Pentagon mistakes EA game for terrorist agitprop?

There are reports that the Pentagon and defense contractor SAIC in early May showed footage from a standard add-on package to the Electronic Arts popular Battlefield 2 video game, claiming it was a clever al Qaeda manipulation of that game that was being used for propaganda.

The bubbling controversy stems from reports about testimony given to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on May 4 by Dan Devlin, described as a DoD public diplomacy specialist, and SAIC executive Eric Michael. The testimony, which is available online, is actually a fascinating read, with experts talking to Congress about the myriad ways that terrorist groups are using technology and the Internet to spread their message, and how woefully prepared the U.S. was and is to counter the efforts of nimble and tech savvy terrorists.

As part of the talk, it appears, House members were shown video footage from terrorist propaganda films as well as a video game that allowed the player to play the part of jihadi’s taking shots at U.S. troops. Not surprisingly, it was that latter aspect that the media picked up on in its coverage with headlines like “Islamists using video games in youth appeal.”

“Tech-savvy militants from al Qaeda and other groups have modified video war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, Defense Department official and contractors told Congress,” the Reuters article on the testimony reads, in part.

Now it turns out that may not be true. According to a May 11th post on the gamepolitics blog, the footage shown to House members was from an official Battlefield 2 expansion pack called Special Forces ($17.99). Playing rebels and insurgents isn’t a dastardly mod by al Qaeda operatives, it’s just a feature of the game (dude!). But wait…it gets worse. Gamepolitics readers picked up on another detail from the Reutuers story, which noted that the footage shown to House members included voice over narration about “infidels coming to my village in BlackHawk helicopters.” That little bit, it turns out, may have been taken from the intro to the satirical South Park Movie Team America World Police — a hillarious send up of U.S. miliatrism.

Gamepolitics tracked down the person who they claim married the Team America voice over narration to the Battlefield 2 footage and released it online — a 25 year old Dutch Morroccan named Samir who uses the online name Sonic Jihad (he got the name from a song by the rapper Paris.)

Here’s Samir’s dark motivation for creating the video, from the Gamepolitics e-mail interview:

“Yes I am Muslim. But my ethnic background and religion have nothing to do with this video. My political views are like most of the people of Europe. We think that Team America IS the WORLD police 😉 I live in the west, I love the west and I do love American culture. Especially rap such as Eazy-E, NWA, Public Enemy, T-KASH and especially…. Paris! Did my views effect my choice? Nah man we were just making videos for fun. Just look at the [BF2] community, there are lots of videos made.”

Great.

TechWatch put calls in to SAIC, the House Committee and the Pentagon. As yet, there hasn’t been any response on whether House Intelligence Committee members will be updated on the true nature of the “al Qaeda” video game component of their briefing. We would hope they would.

Beyond that, it seems that there are a couple sad things about this episode. First of all, it’s more than a little ironic that a presentation about the U.S.’s woeful inability to keep up with the terrorists and understand what they’re doing online ends up illustrating exactly how clueless the Pentagon and its private sector partners are about what are and are not online terrorist threats. I mean, could nobody at SAIC or the DoD have loaded up Battlefield 2 to see whether the footage they picked up off an “extremeist” site was evidence of al Qaeda manipulation or standard game functionality? Bin Laden has truly won a victory if even our own military and intelligence specialists are so in awe of him and his network that we uncritically ascribe anything smacking of anti-Americanism to him and his minions– after all, they get to take credit for a lot of stuff they didn’t even do!

I think it’s also sad that it was the video game bit (and now, maybe the gaffe over the origin of the game footage) that grabbed the headlines, not the actual content of the presentation, which was a lucid and insightful discussion of what the U.S. must do to counter the influence of jihadists online, with passages like this one:

“In order for U.S. government information operations to become more effective, more specifically focused and better tailored to the variety of audiences we seek to inform and influence, we must obtain a far better understanding of our enemy and the constituencies that our adversaries have already proven effective in reaching and motivating. “If you know the enemy and know yourself,” Sun Tzu famously advised centuries ago, “you need not fear the results of a

hundred battles.” The war on terrorism has now lasted longer than America’s involvement in World War II: yet, even today we cannot claim with any credibility, much less, acuity to have fulfilled Sun Tzu’s timeless admonition.