Slashdot Mirror
Terrorists Move to Cyberspace
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "The Washington Post has an article on how Al Quaeda is now using the 'net for its new HQ. From the article: 'With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.'"
For anybody who wasn't tuning in at home before.
Al-Quaida stands for "The Base." It was a database of terrorist organizations, maintained by Bin Laden.
Sure, it had physical manifestations, but it has, from the very start, existed as an Internet entity.
Afghanistan was merely harboring a known terrorist when he was on the run (and he has been on the run a lot longer than most of us bothered to read about him). Al-Quaida merely had troops in Afghanistan protecting him.
If there were all there, Al-Quaida business would have stopped the second that we fought them there.
Sounds like a good way for people to hassle me when I'm with my iBook at Starbucks, not a credible threat.
I wish these rabble rousing journalists would look themselves in the mirror and realize that instead of helping the American public they are just making life harder for hard-working American immigrants. Looking for a good way to alienate American Muslims in the same way the Londoners bombers were? This seems like a good way.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"This is all the more reason the US govt and the CIA need to invest heavily in recruiting and training Arabic translators."
Except it's not that easy. The CIA has been griping since 2001 that, despite the massive upsurge in students taking Arabic, only about 5% of them - if that - end up competent enough to do intelligence work. With the private sector offering obscene money in comparison to a government job, you can pretty much guess what percentage of those 5% want to end up with the CIA.
I see this sort of foolishness in my department all the time. Some ponce show up for Beginning Arabic saying something like "Yeah, wanna learn, you know, 'cause of the terrorists and all". It takes all of about two weeks before they figure out that, hey, Arabic is hard, you have to actually memorize things which aren't even remotely related to English, spend about 3/4 of your study-time mastering vocabulary, and in the end still can't order a cup of coffee in Cairo. I guess we can just ask nicely if the terrorists would mind sticking to the dictionary and reference grammars.
Add to that what the linguist-lads call diglossia. Spoken Arabic has little to do with written Arabic. Want to read a Qur'an? Written Arabic it is, but you can't converse worth a hill of beans. A friend of mine, freshly finished with his M.A. in Arabic, decided to take a trip to Cairo, steps into a cab and decides to practice with a High Arabic "How are You"? The Cabbie just stared at him and blurted out "Sorry, no English".
Want to listen to a wire-tap? What's it going to be then? Cairene Arabic? Yemeni Highland Dialect? Saudi Bedouin Dialects? Palestinian? Moroccan? How about Qwayrish? I've witnessed a 3-hour long argument among an Iraqi, a Yemeni and an Egyptian about the correct Arabic word for watermelon, for Pete's sake. Each one came up with at least three words which the others hadn't even heard of. (We won't even mention that many of the "terrorists" are Iranian, Pakistani, Afghani...)
So yeah, throwing money into recruitment and training or more funding for the Defense Language Institute might help, but not much.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
you lose
Al Qaeda is also a brand name being dramatically inflated by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. If you understand the philosphy of their mentor, Leo Strauss, their objective is to create myths of good and evil they can use to unite disaffected Westerners behind an easily understood cause of good versus evil. They also server to distract the public as they reinstate a very regimented, very religious society. In this the neoconservatives have a lot in common with Islamic fundamentalists, who also want to restore a very regimented, very religious society. Only different is the choice of religion. The neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists are in fact using each other to gain their ends which may be one reason the U.S. seems to be in no hurry to catch Bin Laden and Co. The necons need Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahri in the wild to demonize and terrify Americans to make Americans easier to control and manipulate. al-Zarqawi in particular is a convenient demon on whom to blame every bombing in Iraq. The neocons desperately need to make it look like Al Qaeda is to blame for the mess in Iraq when in reality much of it is a a homegrown Sunni insurgency, but anonymous Iraq Sunni's don't make for a powerful good versus evil myth and al-Zarqawi does.
The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off. At this point Al Qaeda fills the mortal enemy role. Al Qaeda is a great adversary because its unlikely to ever go away like the Soviet Union or Saddam did.
Al Qaeda likes the neocons because they have given Al Qaeda vast prestige by constantly building them up as a vast global terror network in "60 countries" when in fact they were early on probably a small organization with some sympathetic extremists around the globe. The U.S. helped make Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda also like the neocons because their heavy handed tactics, persecuting innocent Muslims, snatching Muslims around the world for torture with Rendition, torturing prisoner in Gitmo and Iraq, and of course invading Iraq in general is driving recruits to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in droves.
A good primer on the reality of the neocons and their fondness and similarity to Al Qaeda can be found in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. The necons have a long running histroy, dating back the Reagan years of pick an adversary and building them up in to an evil monster on the virge of destroying the American way of life.
- In the Reagan years they created a shadow intelligence office called Team B featuring none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within, and instead found the Soviet Union to be a massive and imminent danger, engaging in a massive arms build up, and leading a "global terror network". Sound familiar. Whenever they could find no evidence of a weapons build up the neocons devised a perfect solution. If they can't find evidence of it that must mean that it is so nefarious and well concealed that it is even more dangerous than programs they could see. William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.
- The Power of Nightmares contends they used similar tactics of demonization to create a myth of evil around Bill Clinton. That is a bit of a stretch though there certainly was a concerted campaign on someone's part to destroy him. There was never any evidence produced to support all the conspiracies they tried to pin on him which makes it sound a lot like a Team B style operation based on fantasy. It was a campaign that was VERY successful since it regained control of the Congress and then the White House for the Republicans and the neocons.
- In more
@de_machina
Actually it is not that ironic when you read his thesis:
"In Hamburg, Atta worked on a thesis exploring the history of Aleppo's urban landscapes. It explored the general themes of the conflict between Arab civilization and modernity. Atta criticized how the modern skyscrapers and development projects in Aleppo were disrupting the fabric of that city by blocking community streets and altering the skyline. He received a high mark on his report from his German supervisor."
He had it in for skyscrapers from the begining...
"E. Listening to bad pop music is not torture. Being kept awake is not torture"
There is a case in the courts now where an Iraqi general was severely beaten, shoved in a closed sleeping bag and sat on until he died of suffocation. They are charging the grunts who where there as usual, but as usual they conveniently forget to mention the CIA and Delta Force people who are there and running the torture programs The CIA apparently created a secret force of Iraqi's called the "Scorpions" who are starting to resemble a classic CIA trained death squad. They may have been the ones who actually beat and killed the general while their CIA handlers watched.
@de_machina
Donald Rumsfeld tells the Congress that unreleased torture photos from Iraq are too hot to handle, showing people with electrified wires inserted into their anus, rape of small children, and lots of blood.
Torture, indiscriminate slaughter, and targetted assassination is a way of life in the new Iraqi order.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-