Threatening "Clouds"
And we also got an update about al Qaeda's new media prowess, courtesy of the Washington Post.
Since 2000, al-Qaeda has run its own media production company, al-Sahab, which means "the clouds" in Arabic, an allusion to the misty mountain peaks of Afghanistan.This, in light of the video released by Osama bin Laden last week, is another example of the multi-front and complicated war that America is engaged in. Not only does al Qaeda continue to shift its tactics – from insurgent attacks to IEDs and beyond – but it is elusive when it comes to information warfare as well, going so far as to put more energy into production value.Until two years ago, al-Sahab was dependent on broadcasters such as the al-Jazeera satellite television network to air its videos and could distribute only short clips on the Internet. But then it achieved a spectacular breakthrough. Taking advantage of technological advances and bandwidth expansion, it began posting videos directly on the Internet, relying on an anonymous global network of webmasters to shield their electronic tracks.
In 2005, al-Sahab released 16 videos. This year, it has produced four times that number. Quality has improved markedly, with most videos now including subtitles in several languages and sometimes 3-D animation."If you want to stop al-Qaeda on the communications front, you should concentrate on their IT manager instead of Osama," said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a research group in Lahore, Pakistan, that studies militant groups.
It's clear that no matter who al Qaeda is composed of, or whether al Qaeda in Iraq is the same as the al Qaeda that attacked us 6 years ago, this is a fight that takes a point and click as much as -- if not more than -- a point and shoot to resolve.