Info Ops in Yemen: how effective in Yemen?

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to Jihadica for a perplexing story on US information operations (IO) in the Yemen, which is almost an IO itself.

Several months ago, President Obama signed an executive order establishing an interagency center to coordinate the US government’s public messages against terrorist organizations. A major component of this Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) was in the news lately for its clever campaign against AQAP on Yemeni tribal forums.

Link:http://www.jihadica.com/state-depts-...da-propaganda/

It sounds on-target at first:

...the State Department has for a year and a half now tried to counter Al Qaeda's affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula by rhetorically shooting down the group's propaganda when it pops up on Yemeni tribal forum websites....Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll Al Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people,

Except that:

...in many places in Yemen there is no Internet or even electricity

The linked story is:http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign...-war-is-fierce

On the broader aspects back to Jihadica:

More broadly, people are unaware of the complexities of government messaging against terrorist organizations. To shed light on these subjects, the first coordinator of the CSCC, Ambassador Richard LeBaron (now retired), has given me permission to post his recent remarks on what he learned during his tenure. It’s very instructive for anyone interested in counter-propaganda and how the US government is coping with the new information environment.

Link to the remarks is embedded and is in docx format - so unread by moi,