Deciding who to believe about the Mideast

Readers of this space know that I have substantial misgivings about the flow of news from the Middle East. Specifically, I have often questioned how my journalist colleagues can operate amid that chaos: who to contact, which story to trust, how to confirm it, and, from a practical viewpoint, how they secure the financial resources to both do their jobs, plus buy their way out of trouble when it inevitably arises.

Look a bit deeper, however, and you will discover that socalled independent journalists are providing little of the feverish reporting in the current rush to war. In fact, a disproportionate amount of “jihadi intelligence” originates from a single source: a for- profit, Washington, D. C.- based organization called SITE Intelligence Institute, an acronym for Search for International Terrorist Entities.

Never heard of it? Well, you’re probably familiar with its work. Remember those blurry Osama bin Laden videos? SITE brought us those. Beheadings, including the current crop? Likewise. And remarkably, SITE has a history of revealing these documents in advance of when they appear on jihadist websites.

SITE presents itself as an open- source monitor. It claims to use a variety of techniques to penetrate Internet- based terrorist sites, then reports on their most heinous aspects. Its tiny, multilingual staff supposedly lurks on sites that purport to show, for example, how to build suicide bombs, and elsewhere discovers what terror plots are in the offing.

SITE then sells this information to private and government clients, and, probably more importantly, much of it winds up being retailed in full by various front line media.

You can see how it works by perusing SITE’s website, where they handily post links to mainstream stories in which SITE itself played a key informational role. Consider this report by NBC, quoted here in its entirety: “Authorities believe they have killed the leader of a group of al Qaeda militants known as Khorasan. The SITE monitoring service released a still photo of Mohsin Alfadhi and said various Jihadist Twitter accounts made unconfirmed reports of his death. They said he was killed by a U. S. air strike in Syria. U. S. officials said Khorasan posed an immediate threat to the West and was close to executing a plot against U. S. or European targets.”

Note the seemingly deliberate slapdash reporting. “Authorities believe” is perhaps the most pernicious weasel wordage available today, right up there with “U. S. officials said.” Other SITE- sourced language to watch: “linked to” or the even less certain, “has potential links with.” Then there’s that egregious phrase that infects most contemporary reporting: “believed to be.” Of course, there’s also the classic fallback, used in this case: “unconfirmed reports.”

Given that this style of reporting has become stock in trade, and that SITE’s information is rarely challenged, you might think we’d ask a few more questions. Many observers before me have done so, though to little avail when it comes to discouraging people from swallowing SITE’s stories whole.

SITE was founded in 2002 by its current leader, Rita Katz. She was born in 1963 to a wealthy Jewish businessman in Basra, Iraq, who in 1969 was publicly executed in Baghdad for allegedly being an Israeli spy. The remaining Katz family fled to Israel, where she eventually served in the military and studied Middle East affairs. In 1997, she moved to the U. S., and shortly thereafter, joined a private research group, where as an Arab speaker, she infiltrated a variety of Islamic organizations, often wearing a burka and a wire.

With such a traumatized background, is it reasonable to accept that SITE’s reporting is both complete and even- handed toward the Muslim world?

As news consumers, it behooves us to understand that the word propaganda is not some dusty old term from the Second World War. In fact, we live in one of the most propagandized periods yet known, where it is more difficult to trust official sources than ever before. Think about that as Canada ponders delivering death from above in Syria.