From the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist hotline page:

Computer – Terrorists use computers. Do you know someone who visits terrorist-related websites?

Uh-oh, that’s me that is:

So (allegedly) went the chant at the Highbury Library a few years back. Abu Muqawama drew attention to this tongue-in-cheek article about bin Laden’s love for Arsenal in the Telegraph archives from 2001. This rang some bells.

Jason Burke wrote in Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam:

Nor, as some have claimed [i.e. Adam Robinson, cited in the Telegraph article], is there any evidence that bin Laden is a fan of north London’s Arsenal Football Club and personally ordered the assassination of David Beckham, the English soccer star.

He adds that “bin Laden does not have a small or deformed penis” either. Bin Laden is unlikely to have ever visited the U.K., let alone been to see the Gooners. I do remember a more reputable source than Robinson (Gilles Kepel? Olivier Roy?) suggesting that bin Laden was swayed by the self-organising power of football crowds, but this was more likely to have been in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, one would think.

Faisal Devji, in Landscapes of the Jihad, writes:

… the event itself is compared to a soccer match, which is to say a game, a televised spectacle, and not to some unmediated form of reality. As it turns out, comparing the attacks of 9/11 to televised football games, or to karate tournaments, is common in Al-Qaeda circles. This suggests that its jihad is conceived of in sporting rather than, say, apocalyptic terms, as a rule-bound contest in which survival and indeed community of both parties is assumed. Perhaps such comparisons indicate callousness, or even a loss of reality in their makers. They certainly do represent acts of the jihad as performances which are ethical because they are self-contained.

He goes on to relate the story of a colleague of bin Laden’s in whose dream his fellow jihadis were playing soccer against the Americans, but in which his team turned into pilots, the very same pilots who manned the planes on 9/11. ‘Terrorism as theatre’ is a well-trodden analytical course, but the relationship between the jihad and football, both agents of globalisation, is an interesting one.

Bin Laden has of course been banned by the Arsenal. Anyway, I have evidence that BL is a scouser of the red persuasion, so the whole argument is null and void:

Although, come to think of it, this photo reminds me of an acquaintance of mine who used to head off down to Highbury dressed as a rabbi and sit in the Clock End…

The Al-Qaeda Media Machine, Phillip Seib in the new edition of Military Review. An excellent short article that neatly sums up the use al-Qaeda makes of the globalised media environment and subtly flags up why the US and its allies are failing to combat this crucial element of the global insurgency.

Like an aging rock star who has dropped out of the public eye, Osama bin-Laden occasionally decides to remind people that he’s still around. He makes video appearances that first appear on Arabic television channels but which the world quickly sees on television or on multiple Web sites. Bin-Laden’s message is “Hey, they haven’t caught me yet,” which cheers up his fans, but his threats and pronouncements are mostly terrorist boilerplate. For all the parsing of his sentences and scrutinizing of the color of his beard, hardly anything in his videos helps us better understand and combat terrorism.

Meanwhile, significant Al-Qaeda media efforts go largely unnoticed by news organizations and the public. This myopia is characteristic of an approach to antiterrorism that focuses on Bin-Laden as terror-celebrity while ignoring the deep-rooted dynamism of a global enemy. Most jihadist media products make no mention of Bin-Laden, but they deserve attention because they are vital to Al-Qaeda’s mission and to its efforts to extend its influence. Al-Qaeda has become a significant player in global politics largely because it has developed a sophisticated media strategy. Lacking a tangible homeland—other than, perhaps, scattered outposts in the wilds of Waziristan—Al-Qaeda has established itself as a virtual state that communicates with its “citizens” and cultivates an even larger audience through masterful use of the media, with heavy reliance on the Internet.

Some more critical excerpts:

[In 2005, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] began an online magazine, Zurwat al-Sanam (The Tip of the Camel’s Hump, meaning ideal Islamic practice), which featured 43 pages of text, including stories about fallen jihadists, and photographs of Osama bin-Laden and George W. Bush. Later, Zarqawi’s “information wing”—which included his own online press secretary—released “All Religion Will Be for Allah,” a 46-minute video with scenes including a brigade of suicide bombers in training. As The Washington Post reported, the video was offered on a specially designed Web page with many options for downloading, including Windows Media and RealPlayer versions for those with high-speed Internet connections, another version for those with dial-up, and one for downloading it to play on a cell phone. Production quality has become more sophisticated, with many videos now including subtitles in several languages and some featuring 3-D animation.

