Slashdot Mirror

One of the authors of the Washington Post article cited above is Rita Katz, director of the stupidly named "The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which seems to be an asinine play on SETI. The SITE website is actually very light on real original content. As I revisited it tonight, I found that they have given citation for their copy and paste of the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report, which is the entire contents of SITE's "terrorism library". A year ago, they did not offer this bit of enlightening data. This should be enough to question the veracity of the whole story.

Katz obtained a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is speaks Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. She has both personal and financial issues which could bias her analysis.

• Katz is Iraqi born, and her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family emigrated to Israel.
• Katz is/was a paid consultant for the law firm, Motley-Rice, which file a 1 trillion dollar lawsuit on behalf of the 911 WTC victims.
• Katz is author of the book Terrorist Hunter (HarperCollins, 2003) in which she writes of infiltrating US-based Arab groups to investigate terrorist connections as a private investigator, and receives a plug for the book in every bio blurb that is published with her articles.

Katz got her terrorism expert start working for Stephen Emerson, who himself has credibility issues.

Katz was the anonymous source for a 60 Minutes segment that alleged a chicken farm supported terrorism, and for which both CBS and Katz were sued by Gainesville, Georgia based Mar-Jac Poultry Inc., as well as two Virginia-based muslim charity orgs, for libel.

Katz was also a principle player an an egregious example of of post-911 governmental misuse of prosecutorial powers in the case brought against a Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen.

Al-Hussayen was charged with giving material support to terrorist, for doing volunteer web mastering of the site of the Islamic Assembly of North America, an organization which the government has never charged. He was also charged with 11 minor visa violations, one being that his student visa didn't allow him to work, and he had received $300 from the Islamic Assembly of North America spread out over his five years of volunteer work for it.

The jury in Idaho acquitted on all three terrorism charges, and 3 of the visa charges, but hung on the remaining 8 visa charges.

The main thrust of the material support charges stemmed from the website Al-Hussayen worked on having published 4 fatwas by 4 radical immans on it. A government expert witness blew holes in that theory when he admitted that he had published the very same speeches on his anti-terrorism website.

When Katz testified, she admitted to the same visa violations that Al-Hussayen was charge with, only she had earned real money in violation of her entry terms.

Katz's testimony ended Friday with questioning about her own visa problems when she entered the United States. Katz testified that as a new immigrant in 1997, she misunderstood work permit requirements related to her visa and was employed, in at least one job and possibly two, before she was legally authorized to work. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she detailed those problems in her autobiographical book, in which she expressed disgust for burdensome government re

What isn't clear in the link the the article is that it's in the Washington Post's Sunday OPINION section. It is not a hard news article, has weak sourcing, and is written by people with an agenda (selling a book (still listed as written by anonymous despite the credit at the end of the web article) and promoting a cause (that asks for donations and needs your money to fight terrorism. (Much like every other article in the OPINION section.) The givaway is in the second paragraph: After pursuing an investigation into a European terrorism suspect, British investigators raided Tsouli's house, where they found stolen credit card information, according to an American source familiar with the probe. A "source familiar" could be anyone anywhere who claims to be familiar with the case. In the intelligence/SIGINT world, there is no verification. How the heck would an American source be truly familiar with the case? Clearly not a primary source -- just someone repeating something off the global intel net.

The story is an excellent piece of propaganda that offers "insight" into how you can promote yourself in the opinion section of a national newspaper. Instead of debating the worth of the story in and of itself, slashdotters have the same old debate over terrorism vs. privacy vs. freedom.

Please send me your money now and I'll fight terrorism by putting together a crappy web billboard ripped off from SETI, forming a 501c(3) organization, writing a book anonymously, and using your money to hire a PR firm to represent me and get my stories in the Post. Really, send me your money now and you'll be helping fund my net-centric asymmetric (insert jargon-of-the-week here) battle against terrorism. Free (anonymous) book with donations of $1000 or more.

Hey, if you don't believe I'm winning the war on terrorism, just read my story in the Post...

What isn't clear in the link the the article is that it's in the Washington Post's Sunday OPINION section. It is not a hard news article, has weak sourcing, and is written by people with an agenda (selling a book (still listed as written by anonymous despite the credit at the end of the web article) and promoting a cause (that asks for donations and needs your money to fight terrorism. (Much like every other article in the OPINION section.) The givaway is in the second paragraph: After pursuing an investigation into a European terrorism suspect, British investigators raided Tsouli's house, where they found stolen credit card information, according to an American source familiar with the probe. A "source familiar" could be anyone anywhere who claims to be familiar with the case. In the intelligence/SIGINT world, there is no verification. How the heck would an American source be truly familiar with the case? Clearly not a primary source -- just someone repeating something off the global intel net.

The story is an excellent piece of propaganda that offers "insight" into how you can promote yourself in the opinion section of a national newspaper. Instead of debating the worth of the story in and of itself, slashdotters have the same old debate over terrorism vs. privacy vs. freedom.

