The U.S. Army is having some success against Al Qaeda information warriors:
The U.S. military said on Saturday it had hampered al Qaeda’s ability to recruit new members in Iraq by capturing or killing many of the people who make slick videos used to attract disaffected young Muslims.U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said that in the past year, 39 al Qaeda members in Iraq responsible for producing and disseminating videos and other material to thousands of Internet Web sites had been captured or killed.
“The power of this information is obvious. These guys are using material that is used on Web sites to recruit and raise money,” Smith told Reuters in an interview.
I heard Gen. Wallace speak on this subject a little more than a year ago. At the time he said that al Qaeda had a “better information operations capability” than the U.S. military and that the group had benefited from the “sanctuary of cyberspace.” It looks like killing the bad guys has had a salutary effect on the situation (surprise!).
(via memeorandum)
However that didn’t stop this:
Al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on Muslims in a new audiotape released Monday to strike Jewish and American targets in revenge for Israel’s recent offensive in the Gaza Strip.The al-Zawahri tape came on the heels of a message from Osama bin Laden, who called for a holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories. Together, the two messages appeared to be a more direct push by the terror network’s leadership to use widespread anger over the Gaza violence to whip up support.
The problem is that the bin Laden tape was apparently an old one that was resurrected and al-Zawahri’s tape is a few weeks after the fact. The response time wasn’t so good if the point of these tapes was to rile up the Muslim world over Israel’s counteroffensive into Gaza. Maybe the efforts against Al Qaeda’s propaganda units is paying off.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
