Catching Terrorists Via The Net

Fire of Liberty

Though I generally fall far more to the right than the whole staff at the New Yorker, I generally head over to the web-site from time to time to read most pieces written by Jeffrey Goldberg or find some interesting profiles of writers/thinkers, reviews of books, literature, food and whatever else catches my eye. Well, today I decided to try my luck and see if I could find anything interesting and to my surprise I stumbled across a great article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Rita Katz and her efforts to take down Islamic terrorists via her organization Search for International Terrorist Entities(SITE). According to Wallace-Wells, Katz and her colleagues at SITE comb the various Islamic Terrorists chat-rooms and countless other sites in an effort to discovering the techniques, technical know-how, thinking and plans of the various jihadists who intend to kill American citizens, soldiers as well as our allies/friends throughout the world. Basically Katz and SITE provide our intelligence agencies with a extra hand in deciphering the massive reams of information that terrorists are continually producing on the information highway thus making it much easier to catch terrorists at a much greater rate than we currently do. Though a lot of individuals in the intelligence community tend to look down on Katz due to her lack of "intelligence experience"(This just shows you how the CIA is so protective of their turf that they're unwilling to think that folks from other areas of our society can track down terrorists even better than they can.)they still can't ignore the fact that sometimes the private sector filled with devoted individuals have a better chance of combining through valuable information and deciphering what the terrorists are up to compared to a bloated bureaucracy like the CIA and the DNI have become.

I'm glad that we have private entity like SITE under the hands of Katz especially when our intelligence agencies are having a hard time finding individuals who speak fluent Arabic and understand the way of the Arab world(Who see the Islamic terrorists as a great threat rather than the academic status quo of Islamic terrorists being "misunderstood individuals who have endured years of Western colonialism"). I have to say that you couldn't find a more qualified individual than Katz to do the job of searching for dangerous terrorists especially after you read the following:

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.").

So if you want to read a good and lengthy piece on on an individual and her associates who work day and night tracking the various Islamic terrorists who threaten our lives and way of life then I'd say check out Benjamin Wallace-Wells piece "Private Jihad" in the New Yorker. Now I'm all for going after terrorists via the long end of the law but I still prefer that we kill the terrorists dead in their tracks and prevent them from returning to the battlefield. I can find a good gem every once in a while and I think I found one.

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Also check out Katz's book Terrorism Hunter to learn more about how she goes about taking down terrorists.