Thursday, July 12, 2007

Today's Reading Assignment(s)

Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal, on Radio Free Europe's much-heraled report on terrorists' use of the internet for incitement and propaganda. Mr. Henninger's concluding thoughts on the report are telling, and they echo sentiments that we recently expressed.

In an interview this week, RFE's Mr. Kimmage said they have presented the media study to both the House and Senate intelligence committees and to government national security agencies. Reactions range from "wow" to "we already know all that." In any event, what would they do? This is propaganda on an unprecedented scale.

...The answer--technical or political--is not obvious to me. But the one unacceptable answer is doing nothing.

Yet "nothing" appears to be a cornerstone of our information strategy, at least as far as we can tell. Jihadist websites (and other media outlets) grown like mushrooms after a spring rain, spreading the message to potential recruits across the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has trouble articulating a consistent, decisive message on the war, causing public and political support to evaporate. And, at the same time, the military is cracking down on bloggers within its ranks, while trying to curry favor with MSM reporters who are overwhelmingly against the war.

If there's a method to our information "madness," someone please explain it to me.

2 comments:

gr8scott said...

It's always said that the sites being up (and publicly viewable) are more helpful to our efforts than not - all we can do is hope that the guys in the basements of Ft. Meade are doing their jobs.

Sean Meade said...

yes, that's what Michael Tanji says in this comment.

note the interesting case of the Montana mom cyber counter-jihadist earlier in the post, whom Tanji is critiquing.