Please send me your money now and I'll fight terrorism by putting together a crappy web billboard ripped off from SETI, forming a 501c(3) organization, writing a book anonymously, and using your money to hire a PR firm to represent me and get my stories in the Post. Really, send me your money now and you'll be helping fund my net-centric asymmetric (insert jargon-of-the-week here) battle against terrorism. Free (anonymous) book with donations of $1000 or more.

Hey, if you don't believe I'm winning the war on terrorism, just read my story in the Post...

What isn't clear in the link the the article is that it's in the Washington Post's Sunday OPINION section. It is not a hard news article, has weak sourcing, and is written by people with an agenda (selling a book (still listed as written by anonymous despite the credit at the end of the web article) and promoting a cause (that asks for donations and needs your money to fight terrorism. (Much like every other article in the OPINION section.) The givaway is in the second paragraph: After pursuing an investigation into a European terrorism suspect, British investigators raided Tsouli's house, where they found stolen credit card information, according to an American source familiar with the probe. A "source familiar" could be anyone anywhere who claims to be familiar with the case. In the intelligence/SIGINT world, there is no verification. How the heck would an American source be truly familiar with the case? Clearly not a primary source -- just someone repeating something off the global intel net.

The story is an excellent piece of propaganda that offers "insight" into how you can promote yourself in the opinion section of a national newspaper. Instead of debating the worth of the story in and of itself, slashdotters have the same old debate over terrorism vs. privacy vs. freedom.

Please send me your money now and I'll fight terrorism by putting together a crappy web billboard ripped off from SETI, forming a 501c(3) organization, writing a book anonymously, and using your money to hire a PR firm to represent me and get my stories in the Post. Really, send me your money now and you'll be helping fund my net-centric asymmetric (insert jargon-of-the-week here) battle against terrorism. Free (anonymous) book with donations of $1000 or more.

Hey, if you don't believe I'm winning the war on terrorism, just read my story in the Post...

This site is really just PR for the Israeli side of that conflict. It's run by Rita Katz, "a graduate of the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University".

I always like a good joke. But your joke wasn't very funny, and I feel uncomfortable with so many jokes about something that should be taken seriously. It seems to me that there is too much joking about this subject and not enough seriousness.

If you want the violence and the degradation of the U.S. lifestyle to stop, study the situation carefully. Below is background information you need to know to understand the Washington Post article referenced in the Slashdot story. You could gather this information yourself, but people who joke easily about this kind of thing generally don't take the time:

The SITE Institute supplied information for the Washington Post article. SITE stands for "Search for International Terrorist Entities". SITE Institute provides examples of terrorist web sites. One of them, PalestinianInfo.net, published this photograph: Photo of the day. The caption says, "Palestinian children walk on the rubble of a Palestinian house that was demolished by Israeli occupation authorities, in the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of A-tur July 5, 2005. According to the Israeli authorities, the house was demolished due to a lack of permits." It seems that the issue might not be completely one-sided.

The Arab "terrorists" believe they are fighting a war, and that violence is a solution to social problems. The U.S. government believes it is fighting a war, and that violence is a solution to social problems. I'm not saying those groups have anything else in common, just that they share two beliefs in common.

If your government chooses killing as policy, expect others to choose the same. The U.S. government began killing Arabs and Muslims and corrupting their governments long before most Arabs and Muslims thought about the United States. None of the violence was secret. It was in the newspapers and in magazines and on TV, but not in enough detail that U.S. citizens could understand the implications. I remember reading that the U.S. government overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran (Mossadegh) because he wanted his country to share more of the profits of U.S. and British oil companies doing business in Iran. The U.S. government put a weak man in power, the Shah of Iran, who became very violent toward his own citizens. Eventually, people in Iran overthrew the Shah. The U.S. government's actions de-stabilized the country and encouraged the violence that came after. For more information, see the short article, To understand the present conflict, consider the past.

As of 2005-08-08, 04:24 AM PDT, the SITE Institute says these are other terrorist web sites: http://www.kataebaqsa1.com/, http://www.moqawama.net/, and http://www.qudsway.com/. The only way you can know directly what they say in Arabic is to read Arabic. Be careful about accepting what someone else says they say. You need to be able to trust that the translator is not politically involved.

The Washington Post article says, "Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online presence." This sentence worries me. It seems to justify U.S. government interference with free speech. It's not clear that preventing open speech for those who disagree with the policies of the U.S. government is a sensible idea. It seems likely that knowing what they are saying is important; we don't want

I wonder what criteria the International Terrorist Entities Search Team http://www.siteinstitute.org/ uses to mark a website as 'Terrorist Entity'. Would posting a link to http://www.bombshock.com/fronts/explosive.html and yelling "Hey, lets undermine western society" put me on a no fly list?

From TFA: Rita Katz, an expert on Islamic terror sites and director of the Washington, D.C.-based Search for International Terrorist Entities, believes a website that posts an execution should be taken out immediately. No matter what the implications are for free speech or other nation's laws, she said. (emphasis mine)

Coming soon - non-Evangelical-Republican == Terrorist.