Five prominent Web forums for jihadist conversation and terrorist propaganda have been mysteriously unavailable for more than a week, according to a report in today’s Washington Post. A frustrated jihadist site administrator fumed: “The media arena is witnessing a vicious attack by the cross and its helpers on the jihadi media castles.” The lengthy blackouts—the first forum went down on March 22—have all the hallmarks of a cyberattack, though the Post quotes unnamed American officials disavowing U.S. responsibility.

Whoever is behind the outage, the incident illustrates a point specialists have been making lately: The Internet is not the open avenue for terrorists we once assumed it was. As Manuel R. Torres Soriano points out in a new article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the Web is a two-way street. In 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (an Al Qaeda affiliate) attempted to publish step by step instructions for making a pipe bomb using kitchen ingredients. The recipe was to appear in the inaugural issue of Inspire, its English-language Webzine. But when would-be jihadists downloaded Inspire, they found a bowdlerized and garbled version of the original. Computer code lifted from a Web recipe for “The Best Cupcakes in America” had replaced the deadly bomb plans. Media outlets dubbed the incident “Operation Cupcake”; British cyber spooks had reportedly hijacked Al Qaeda’s flashy new magazine. (The

COMMENT (0) >>

John Lewis Gaddis labored as George F. Kennan’s authorized biographer for more than 30 years. And that was while Kennan, who died at age 101 in 2005, was still living. Appearing last week at the Wilson Center to discuss George F. Kennan: An American Life, Gaddis marveled: “I was Kennan’s Boswell longer than Boswell was Johnson’s Boswell.”

Gaddis spent another six years finishing what became a 784-page tome. In his review for The Wilson Quarterly, Martin Walker called it “as near a definitive biography as we are likely to get of one of the most singular and significant Americans of his century.”

Gaddis, a former Wilson Center fellow who is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, focused in his talk on the surprising impact of classic works of literature and scholarship on the prolific Kennan’s ideas. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), for example, figures in Kennan’s famous

COMMENT (0) >>