Offering a diversity of access options is a sure sign that al-Qaeda recognises the nature of the ‘digital divide’, and tailors its output to cover as many eventualities as possible.

Through news reports, satellite television provides Al-Qaeda and the public with graphic representations of Al-Qaeda’s work and occasional glimpses of Bin-Laden himself. More significantly, the Internet supplies more detailed versions of what the news media have covered, all the while furthering operational connectivity and a sense of cohesion. Michael Scheuer observed that “the Internet today allows militant Muslims from every country to meet, talk, and get to know each other electronically, a familiarization and bonding process that in the 1980s and early 1990s required a trip to Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Pakistan.” As author Gabriel Weimann noted, Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Jihad), an Al-Qaeda online magazine, reflects the multiple purposes of such ventures: “Orchestrating attacks against Western targets is important, but the main objective remains that of mobilizing public support and gaining grassroots legitimacy among Muslims.”

The creation of alternative news outlets with a perceived legitimacy is a critical factor in fostering a sense of common grievance, and is a classic propaganda tactic.

Another Al-Qaeda online magazine, Muaskar al-Battar (Camp of the Sword), underscored the value of online instruction: “Oh Mujahid brother, in order to join the great training camps you don’t have to travel to other lands. Alone in your home or with a group of your brothers, you too can begin to execute the training program.” To enhance cyber security for such connections, the online Technical
Mujahid Magazine was begun in late 2006 to instruct its readers about electronic data security and other high-tech matters.

Some intelligence experts argue that online training has its limits—that technical skills and tradecraft require more than Web-based instruction. But although Al-Qaeda’s students might be able to glean only rudimentary knowledge from Internet sources, it is enough to make them dangerous.

The Al-Qaeda leadership has stressed Internet use in directives to its citizens/followers, as was illustrated in this message carried on one of its Web sites:

“Due to the advances of modern technology, it is easy to spread news, information, articles, and other information over the Internet. We strongly urge Muslim Internet professionals to spread and disseminate news and information about the Jihad through e-mail lists, discussion groups, and their own Web sites. If you fail to do this, and our site closes down before you have done this, we may hold you to account before Allah on the Day of Judgment . . . We expect our Web site to be opened and closed continuously. Therefore, we urgently recommend to any Muslims that are interested in our material to copy all the articles from our site and disseminate them through their own Web sites, discussion boards, and e-mail lists. This is something that any Muslim can participate in easily, including sisters. This way, even if our sites are closed down, the material will live on with the Grace of Allah.”

This is a fundamental point about the internet that AQ obviously understands - data lives on in the infosphere even if the apparent source is deleted or removed. This is a complex hardware issue manifest as a viral/memetic phenomenon.

During the second half of 2007, U.S. forces in Iraq shut down at least a half-dozen Al-Qaeda media outposts in that country. One house the U.S. raided in Samarra contained 12 computers, 65 hard drives, and a film studio. The American military effort to halt such media operations relied in part on the belief of General David Petraeus that “the war is not only being fought on the ground in Iraq but also in cyberspace.” Petraeus’s concern relates to an issue raised in U.S. Army and Marine Corps Field Manual, Counterinsurgency—insurgents attempt to shape the information environment to their advantage by using suicide attacks and other such tactics to “inflate perceptions of insurgent capabilities.”

As with so much else, Petraeus is right, although FM3-24 itself is arguably still mired in 3GW.

Information dominance is a modern warfare tenet that is increasingly important, particularly if conventional military strength accompanies the effective exercise of soft power. Al-Qaeda understands the limitations of its own use of “hard power”—the coercive force of terrorist attacks—and continues to expand its conceptual approach to information warfare.

By making himself available for a cyberspace chat, Zawahiri taunts those who have been hunting him for years. By holding a “news conference,” the Al-Qaeda leadership positions itself on a plane comparable to that where “real” governments operate. By using new media to communicate with the rest of the world, Al-Qaeda stakes a claim to being an exponent of modernity.

In conclusion, with a prescription for the remedy:

One is tempted to dismiss these maneuvers as just another distracting ploy by murderous thugs, but for those who see Al-Qaeda’s cadres as heroic defenders of Islam—and their numbers are substantial—this exercise is evidence of legitimacy, despite Al-Qaeda’s vilification by much of the world. The inadequate responses to Al-Qaeda’s media messages heighten the danger. Even a flawed argument has appeal when we allow it to stand in an intellectual vacuum. Moderate Muslims and non-Muslims who do not accept the idea that prolonged conflict is inevitable must recognize this reality and act on it in a sophisticated, comprehensive way.

