Al-Qaida texts to be published in U.S.

The original thoughts of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders will be made available in English next year in “The Al-Qaida Reader,” whose publisher says it is intended to educate the American people.

The book, which has been criticized by some who suffered in al-Qaida attacks, offers a history of the radical Muslim group, interviews with bin Laden and his associates and a tract on Islamic struggle by his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Suzanne Herz, a spokeswoman for the publisher, Doubleday Books, an imprint of Random House, said it was important for Americans to understand the mind of their enemy. “This gives a direct perspective on their philosophy,” Herz said Thursday.

But some who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks objected.

“I do not want to give the terrorists any platform to forward their agenda,” said Jack Lynch, whose firefighter son, Michael, was killed at the World Trade Center in New York. “I fear this book could ignite the lunatic fringe in this country who are sympathetic to al-Qaida.”

Herz said Doubleday had “no intent to offend anybody who suffered at the hands of the terrorists” but hoped to “educate Americans and offer information useful to combat the enemy.” The company would donate any profits to charity, she said.

’90s-era texts
The book draws on two texts published in the Middle East in the 1990s — one from International Jihad Press, which has no known address, the other printed by a small imprint in Jordan.

The first text is “The Battles of the Lion’s Den of the Arab Partisans in Afghanistan” — a compilation of interviews with bin Laden and his associates giving an oral history of al-Qaida.

The second source is “Bitter Harvest,” a treatise on jihad written by al-Zawahri.

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Doubleday said it would pay royalties to the translator of the original Arabic material, Raymond Ibrahim, a Library of Congress employee who is still working on the book. It plans to donate any profits to a charity to be named before the book is published.

Lynch, a board member of the Coalition of 9/11 Families, said some other families of victims of the attacks supported the publication, believing Americans needed to know everything about al-Qaida to help prevent future attacks.

Normally U.S. royalties for a foreign book would accrue not only to the translator but to the authors of the source material, in this case bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.

Herz said that “technically they could sue us,” but she said Doubleday believed there was such a historic need to publish their writings in the United States that “the law affords us an exceptionally broad privilege of fair use.”

“We would never pay royalties to Osama bin Laden or any other known terrorist,” she added.