrorist. I told them that academics might look upon the very same materials as aids to teaching/research. I also pointed out that how are any counter-terrorism experts to do their job if they do not know how the ‘enemy’ operates? And, by extension, how is anyone in academia – student or researcher - supposed to study terrorism if they cannot have access to materials that help ascertain why terrorists do what they do and how they do what they do. Quite rightly, any documents that relate how to make explosives or poisons are off limits. They have no place in academic inquiry. But we are not talking here about such documents.

**Legal IssuesThere seems to be some confusion even over legal issues. The University has made the point, backed up by its legal team, that researchers have the right to research anything related to terrorism but, if apprehended by the police, they would have to explain why they had ‘possession’ of any incriminating documents. Indeed, Oliver Blunt QC of the Anti-Terrorism Team at Furnival Chambers has noted that ‘academics do have a “right’ to “access” terrorist materials, whether for research or otherwise, as long as they do not “possess” them’. (‘Researchers have no “right” to study terrorist materials’, THE, 17 July 2008). He went on, ‘there is no “right” to possess terrorist materials and, while a genuine researcher would be able to establish a defence, the evidential burden is on the researcher to do so’. But this seems to run counter to the judgement in the ‘Bradford Case’ of February 2008. (‘Terror law in tatters as extremists go free’ Timesonline, 14 Feb 2008) Here 5 men were released by an Appeal Court after they had been jailed for ‘possessing’ terrorist materials, including the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. The judges here said that ‘possession’ did not constitute a crime: ‘Literature may be stored in a book or on a bookshelf, or on a computer drive, without any intention on the part of the possessor to make any future use of it at all’. The judges ‘ordered that, in future cases, the Crown would have to prove that defendants clearly intended to engage in terrorism or that items they possessed were of practical use to a terrorist’. Thus the ‘evidential burden’ would appear to be now on the Crown to prove intent rather than on any researcher apprehended to prove lack of intent as indicated by those such as Blunt.

Addendum

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(Taken from the Module Reviews document in the School of Politics, University of Nottingham)

What is the purpose of a Module Review?

The aim of a review would be to provide feedback to staff on a range of issues pertaining to their modules including:

The range of topics covered by the module The assessment methods and whether they are appropriate for the learning

outcomes Electronic resources available on the module Potential links with other modules in the School and contribution to the overall

curriculum Whether any material on reading lists could be illegal or might be deemed to

incite people to use violence

How would it be carried out?

In the first year of introducing the system, there would be a review of all modules. This would be undertaken by the Heads of each Teaching Group with additional help from some members of staff. In subsequent years, the exercise would be carried out by the Heads of Teaching Groups. A module would be reviewed every three years on a rolling basis, unless it was a new module.

The exercise would be conducted after the end of exams and before U/G results are released. Those responsible for the task of module reviews would feedback their comments and suggestions to module convenors.

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