This means providing a steady stream of videos and other materials through the new media that many members of the Al-Qaeda audience use. This counter-programming should not feature defensive, pro-American content, but rather should concentrate on undermining Al-Qaeda’s purported nobility, such as by reminding the audience how many Muslims have died in the terrorist attacks and insurgent warfare Al-Qaeda instigated.

Osama bin-Laden will undoubtedly pop up in another video before long. Note what he says, but then look to the always expanding reservoir of jihadist media to see what Al-Qaeda is really up to.

“You are a member of ‘al-Qaeda’ if you say you are” - Jason Burke (2007), Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

The franchise analogy has occasionally been applied to the decentralised nature of al-Qaeda-inspired activities and the above quote from Jason Burke neatly sums up the idea that al-Qaeda as an idea, nay, a brand, can be utilised by almost anyone should they choose to do so. Like a franchise, one assumes that the same product (terrorism) is supplied to the same standard (magnitude, degree of disruption) with the same brand values (anti-American, radical Islam). ‘Al-Qaeda’ as a name has to some degree become a collective pseudonym available to those who wish to depersonalise themselves under the banner of a greater, globalised movement.

For those not perhaps au fait with the Luther Blissett phenomenon, Paolo at In Media Res provides a long and thoughtful description and examination in The Luther Blissett Project: a viral attack on the modern infosphere, which mainly deals with the Italian example, although his points are well-made in the international context also. (I should perhaps note at this point that the original Luther Blissett played football for Watford and England in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Over to Paolo, and some background:

The reasons why the name of an English football player has been used to share the identity of a great variety of people are unknown. However, it is true that since the summer of 1994 many shows of performing art and media guerrilla operations were carried out under this unique name. The leitmotif, which was endlessly repeated, was “Everyone can be Luther Blissett”, highlighting a sort of ideological statement aimed at the loss of individual identity. In other words, the multiple-name is an open reputation that anyone can informally adopt and share with other people, and whose performances must not necessarily have a common purpose.

The performative nature of terrorism has long been recognised. Indeed, Brian Jenkins coined the phrase “terrorism is theatre” in 1975, although its demonstrative characteristics are recorded at least as far back as the ‘propaganda of the deed’ of European anarchists in the 19th century. Do AQ-brand actions have a common purpose? Operationally and tactically, yes, I would argue - perhaps not strategically. I am as skeptical as Olivier Roy as to the existence of a consistent AQ ideology and grand strategy.

Thereafter follows a list of ‘media pranks’ propagated by anonymous persons calling themselves Luther Blissett, whose intention was:

the construction of a myth of fighting, a folk hero whose identity can be shared and used for demonstrative actions. Luther Blissett wants to hit the system of mass communication in order to … re-appropriate of a ludic [read, playful or spontaneous] practice and show a different relationship with mass media.

Nicholas O’Shaughnessy has written about bin Laden’s manipulation of media to create just such an identity in Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction (2004). Videos of bin Laden in heroic guises alternately emphasise his mystique as a freedom fighter, his authority as a mullah, his demeanour as international statesman, yet he is arguably none of these things.

Like Robin Hood, the intention is to hit and then to go into hiding thanks to the loss of individual identity. Many other groups have used a collective or multiple name in order to carry out performance acts at a social or artistic level. Some of the most influential, from which Luther Blissett takes inspiration, come from the context of the ‘70s. The rise of multiple-use name, for instance, is mostly evident and popularized in the ‘70s and ‘80s, especially within artistic subcultures like Mail Art and Neoism [see Monty Cantsin]. The latter is a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists guided, broadly speaking, by a practical underground philosophy. It operates by means of collectively shared pseudonyms and identities. Most of its activism is arranged through pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and, as a consequence, has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy any categorization and historical and spatial location.

Of course, there is nothing ludic or whimsical about the AQ brand-actors. But the points about deterritorialisation and depersonalisation are too obvious to ignore.

One of the most important aspects in the Luther Blissett performances is a deep knowledge of information techniques in order to exploit the circulation of information via mass media and, eventually, to realize its purposes. This has been largely shown in one of their most famous and complex pranks.

