Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[David Gerard]

Oh, and there's a firehose story [slashdot.org] on the subject which could do with clicking up. Blithering stupidity is best dealt with by wide exposure.

Re:fp

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I think I speak for all of us when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

No, you are just speaking for people with really high UIDs.

That post was a cut-n-paste of a tired, old troll posting with the slight up date of using Obama instead of some random jock twink type.

So what are the URLs?

[Animats]

The classic site was Voice of Jihad [sawtaljihad.com], but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.

bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary. [reuters.com].

I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."

It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. [denverpost.com] In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.

We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.

Re:So what are the URLs?

[bonch]

Actually, I suspect the reason his videos aren't reported as much is that whenever Bin Laden shows his face, it energizes Americans and makes them more likely to vote Republican. The media is ridiculously pro-Obama this year and does not want a repeat of 2004 when Bin Laden released a video and threatened Americans a week before the election. We're in a media environment in which the New York Times will run an editorial by Obama but refuse to run one by McCain. Comedians mock Sarah Palin's apparent stupidity while ignoring that Joe Biden said Americans were huddled around television sets to see President Roosevelt [politico.com]. Palin is criticized for her religious views, yet Obama is a Christian who went to the church of reverend Wright for 20 years, and Joe Biden is a Catholic (amazingly, McCain is the least religious candidate).

So I wouldn't worry about any Bin Laden videos popping up to energize conservative voters this time.

Re:Athiest, Atypical

[glwtta]

The privative alpha [wiktionary.org] ('a-') has nothing to do with 'anti', it's a negating prefix that goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. It is a cognate of 'un-' and 'in-', though.

Though apparently this isn't the point of the discussion at hand.

Re:No Links?

[Haeleth]

I think you didn't RTFA carefully enough. It says it's talking about private, password-protected sites. So even if they did provide links, all you could "verify" is either that they have indeed linked to a site that doesn't exist (and how would you be able to tell whether it really had been an al-Qaeda site before?), or to some kind of login page (and, without a password, how would you be able to tell whether it was really an al-Qaeda site or just a random anonymous login page?)

This is nothing to do with censorship. It's the owners and users of those sites themselves who have always been taking measures to prevent the public from finding them or reading their contents. Even if someone really has hacked these sites and taken them offline, that is not affecting what the public can see in the slightest.

This isn't Wikipedia. In the real world, some things really are unverifiable. Journalists really do have secret sources, and they really do sometimes report on things the public can't verify. It's your choice to decide whether you believe them or not, but it certainly isn't "ridiculous" to decide that, on balance, you think an unverifiable story is still credible.

Re:Yeah... so what?

[eli pabst]

I hope that's a joke. The formation of Al Qaeda didn't occur until August 1988, at the very end of the Soviet invasion. It wasn't a CIA database name, it was short for Al Qaeda al-Askariya (the military base). It wasn't directly funded by the CIA either. The CIA gave money, which was matched by the Saudi's to the Pakistani ISI who then channeled it to the various Mujaheddin groups (of which bin Ladin was not one). He had most of his own funding from his families money and from Saudi donors. The fact that he was an Arab made him an outsider to the other Mujaheddin leaders.