Who Found, Translated and Dispersed the new "bin Laden" video?

Emit

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Sun Sep-09-07 11:07 PM
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Who Found, Translated and Dispersed the new "bin Laden" video?

According to all sources about the video that I have read, SITE Intelligence Group found, translated and dispersed the video to the media. They, and other private companies like them, contract with the US Government.

As far as I can tell, As-Sahab initially put up a still image of the video on some militant website, and The SITE Intelligence Group (Search for International Terrorist Entities) found the still photo of the video, and apparently obtained the full video, although it is uncertain as to how they were able to obtain it, as all accounts indicate that they came across the advertisement of an upcoming video to be released sometime next week.

Here's SITE's website -- and info about them
http://siteinstitute.org/mission.html

An Invaluable Resource. As the public hearings of the 9-11 Commission made disturbingly clear, the U.S. government is not yet fully equipped to win the war on terror. Bureaucratic wrangling among law enforcement and intelligence agencies has crippled government efforts to apprehend terrorists and dismantle the financial networks that support them. Most government agents currently lack the training and language skills required to track the dense and convoluted financing and recruitment networks of radical Islamic terrorist groups. Because these agents traditionally depend on surveillance and classified intelligence, they have little familiarity with the full range of public sources that the SITE Institute systematically utilizes to conduct research and obtain information crucial to success in the war on terror.

Thorough and Unique Methodology. Through continuous and intensive examination of extremist websites, public records, and international media reports, as well as through undercover work on both sides of the Atlantic, the SITE Institute swiftly locates links among terrorist entities and their supporters. Once a potential terrorist entity is identified, either through SITE's ongoing internal research or via a client's specific query, SITE conducts a comprehensive investigation on the target and entities affiliated to it, scouring corporate records, tax forms, credit reports, videotapes, internet newsgroup postings, and owned websites, among other resources, for indicators of illicit activity. Such research has often yielded important leads that have been, and are continuously being, forwarded to pertinent law enforcement or government agencies, and/or information that has been used for government investigations, raids, and prosecutions, in the U.S and abroad.

Unparalleled Track Record. The SITE Institute works regularly with and provides important and often unique information to journalists, law firms pursuing civil litigation, major corporations, law enforcement, U.S. Congress, and numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), the FBI, Customs, and the Department of Justice. SITE provides clients and interested parties with well-documented and comprehensive reports on terrorist entities and the individuals and organizations supporting them. Excerpts from these reports frequently make their way into legal papers filed against terrorist entities and their supporters.

Educational Mission. The SITE Institute is guided by the principle that everyone must understand our enemy in order to prevail in the war on terrorism. In addition to its research and investigative activities, SITE seeks to educate the public about the history, ideology, tactics, and methods of Islamic terrorists. SITE Institute staff frequently gives expert interviews and provides information on terrorism to major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Time Magazine. They have repeatedly appeared on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Fox News Channel, NPR, BBC, and a variety of other national and international television and radio networks.

Experienced and Dedicated Staff. The staff at SITE has years of experience in the research and analysis of terrorist networks, including how terrorist groups receive and transmit funding; how and where recruitment for new terrorist operatives occurs; where the money comes from; and how these groups communicate. SITE researchers are fluent in several languages including Arabic, French, German, Spanish, and Hebrew, and they maintain an unparalleled worldwide network of contacts and resources.

Our Staff

Rita Katz, Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute, has studied, tracked, and analyzed international terrorists and their financial operations for several years. Since well before September 11, she has personally briefed government officials, including former terrorism czar Richard Clarke and his staff in the White House, as well as investigators in the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security on the financing and recruitment networks of the terrorist movement. Many of her leads have prompted the government to investigate and take legal action against individuals and organizations suspected of ties to terrorism.

Before founding the SITE Institute in 2002, Ms. Katz served as Research Director of the Investigative Project in Washington, DC. Born in Iraq and a graduate of the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, Katz speaks both Arabic and Hebrew with native fluency.

