Terrorists' favorite place to show videos of Americans and Brits dying
Five quick gunshots erupt to start the video, each sending an American or Brit soldier in Iraq sprawling to the ground wounded or dead. Soon a compilation picture of Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and other leaders appears--the crosshairs of a gun riding slowly across their faces. A rash of gunshots sounds again, as red holes pop across their foreheads.
Welcome to "The Baghdad Sniper," a video on the San Francisco site www.archive.org. about the insurgent sharpshooter his Allied targets call "Juba." The authentic footage of allied soldiers being killed and maimed in ambushes by the sniper--with the camera catching his act from an over-his-shoulder perspective--is one of 10 from the Islamic Army up on archive.org. Six Jubas are among the Top 10 most watched Jihadist videos, the most popular one recording 5,409 downloads.
Names of others from the Islamic Army featuring Juba: "American Hell in Iraq," "Top Ten attacks in Iraq," and "Jihad: Hidden Camera." In the non-English section, presumably the area visited by the terrorists themselves, all top 10 most viewed are Juba, recording 25,000 downloads combined.
Www.archive.org, an internet library whose goal is to create a permanent archive for things happening on the web for researchers and scholars, has become the favorite site for terrorists to host their video and propaganda films.
"I monitor several Arabic websites, this is the file host of choice for many months now for real life Jihadi propaganda," Said Casey Britton, who posts on achive.org. "Www.alneda.com which used to be the al Qaeda web site is now American owned and is directed to an international discussion forum at wwww.wincoast.com
The Jihadists favor arhive.org because a file can be posted there in near anonymity, and the site allows a direct link to the video itself. Popular You tube, by contrast, places proprietary tags on anything that's posted and at times censors controversial material. A direct post is vital to the Jihadists because the websites they link from are quickly shut down by U.S. authorities.
The 5,409 downloads for "Juba" is modest, considering the fierce debate inside the site among users--some rail at it being a platform for Islamic killers, others call the Allies invaders and the real death merchants. The argument went national in early March in the United States when the most popular TV news magazine, "60 Minutes," dedicated a segment called "Jihad.com," asking if terrorists should be allowed to use American sites to trumpet their exploits and educate and inspire eager raw recruits.
Tsunami videos, by the way, are the most popular on archive.org. The most watched has recorded 628,000 downloads.
Archiv.org has quarantined the Jihadist videos in the Iraq War Section and posted a warning on every page: "Caution, some items contain images of graphic violence or encourage violence against certain groups of individuals."
Beheadings reportedly are posted on archiv.org, although apparently not for long since they aren't easy to find. The moderators will remove video, although that clashes with the site's objectives of being a record of the web.
Juba is apparently a star of the terrorist video scene. He draws more downloads than allied military vehicles blown to bits--Muslim music blaring--or instructional videos on how to build or use weapons or men lecturing in front of maps, the camera occasionally catching the Kalashnikovs hung on the walls.
Brian Wyrick, Roy Kammerer
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