(Imagine a mirror-image Arab news organisation combing the US local newspapers for editorials demanding that we kill them all or forcibly convert them to Christianity. They wouldn't have to look far with the likes of Anne Coulter about, would they?)
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?
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
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
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
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.)
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.
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
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&
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.
Well, that sounds like a job for plain old Bayesian reasoning.
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