Ms. Katz is the author of TERRORIST HUNTER: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (HarperCollins, 2003). Her commentary on terrorism issues frequently appears in prominent media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, 60 Minutes, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.

Josh Devon, Senior Analyst and co-founder of the SITE Institute, focuses on the research and analysis of the global terrorist network. He has consulted on terrorism-related investigations for several government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. Mr. Devon has published numerous articles on terrorism, including the extensive use of the Internet by terrorist groups and their followers worldwide. He appears regularly in the media. Mr. Devon has a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Master's Degree in International Relations, concentrating in Middle East Studies, at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Here's an excerpt from a long article about SITE and it's founder, Rita Katz, from the New Yorker:

~snip~

Traditionally, intelligence has been filtered through government agencies, such as the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., which gather raw data and analyze it, and the government decides who sees the product of their work and when. Katz, who is the head of an organization called the Search for International Terrorist Entities, or SITE Institute, has made it her business to upset that monopoly. She and her researchers mine online sources for intelligence, which her staff translates and sends out by e-mail to a list of about a hundred subscribers.

Katz’s client list includes people in the government who are presumably frustrated by how long it takes to get information through official channels; it also includes people in corporate security and in the media, who rarely get much useful material from the C.I.A. She has worked with prosecutors on more than a dozen terrorism investigations, and many American officers in Iraq rely on Katz’s e-mails to, for example, brief their troops on the designs for explosives that are passed around terrorist Web sites. “You’re thrown into Baghdad, and there are a million different groups out there you’ve never heard of claiming responsibility for attacks,” Robert Worth, a Times reporter who used Katz’s service during the eighteen months he spent in Iraq, told me. “Rita really knows what she’s talking about—who’s responsible for attacks, what’s a legitimate terrorist organization and what’s not.” Because many reporters rebroadcast her information, it can reach the public before people in the government have had a chance to evaluate it; her organization’s work is cited in the Times and the Washington Post about twice a month.

~snip~

“Much as Al Jazeera underplays terrorist threats, the SITE Institute at times overhypes them,” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit, said.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529fa_fact

Here's info on the woman who runs SITE, Rita Katz:

“What makes Rita unique is her background,” Peter Probst, a terrorism consultant and retired C.I.A. officer who works with Katz, told me. “Because of what she’d been through, she understood the threat earlier and better than most of us.”

Katz was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1963, one of four children of a wealthy Jewish businessman. In 1968, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the Baath government, with Saddam Hussein as its head of security, encouraged attacks against Iraqi Jews. Some Jews from prominent families were arrested and charged with spying for Israel, among them Katz’s father. After he was imprisoned, his wife and children were transported to Baghdad and kept under house arrest in a stone hut. Katz’s father was convicted in a military tribunal and executed, in 1969, with eight other Jews and five non-Jews, in a public hanging in Baghdad’s central square. Hundreds of thousands of cheering Iraqis attended; the government offered free transportation to people from the provinces, and belly dancers performed for the crowd. Katz was six years old.

After the family had been living in the hut for months, Katz’s mother drugged the guards and escaped with the children. By pretending to be the wife of a well-known Iraqi general, a woman she faintly resembled, she got the family first to the Iranian border and then to Israel. They settled in a small seaside town called Bat-Yam. Katz did her military service in the Israel Defense Forces after high school, and studied politics and history at Tel Aviv University. She married a medical student, and went into business with her mother, manufacturing clothes; Katz handled sales. In 1997, Katz’s husband won a fellowship to do research in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health, and they moved to Washington with their three children. (They later had a fourth.)

