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By Root 1115 0

It makes this ‘real’ and ‘warm’ at least in virtual reality, where complete strangers exchange intimate thoughts in Al Qaeda chatrooms such as ‘The Fortress’, ‘The Fields’ and ‘Reform’, none of which can be accessed without the original Arabic titles. How intimate they are can be gauged from the fact that Anthony Garcia, one of the British jihadists jailed after Operation Crevice, ‘met’, and became engaged to, Zenab Armend Pisheh, a student in Minnesota, in an internet chatroom. Associates of Garcia, whom she never physically met either, soon asked her to wire US$5,000 to support a trip they were planning to an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan.103 The internet also provides a combination of nationhood and morality. The tens of thousands of Islamist sites represent the electronic birth of a nation, because they provide the Islamist equivalent of anthems, flags, patriotic poetry, heroes, martyrs and bloodcurdling injunctions. These sites also increasingly supply the fatwas which license homicidal and suicidal violence, giving the jihadists their peculiar code of ethics which turns homicidal suicides into martyrs. As Mohammed al-Massari, a Saudi dissident based in London, explains on his jihadist internet forum Tajdeed.net, ‘No jihadi will do any action until he is certain this action is morally acceptable.’ The acceptable includes killing innocent civilian bystanders, who will simply go to heaven or hell as they were meant to anyway. Killing children is not an issue either, as they are not accountable for sin before the onset of puberty. Gone straight to heaven, they will instantly mature to twenty and enjoy the same virgins that the martyrs get. Taxpayers and voters are all liable to be killed since they support enemies of Islam. As Khalid Kelly, a convert of Irish extraction, puts it: ‘We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target.’104

Wits speak of the net as ‘Sheikh Google’. These websites and blogs are simultaneously authoritative and demotic, part of a world where Everyman’s thoughts, be they banal or crazed, assume the respectability conferred on the written word. The technology enables a reversion to a pre-Gutenberg world, where anyone can chop and change a key text, rather as medieval scribes inserted their own thoughts between the lines or in the margins of manuscripts. They can be blocked, or filled with porn, by intelligence agencies and freelance counter-terrorist cybernauts, but as the jihadists have commandeered even the servers of the Arkansas Department of Highways and Transportation to bury their trail, this can seem like a losing battle. Incredibly, Al Qaeda’s own television outfit, As-Sahab or ‘The Cloud’, managed to relay itself for a few months via a Centcom satellite conveying orders to US forces in Iraq.105 The ‘television service’ consists of a webcam and a mini-editing suite installed in the back of a van, with more fancy technology available in Lahore. Trusted Arab or Afghan cameramen are also brought in to record major statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri or the latest front-man, Azzam the American. The films are copied on to CDs and then passed on through several hands to the television station Al-Jazeera.106

In Milan Ahmed and his target watched the internet for hours, taking special delight in al-Zarqawi’s beheading of Nicholas Berg, a twenty-six-year-old American businessman. ‘Watch closely. This is the policy of the sword. Slaughter him! Cut his head off! God is great!’ cried Ahmed. Judging by his actions, al-Zarqawi was addicted to the coppery smell of blood. There was a special audiotape, the one that ‘enters inside your veins’, which Ahmed repeatedly played to the Madrid jihadists until they had it memorised by heart. Ahmed was especially proud of Oxygen Phone Manager 2 software which enables a computer to command remotely all the functions of a Nokia mobile phone, as it presumably did with the detonators used at Atocha station. In the course of this long conversation, Ahmed lowered his voice and said: