Opinion ID: 181375
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Information in the Battlegroup Document Came from a Navy Insider

Text: The contents of the Battlegroup Document, specifically, its identification of significant dates referenced in the classified transit plannotably March 20, 2001, for an ammunition stop in Hawaii; April 6, 2001, for a port call in Sydney; and April 29, 2001, for passage through the Strait of Hormuz (in fact, the date for crossing the CHOP point)strongly supported an inference that the source of the information contained therein had to have been a Navy insider. In urging otherwise, Abu-Jihaad relies on arguments that he unsuccessfully made to the jury: that the Battlegroup Document contained so much publicly available information and so many errors that it could just as easily, if not more likely, have been transmitted by someone outside the Navy. The jury's rejection of this argument was hardly irrational. To the extent the defense adduced evidence in the public domain about movements of the Constellation battlegroup, it failed to demonstrate that the majority of that information was available prior to the battlegroup's March 15, 2001 deployment, as would have been necessary for publicly available information to have informed creation of the Battlegroup Document. The information that was shown to have been publicly available before deployment failed to provide sufficient facts from which to compile the Battlegroup Document. Specifically, a February 11, 2001 post to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni website stated only that a carrier pilot would be deploying for six months aboard the U.S.S. Constellation, which was expected to make port calls in Sydney, Perth, Bahrain, and Dubai. We need not here assess the relative indiscretion of such a post. We note simply that it did not provide specific dates for the identified ports of call, as contained in the Battlegroup Document. Nor did it mention Hawaii as a port of call, a fact included only in the final transit plan. Similarly, although a pre-deployment press release from the Canadian Navy indicated that the Constellation battlegroup would arrive in the Arabian Gulf in early May 2001, and a February 2001 article about the Tarawa Amphibious Readiness Group identified Phuket, Thailand, as a favorite port of call for the Navy and the Marines, neither document provided any specific information about the Constellation battlegroup's expected ports of call, let alone the dates on which any ships would reach those ports. Similarly unavailing is Abu-Jihaad's reliance on errors in the Battlegroup Document to argue that the source of its information could not have been a Navy insider. To the extent the errors involve misspelling of Navy terms, the jury would have seen that Navy insider Abu-Jihaad routinely misspelled ordinary words in his emails with Azzam. Insofar as defendant points to the Battlegroup Document's misidentification of April 29, 2001, as the date for transit through the Strait of Hormuz (when in fact it was the date for crossing the CHOP point) and March as a tax-free month (when in fact it was April), a reasonable jury could have concluded that the errors were either inadvertent, introduced after the information was originally conveyed, or reflective of a Navy insider conveying information outside his particular area of responsibility. Indeed, a jury might reasonably have rejected the coincidence of anyone other than an insider selecting the same date (April 29, 2001) for transiting the Strait of Hormuz as had been emphasized in each iteration of the transit plan for crossing the CHOP point, particularly as the latter event would take place only a short time before the ships entered the Strait of Hormuz, an easily identified natural geographic reference compared to the CHOP point, which was defined only by degrees of latitude and longitude. Moreover, a jury was entitled to consider that the Battlegroup Document concluded with the instruction: Please destroy message. Gov't Ex. 1. A person transmitting publicly available information would have less reason to include such an instruction than a Navy insider transmitting classified information.