The particulars of her biography—her father’s execution, her escape from Iraq, and her education in Israel—give Katz, in the eyes of some in the counterterrorism community, a kind of bionic character, as if she had been designed to hunt down terrorists. Her friends and allies are awed by her background; her critics find in it reason to be suspicious of her motives. Katz claims to attach no special meaning to it. “I would have to think about that,” she said, when I asked her if her early life had made her particularly sensitive to the terrorist threat. Later, she told me, “I know that the people who killed my father aren’t the same as the jihadis, but obviously I would never have got interested in the politics of this part of the world if it weren’t for his execution.” (She also said, “When you grow up in a place like Iraq, you understand maybe a little bit about how Arabs think, and also what they are capable of.”)

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529fa_fact

Apparently, IntelCenter was the second group that found this video at or around the same timeframe:

The advertisement was first found on the Web by two U.S. groups that monitor terror messages, the SITE Institute and IntelCenter.

http://www.plnewsforum.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/23175/P0 /

Here's some info on Intelcenter:

Who is the "Intelcenter" that releases the "Al Qaeda" tapes?

IntelCenter is a US company founded in 1993. Ben N. Venzke serves as the company's CEO. It's stated purpose is to "study terrorist groups and other threat actors and disseminating that information in a timely manner to those who can act on it. We look at capabilities and intentions, warnings and indicators, operational characteristics and a wide variety of other points in order to better understand how to interdict terrorist operations and reduce the likelihood of future attacks."

Terrorist Media

April 2006: A video featuring Qaeda operative Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he said the US military had "seen only 'loss, disaster and misfortune' in Iraq", "was first obtained by IntelCenter".<1>.
In June 2006, a video of "20th hijacker" Fawaz al-Nashimi, who died in a shootout in Saudi Arabia in 2004, was released by IntelCenter".<2>
On 30 September 2006, IntelCenter made available an 18-minute Al-Qaeda tape in which Al-Zawahiri called Bush "a deceitful charlatan".<3>.
On 2 October 2006, IntelCenter and Venzke were again referenced as a source in an article detailing a silent Al Qaeda video recently released in which two 9/11 hijackers, Muhammad Atta, and Zaid Al-Jarrah, read their last will and testaments<4>.
On 4 July 2007, an al-Zawahiri video was provided by al-Qaeda's As-Sahab Media to IntelCenter. <5> Another US-based intelligence group, SITE, "said it had obtained the tape ahead of its release on the internet by militant web sites".<6> The video was "first reported by IntelCenter and SITE".

The Pearlman tape was once again obtained by the IntelCenter group, a U.S. government contractor, and it's head Ben Venzke has given the tape credence in media interviews concerning the story.
In our previous groundbreaking expose, we unveiled the ties between Intelcenter, a group that regularly 'obtains' Al-Qaeda tapes and the Pentagon.
Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter were behind the October 2006 release of the "laughing hijackers" tape that showed Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah allegedly attending a 2000 Al-Qaeda meeting and reading their last will and testament.

Segments of the video that were interspersed with footage of the "laughing hijackers," Jarrah and Atta, showing Bin Laden giving a speech to an audience in Afghanistan on January 8 2000, were culled from what terror experts described as surveillance footage taken by a "security agency."

~snip~

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/pol/416670197.html

And here's a bit on some other groups like these:

June 18, 2006
Reporter's Notebook
Mideast Analysis, Fast and Furious
By ROBERT F. WORTH
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.

~snip~

Most of these analysts are unknown to the reading public. But that is changing. Last month, Rita Katz, founder of the SITE Institute, was profiled in The New Yorker. (A terrorist Web site that her group monitors promptly posted a link to the article.)

~snip~

On this front, Memri, the largest translation service, may have drawn the most criticism. It was founded in 1998 by Col. Yigal Carmon, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli military intelligence and later advised two Israeli prime ministers. Its 60 staff members scan Arab and Muslim media and send translations by e-mail to 100,000 subscribers, including journalists and officials. Critics have long said it focuses on translating the most dangerous-sounding material.

~snip~

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/weekinreview/18worth.html?ei=5070&en=3aeb3d88081e3157&ex=1189483200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1189397213-dlrykUZkY5Cs/XIwwsCrYQ