The terrorist communications OODA loop

NY Times:

WHEN an Iraqi insurgent group releases a new videotape or claims responsibility for an attack, Western reporters in Baghdad rarely hear about it firsthand. Nor do they usually get the news from their in-house Iraqi translators.

Instead, a reporter often receives an e-mailed alert from a highly caffeinated terrorism monitor sitting at a computer screen somewhere on the East Coast. Within hours, a constellation of other Middle East analysts has sent out interpretations — some of them conflicting — and a wealth of contextual material.

Terrorists have been using the Internet so heavily that the monitors often know as much or more about their communications as military or intelligence officers do.

The role that terrorists' Web sites can play in this war was clear on June 7, when several posted laudatory death notices for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — and in so doing laid to rest any doubt about reports from the American military that its troops had killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Journalists in Iraq are far too busy with the perils of on-the-ground reporting to sit at screens for hours browsing for terrorist Internet traffic. That is why the new array of online expertise has become an essential tip sheet for them. A whole new mini-industry of instantaneous translation and analysis has arisen, and it often erodes the traditional distinctions between credentialed foreign policy experts and mere amateurs.

Some of the groups are well-known and generously financed outfits like the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, whose primary function is to translate Arabic and Muslim media.

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That the media would think that it would need confirmation from the terrorist of Zarqawi's death tells you something about their mind set. However, the larger point is that the US needs to get inside this enemy information loop and get its own story out ahead of the bad guys. While it is likely that these same sites are monitored by intelligence resources, if the media is seeing the same thing then the US needs to get its story out before the new cycle moves on to another story. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell has been in charge of media operations in Iraq for only a short time and he is moving quickly to get more timely information out, but there is much more that needs to be done and it is not a one man job.