This was played by dozens of people in Latium, central Italy, in 1997. It lasted one year and was placed in the backwoods of Viterbo, involving newsworthy issues like black rituals, Satanism and spreading of media panic. Local and national media reported for a long time news about the activity of a satanic sect placed in Viterbo. Like the TV show about missed people, facts were not scrupulously checked. Rather, the circulation of the news helped the diffusion of panic among population, leading politicians to claim officially a war against Satanism. When Luther Blissett claimed its responsibility by means of local newspapers for the whole prank and the production of the sheer amount of evidences, Blissett activists called their act as an example of homeopathic counter-information: in other words, by injecting a calculated dose of false news in the media, they meant to show the unprofessional way of working of many reporters, and how easy was to exploit media as a resonance box for the diffusion of the panic.

Al-Qaeda is, if nothing else, a very adept and skilled manipulator of the media. Ayman al-Zawahiri famously stated years ago: “We must get our message across to the masses of the nation [ummah] and break the media siege imposed on the jihad movement. This is an independent battle that we must launch side by side with the military battle.”

[T]he exploitation of mass media aimed at the management of reality through the press or television … has increasingly become a profession. As Boorstin (1961) noted, one of the most relevant aspects in the field of news diffusion is the creation of what he calls pseudo-events, a ‘new kind of synthetic novelty which has flooded our experience’. This kind of event is symptomatic ‘of a revolutionary change in our attitude toward what happens in the world, how much of it is new, and surprising, and important.’ In other words, a pseudo-event is an artificial event, created with the aim of calling attention and planned for specific purposes. The main features of the pseudo-event, as Boorstin indicates, are 1) to be not spontaneous, but planned, planted or incited; 2) that the event is planned primarily for the purpose of being reported and reproduced; 3) to be ambiguous, and this is the very kind of relation with the event and reality itself; 4) to be intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

… since the birth and increase of public relations, we have assisted [in] a gradual process of commodification of the information flow. As news has become something to be sold, a general shift to what is newsworthy and what is not has occurred, and the entire information flow has become dependant on business and political strategy of communication.

And bin Laden and al-Zawahiri know the processes of this far better than Western prosecutors of the GWOT.

[Luther Blissett becomes] the source of information through the creation of a pseudo-event, and perpetuates the prank through the construction of a manufactured message. This practice of media guerrilla … is played in the twilight zone which surrounds what they call the verifiable core of the news. This uncertain area is built on myths, urban legends, hearsays, that journalists exploit in order to turn a news into something more attractive, that can be sold more easily. The process of injecting a calculated dose of false news in the media is, in this context, not different from every process of information management. What is different is the lack of any commercial or political objectives to achieve, because these pranks are only a sort of act of demonstration. Furthermore, the revelation of the media bluff by means of media themselves suggests to citizens a reflection upon how easy is to manipulate the source of information, and, moreover, how easy is to create a pseudo-event aimed to attract the media interest. On the other hand, if in Luther Blissett’s view the revelation of the bluff is the final stage of a general act of demonstration, for others this is the worst thing that could happen. For strategic communication, that works for commercial purposes or for taking the attention away from a uncomfortable fact, the revelation of what “lies behind” is the failure of the strategy rather than the success.

An interesting thesis if applied to AQ. Intelligence being what it is, i.e. incomplete and sometimes erroneous, certainly misinterpreted at times, we do not know what real connection there may be between AQ-brand’s media broadcasts and any intended kinetic actions.

In Postscripts on the Societies of Control Deleuze points out that contemporary societies are witnessing the dissolution of every institutional boundary, leading to a process of decentralization of every previous form of power. Foucault (1980) [probably Discipline and Punish] had theorised the birth of disciplinary societies as a replacement of the previous system of sovereignty. This led to the rise of institutions – such as schools, hospitals, prisons or factories – which were able to exercise power by means of discourses. As Deleuze notes, ‘[t]he disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass.’ In societies of control, on the other hand, power is not fixed or centralized any more, but is rather nomadic and exercised through abstract representations like codes, data and passwords. In this context, ‘[w]e no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples, data markets, or banks’ (Deleuze). This transformation in also visible through the machines that power uses to exercise control:

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society – not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old society of sovereignty made use of simple machines – levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the production of viruses (Deleuze).

