Surfing for Jihad

[bigtree]

Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist Web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active, defense officials say.

The team includes 25 linguists, who cover multiple dialects of the Arabic language and provide reports on events sparking anger on extremist Web sites, Dan Devlin, a Pentagon public diplomacy specialist, said Thursday. The researchers, for instance, focused in November on the backlash caused by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Extremist propaganda is most often used to recruit jihadist fighters and supporters between the ages of 7 and 25, the officials said. But ''we've seen products that are aimed at ages even lower than 7,'' testified Pentagon contractor Ron Roughhead. His company wasn't identified, for security reasons.

According to the briefing, al-Qaida has advertised online to fill jobs for Internet specialists, and its media group has distributed computer games and recruitment videos that use everything from poetry to humor to false information to gather support. The media group has assembled montages of American politicians taking aim at the Arab world.

''This crusade -- crusade -- crusade -- is going to take awhile,'' President Bush says in one video, edited to make him repeat the word ''crusade'' six other times.

article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Congress-Terrorism.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print