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Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline

Posted by kdawson on from the i-hack-you dept.

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

2 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Re:fp by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think I speak for all of us when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

    No, you are just speaking for people with really high UIDs.

    That post was a cut-n-paste of a tired, old troll posting with the slight up date of using Obama instead of some random jock twink type.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  2. So what are the URLs? by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    The classic site was Voice of Jihad, but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.

    bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary..

    I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."

    It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.

    We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.