When U.S. authorities got their hands on terrorist Mohammed Mansour Jabarah in May 2002, he agreed to inform on some of the most influential al-Qaeda leaders. So instead of being sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or a high-security CIA detention facility, Jabarah was housed with relatively lax security at Fort Dix, N.J., where he was allowed to watch television and movies, speak to his family in Canada by telephone, go for walks and even make his own meals, all under 24-hour FBI watch.

That arrangement soon proved to be a major problem for the bureau.

In court papers filed in relation to the terrorism case against Jabarah -- who was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in a New York federal courtroom -- prosecutors allege that he duped federal authorities into believing he was no longer a threat, and began squirreling away weapons and hatching a plot to kill his captors.

Federal authorities wrote that Jabarah collected steak knives, a long piece of nylon rope and instructions on how to make explosives. Jabarah also allegedly wrote a litany of angry Arabic passages in a notebook he kept in his room, vowing to die as he avenged his slain al-Qaeda comrades.

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"These writings make clear that Jabarah had secretly disavowed cooperation and was affirmatively planning further jihad operations, including in all likelihood the murder of government officials in some sort of suicide operation," U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia wrote in a court document dated May 7, 2007, and unsealed this week. The discovery of Jabarah's pledge of martyrdom prompted federal authorities to move him into a high-security area at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center in November 2002.

The case illustrates how the FBI's relatively relaxed handling of a serious terrorist such as Jabarah led to "a considerable amount of valuable intelligence," including information about training camps in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda network and some of the most sought-after terrorism suspects, according to court documents. Jabarah had direct contact with Sept. 11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali, the mastermind of Jemaah Islamiah, a terrorism network in Southeast Asia that, with Jabarah's help, was plotting to bomb U.S. embassies in Singapore and the Philippines.

But the unusually lenient custody also apparently gave Jabarah the means to plot an attack on federal agents and gather potential weapons for weeks without drawing notice.

Full article here.