Although Deleuze refers here to the virus in the field of computer technology, I think it may be relevant to carry out the metaphor of infection to examine the nature of the antagonism of the Luther Blisset Project. In many passages of its manifesto, Luther Blissett has often compared their action with that of a virus: a calculated dose of false news (the core of verifiable news) is put in circulation. Successively, it links itself with the general process of news production and goes, at the end, to infect the flow of information, that is effectively embodied by the dissemination of moral panic for something that has never happened. What is relevant, however, is that the revelation of the prank works like the antidote to the infection which is given exactly by the material authors. All this has been made with the intention of revealing the whole mechanism: this raises several and crucial questions about who actually acts as a virus … If these pranks are performed with the aim to make people aware of a more balanced relationship between mass media and individuals it is possible to argue that probably the real infection is perpetrated by those who seek to hide their practice and exploit news production for strategic purposes. What has been called a viral attack could be seen, at the end, as the ethical implication.

There is no prank with AQ. Or is there? As Faisal Devji has said about suicide bombs, these are ‘not actions that can be seen in strategic or instrumental terms. They are not means to an end. There is no ‘end’, as such.’ If AQ operates in an ethical rather than political space, as Devji contends elsewhere, in Landscapes of the Jihad (2005), its actions become purely speculative once they lose their functionality.

At the same time, it is significant that, in this study’s perspective, a nomadic and decentralized form of power, as highlighted in Deleuze’s societies of control, leads consequently to a mutation of the concept of antagonism. Luther Blissett has noted that the simple counter-information is not effective anymore because the context and “the enemy” have radically changed. Consequently, I think it is essential to draw attention to the structure of the multiple-use name in relation to the post-panoptical form of social control. As a result, to contrast a decentralized form of power, a decentralized form of antagonism is needed.

For these reasons, I will adopt here another metaphor taken from Deleuze and Guattari [e.g. A Thousand Plateaus]. I think it is fruitful to analyze the loss of the individual identity through the lens of the concept of the rhizome. The metaphor of the rhizome is used by Deleuze and Guattari to give an idea about a way of thinking which is not centralized, but is rather characterised by principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity and rupture. This kind of thinking is opposed to the [arboreal] structure, which is by contrast linear, hierarchic and sedentary. Generally speaking, the rhizome has not a centre, but many nodal points, and one of the main features is to be accessible from many entries. Furthermore, if a part of the rhizome is cut off , it is able to find alternatively new directions and to link randomly with other points or nodes.

The recent work Understanding Alternative Media has advanced a rhizomatic approach to interpret some of contemporary alternative media. One of the main feature of this interpretation is the highly level of elusiveness through which a rhizomatic alternative media works.

The concept of multiplicity constructs the rhizome not on the basis of elements each operating within fixed sets of rule, but as an entity whose rules are constantly in motion because new elements are constantly included. The principle of asignifying rupture means that ‘a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

Its intrinsic being constantly in motion, its fluidity and its quality of being pluri-accessible make an alternative media based on a rhizomatic structure hardly difficult to identify and, at the same time, it is complex to find the source of their message production. In this perspective, we can consider the action and the structure of the Luther Blissett Project as based on a rhizomatic structure. The loss of the individual identity and the sharing of a multiple-use name calls for the abandonment of one of the most strict parameters through which societies of control exercise their power: that is to say, the proper name. This embodies the last resort through which control can be exercised. On the other hand, the renunciation of the proper name makes it difficult to identify any physical action or intellectual production, undermining in this way every form of dataveillance. The adoption of the multiple name is, in this perspective, rhizomatic because its elusiveness and heterogeneity are disguised under the homogeneity of a unique name. In this context, any question about intellectual property is erased, and any attempt to locate a centre is undermined.

In its attempt to demonstrate how easy is to make fun of the culture industry, the Luther Blissett phenomenon has shown how much difficult is trying to locate an entity which has no centre and is rhizomatic in any development. It is impossible, in this sense, to behead something that has no head. Therefore, if everyone can be Luther Blissett, no one could be at the same time.

There is much of relevance to the global jihad in this article. I’ve written elsewhere about the rhizomatic nature of globalised insurgency and I think it is a useful analogy with which to approach the slippery nature of the media space in which AQ and their associates act, and in such a sophisticated fashion. Is the Luther Blissett analogy similarly useful? Perhaps ideas of pranks and revelation are too pomo to be of real analytical utility but viruses, media manipulation, depersonalised actors and decentralised information propagation are definitely, to my mind, partly why the global insurgency is so difficult to counteract. Whether bin Laden is the original Luther Blissett, or al-Qaeda, is not particularly important. No-one knows, in a technical sense, if bin Laden is still alive, for example.

I’ve only partially commented on Paolo’s article for reasons of time but I will probably return to it at a later date. He makes no mention of al-Qaeda or terrorism, but the comparisons are clear, and it may prove to be another useful avenue of research.