March 15, 2009

An Osama bin Laden Approved Website: or, How we Know AQ #1 Surfs the Internet & What this tells us about his location

The minbar Tawhid wal Jihad website's logo.
[Hotlinked, because it just feels right]

Osama bin Laden is not in a cave. Or, if he is, it is one very sophisticated cave.

How do we know? Because he told us so yesterday in bin Laden's latest video message.

First, we must assume that the voice heard in the message is really him and not one of his sons or someone recruited by al Qaeda to impersonate bin Laden.

Second, we must assume that the message is somewhat recent.

If the message is authentic, then there is a glaringly obvious point in it which reveals quite a bit about bin Laden's current homelife. In fact, I hesitated to even write about it because it was a mistake on his part (and his producer's for overlooking it).

But the point is so obvious, I think, that it would be silly not to point it out. I'm sure many others came to the same conclusion almost immediately.

In the message bin Laden gives a list of books he recommends Muslims read. He's done this in the past before, and it's kind of standard fare. But then bin Laden urges his fans to go to a particular website:

many beneficial books can easily be read on the Internet, like on the al-Tawheed wal-Jihad website.

At first I thought this was a giveaway that the message was old. Tawhid wal Jihad was Abu Musab al Zarqawi's group before he changed its name to al Qaeda in Iraq and he went teets up.

But then it clicked: can he mean the minbar Tawhid wal Jihad webite?

Yes he does.

The website was described two years ago as:

The largest online jihadist library, Al-Maqdisi's intermittently available Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad (Pulpit of Monotheism and Jihad) contains hundreds of works totaling hundreds of thousands of pages.

A cave with broadband? It's possible. A generator and a satellite uplink is all you need.

But Ockham's razor suggests the simplest and most obvious explanation is the most likely: that bin Laden is somewhere with preexisting internet access, like say, a penthouse apartment in Karachi.

Like I said there are other implications to the slip of the tongue which I won't mention. Perhaps you shouldn't either.

Think the virtual jihad is just being waged by jobless teenagers from mommy's basement? Think again. The world's #1 terrorist is wired and online. Who knows what else he's up to in the virtual world?

[I'm heading out of town for spring break. I'll try to answer e-mail this next week but don't expect too many posts.]