Web sites show sophistication of Al-Qaida

Some intelligence experts say the United States does nothing to stop the sites.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
NEW YORK -- Wanted: video editors, writers and Web masters to help Al-Qaida spread its message. Contact: the Global Islamic Media Front via e-mail.
It sounds unlikely, but such messages have appeared on radical Islamist Internet sites in the past week. They are just the latest sign of Al-Qaida's increasing sophistication in communications that is allowing the terrorist network to expand its universe of sympathizers around the world.
Before 9/11, only a handful of extremist Web sites existed. Now there are thousands of increasingly sophisticated sites offering everything from chat rooms to videos of beheadings as well as in-depth instructions on kidnapping, bomb-making and recruiting.
Earlier this month, an Italian newspaper reported that Al-Qaida started producing what is essentially an "All Al-Qaida, All The Time" video news release, providing converts and sympathizers an Islamist perspective on the day's events.
Intelligence experts contend that these recent developments are a sign that the terrorist organization continues to evolve, thrive and, in parts of the Muslim world, maintain the upper hand in the ideological debate, despite Washington's attempts to step up its publicity campaign.
"The implications are clearly that [Al-Qaida mastermind Osama] bin Laden is able to talk to the people who form his base of his support, and from which he'll draw more support" said Michael Scheuer, the CIA's former top Al-Qaida expert. "The one lesson that should come home more than anything else is that these people are not medievalists and anti-modern. They may be anti-Western, but they're devotees of the tools of modernity in communications and weapons."
Critical of U.S. intelligence
Several experts, including Scheuer, argue that America has given "free rein" to bin Laden's increasingly successful efforts to spread his message through the Internet after his Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. This has enabled him, these experts say, to further radicalize angry young Muslims and maintain contact with independent extremist cells around the world.
American intelligence officials, however, say they have basically isolated bin Laden, as well as his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, and do track and disrupt some Internet communications.
For example, a letter from al-Zawahri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaida operations in Iraq, has been obtained by U.S. forces and posted on the Web site (www.dni.gov) of the director of national intelligence.
In the letter, al-Zawahri discusses other communications he sent that may have been seized and claims U.S. intelligence services have his laptop computer.
Al-Zawahri also admonishes his Iraqi compatriots to remember that "more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media."
Intelligence experts compare the current battle of Internet-spread ideas to a political campaign where one side, in this case the United States, allows its opponent, Al-Qaida, to define the terms of the debate and sway voters.
"[The terrorists] appear, and we've let them fill this vacuum that's the Internet without any push back," said Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at the RAND Corp. in Washington. "This has not been like a political campaign where immediately there's some response and an effort to take their message and spin it in a different direction."