In
2003 Katz authored a book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of
a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups
Operating in America, which she published using the pseudonym,
“Anonymous.” In the book Katz
explains how she took on the trappings of a Muslim woman to infiltrate
the meetings of radical Muslim terrorists. The plot is unlikely,
especially when one considers that such secret fundamentalist gatherings
are almost always segregated along gender lines and no woman, however
elaborate her costume, would be granted entry without her identity being
firmly established.
SITE
Intelligence Group consists of Katz and two “senior advisers,” one of
whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and
Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the
RAND’s Washington DC office. The SITE Intelligence Group “constantly
monitors the Internet and traditional media for material and propaganda
released by jihadist groups and their supporters,” the company’s website
announces. “Once obtained, SITE immediately translates the material and
provides the intelligence along with a contextual analysis explaining
the source of the material and its importance to our subscribers.”
In 2003 and 2004, though claiming to be a 501c3 non-profit, SITE
received more than $500,000 from the US government. Also in the early
2000s Katz received $150,000 from the FBI for consulting services. A
Guidestar search for nonprofits yields no recent records for SITE,
suggesting how it has abandoned its non-profit status and now relies on
corporate and individual subscriptions for revenue. In 2005 the private
mercenary contractor Blackwater hailed SITE as “an invaluable
resource.”
The
majority of “jihadist groups” operate one or more media outlets that
produce and publish “the group’s multimedia, and in some cases,
communiques and magazines,” SITE explains on its website. “These media
units involve production teams and correspondents who report directly
from the battlefield, and craft propaganda to indoctrinate and recruit
new fighters into the group’s ranks.” SITE provides no direct links to
the jihadist groups’ websites or multimedia productions from its own
platform.
Katz
describes SITE as geared toward international Islamic jihad. In fact,
it performs an international function akin to what a Southern Poverty
Law Center or Anti-Defamation League do domestically–ferreting out and
publicizing terrorist and “extremist” threats. “[W]e at SITE for over a
decade monitor, search, and study the jihadists online. We have been
studying and monitoring the jihadists online, which also as they get
more sophisticated, we follow their techniques and study them. And based
on that, we could predict where they will be uploading their video.
After all, we have to remember that much of this propaganda is being
posted online. Their releases are released online [sic]. So they have to
be able to use certain locations to upload their releases before they
are published."
Though
routinely overlooked in the flurry of front-page coverage corporate
media have allotted the three beheading videos–the most recent of which
featured British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines–it is common
knowledge that SITE uncannily secures terrorist statements and videos
well before the US’s wide array of lavishly-funded intelligence
services.
For
example, as the Washington Post reported in 2007, "[a] small private
intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month,
and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7 … It gave two senior officials access on
the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the
al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies
had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon
that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide."
The video later proved to be fraudulent.
With
the above in mind, one may ask, If parties within a US presidential
administration or the State Department sought to bypass the potential
scrutiny of a wide-ranging intelligence community concerning such
matters, while simultaneously providing itself with the means to
effectively propagandize the American public toward a broader end, what
better way than to contract the services of an entity such as SITE?
If
there is some merit in the above appraisal, the arrangement is now
being pushed to an extreme by the Obama administration to pave the road
toward a long-sought goal: war with Syria’s Bashar Al Assad regime.
Indeed, services such as SITE’s are a potent and valuable means for
moving public opinion, as they have done in recent weeks concerning
military action against the Islamic State.
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