Watching the watchers or AQ PR observed

[davidbfpo]

I was unable to identify an appropriate thread for AQ / Taliban propaganda, in particular their use of the web. Today FP Blog has two excellent articles by Jarret Brachman:

'Al Qaeda Wants to Be Friends: An insider's tour of the electronic jihad in the Facebook era'

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...iends?page=0,0

A longer piece: 'Watching the Watchers: Al Qaeda's bold new strategy is all about using our own words and actions against us. And it's working'

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...chers?page=0,0

Which ends with:

What makes al Qaeda's new approach so powerful is that it is now easier than ever for passive jihadi supporters to become active al Qaeda participants, particularly in the West. They no longer need to wait for al Qaeda propaganda. Just like Chesser and the growing number of other American jihadi propagandists operating online, anyone can repost videos, write articles, create Facebook and Twitter accounts, and start blogs filled with content intended to show the world how awful the United States is.

This Power of Truth approach, rooted in finding actual "evidence" of U.S. missteps, has the added benefit of being all the more believable to empirically minded Westerners. Al Qaeda hopes that its online armies of jihobbyists will someday log off and launch their own Fort Hood or Times Square attacks. And eventually, some of them will.

Then in The Daily Telegraph, which I suspect has picked up on another US-based story:

Al-Qaeda magazine published 'tips on how to kill Americans'. A magazine run by the Yemeni group al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula has published a list of tips on how to kill Americans.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...Americans.html

I know another, recent thread offered a contrast to AQ's media profile and how it could be criticised:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=11158

Personally I like to emphasise that AQ's appeal for support, let alone action, can fall on "stony ground" as so few take up the "call" and we need to consider the "causes" and the motivation to follow (thanks to Bob Jones here).

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to Jihadica for some clarity on the flurry of articles:http://www.jihadica.com/inspire-2/

The second edition of an AQ periodical is out. This paragraph IMHO supports my closing comment:

Perhaps most interesting are the advice on how to avoid detection:

Do not travel abroad for jihad – act on US soil instead.
Do not use mobile phones and the Internet for any jihad-related communication – if you have to, use coded language and encryption tools.
If you are clean stay clean – do not interact with other activists.
Do not access jihadi websites – get your jihadi propaganda fix from anti-jihadi monitoring sites such as MEMRI and SITE.

Obviously, someone who follows these guidelines is going to be extremely difficult to catch. The question is how many people are ready to act in this way. Khan’s strategy presupposes that individuals can aquire the motivation to die for the cause almost in a vacuum. However, in most historical cases, individuals only acquired this motivation after interacting with other radicals, going abroad for jihad, or accessing jihadi propaganda - all of which are activities discouraged by Samir Khan. Of course there have been exceptions, such as the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan, but even he was not completely “clean”, as evidenced by his email correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaki. Decentralized jihad is indeed a scary concept, but it does not necessarily work.

[bourbon]

Originally Posted by davidbfpo

A longer piece: 'Watching the Watchers: Al Qaeda's bold new strategy is all about using our own words and actions against us. And it's working'

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...chers?page=0,0

Good article. Had me grinding my teeth at the end though, it’s a tough problem to crack.

The rap battle scene at the end of the movie 8 Mile (video 10m58s) - particularly in the final matchup – has the counter strategy.