Posted by: mitch | http:// | Wed Sep 18 03:34:42 2002

There is no doubt that Mr Abu Gheith is an Al Qaeda spokesman. He appears in some of OBL's early post-9/11 videos.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22suleiman+abu+gheith%22

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Sep 18 09:40:04 2002

Of course, just because he's an Al-Qaeda spokesman doesn't mean his views are representative of Al-Qaeda policies, any more than Cheney/Rumsfeld's New American Century paper is of the Bush administration's international relations strategy, right?

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Sep 18 09:41:10 2002

Btw, here's an article on MEMRI, the "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" translation service:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,773258,00.html

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Wed Sep 18 10:56:52 2002

The PNAC paper *is* probably indicative of Bush admin philosophy. What I deplore about that Sunday Herald article are the over-the-top falsehoods it contains, which I have now seen credulously cited on about ten sites, and that's without even searching for such references.

As for MEMRI, two can play the game of running background checks; here's an ally of MEMRI claiming the Guardian editor who wrote the article himself has a conflict of interest: http://honestreporting.com/Critiques/2002/69_guardian.asp

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Wed Sep 18 11:02:56 2002

And here's the Guardian attacking honestreporting.com (there's also a similar article at the Independent by Robert Fisk, another of their targets): http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4140042,00.html

The merry-go-round of spin and counterspin is quite wearying to follow. You get to know the names and their opinions and affiliations, and it might be a minor public service to map them all out in the fashion of theyrule.net, but I feel like I have better things to do.

Here's one more article on MEMRI, which manages to say that it's slanted and imply that it's not (and I think the latter is the conclusion they want the reader to leave with): http://www.ojr.org/ojr/reviews/1017788174.php

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Sep 18 14:23:28 2002

Interesting... is there a mathematical theory for modelling disinformation and distortion? (I remember hearing something about "disinformation theory" or disinformation equations somewhere, but I can't remember where.)

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com/vm/ | Thu Sep 19 01:50:55 2002

Funnily enough, this reminds me of warbloggers. I did get one somewhat kooky letter a while back insinuating that warbloggers were actually being bankrolled by Neocons to act as agents of influence.

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Thu Sep 19 07:05:15 2002

There was a 1-page essay called "Disinformation theory" in an ACM publication, but it's a purely qualitative discussion, such as you might find in a poker guide or a seduction manual. A genuine mathematical 'disinformation theory' I think would be a branch of game theory: http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/quiggin/news/Spies0112.html http://www.earthtym.net/ref-expect.htm

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Fri Sep 20 06:06:45 2002

Footnote to the discussion of MEMRI: You may recall that the founder of akamai.com was on one of the hijacked planes. "Since Danny's death, his father, a well-known child psychologist, has chosen to devote himself to speaking and fundraising for an organization called MEMRI that provides information on the ideological workings of Islamic fundamentalists."

http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ArticlePage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article%5El1426&enZone=Culture&enVersion=0&

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Fri Sep 20 14:31:50 2002

In the context of disinformation theory, I was thinking of something more ambitious: perhaps some mathematical method for considering N items of (potentially contradictory) information, each with some sort of reliability score, and determining the degree of distortion, and the probabilities of various of the information being true/false, depending on how they interact with other information.

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Sat Sep 21 05:18:33 2002

Well, that sounds like a job for plain old Bayesian reasoning.