Psychological Warfare Goes Online

Using the Internet is not a new mode of operation for terrorist organizations. Many groups, including al Qaeda, have long used it as a way to recruit followers, raise money, plan attacks and communicate with each other.

A few weeks ago, a terror group calling itself the Green Brigade offered video footage of the murder of an Italian hostage to Arab TV station al-Jazeera. The editors chose not to air it because of its graphic content.

Now the terrorists cut out the middleman to get their message to the public: They published the video of the beheading of 26-year-old Nick Berg online, making it available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

Similar videos, including footage of Chechnyan terrorists playing soccer with the severed heads of Russian soldiers, have been published online before. But the West has largely ignored them until now, says Udo Ulfkotte, a German terrorism expert.

"It's not a new strategy, it's always been part of psychological warfare," he says, adding that a video of the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl was the first time Westerners began paying more attention to such images on the Internet.

An act of revenge?

Ulfkotte suggests the footage of Berg's killing mainly served to satisfy the Arab world's hunger for revenge after seeing pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.

Others agree that the video was intended to provoke cheers and recruit sympathizers in the Arab world while shocking the U.S. and its allies.

"In the Arab world, this is seen as taking an eye for an eye," says Kai Hirschmann, the deputy director of the Institute for Terrorism Research in Essen in western Germany. He describes the video as a skillful response that served a specific purpose. "These people aren't stupid," he says. "They wanted to make a point that's noticed in the West. It's a response to the [torture] pictures that cannot be repeated regularly."

"It's a piece of the mosaic that worked in the current situation," he says. "A bomb attack would not have worked as a reponse to the torturing."

But Col. Nick Pratt (Ret.), the director of the Marshall Center Program on Terrorism and Security Studies in southern Germany, says he doesn't interpret the video as a direct response to the torture pictures.

"This has nothing to do with the prison atrocities," Pratt says. "This is a great example of psychological warfare. They can spread this information and show the world how helpless we are."

Protecting freedom on the Internet

As a result, self-regulation of the media is the only way to deal with this "war of pictures" as it is technically impossible to police the Web, explains Rainer Kuhlen, a computer science professor and expert on ethics and the Internet at Constance University in southern Germany.

"We'll have to live with this," he says, adding that the proliferation of pornography over the Internet raised similar questions in the past. "Without a doubt, these pictures are weapons of the most gruesome kind and they are meant to function as weapons. But that doesn't make 'normal' war weapons and cultural humiliation any more ethically acceptable."

Pratt believes that the West has so far focused too much on future threats of cyber terrorism, such as breaking up airline schedules and attacking bank systems and failed to recognize the significance of psychological warfare via the Web.

While there is little that could be done to prevent the spread of similar videos in the future, U.S. officials could do more to counter them. "We have to use the Internet better ourselves," he says, citing as an example pictures of Iraqis demonstrating in front of Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where the alleged torture by U.S. soldiers took place.

"You have to show that it's now safe for them to demonstrate, which is something they couldn't do under Saddam Hussein," Pratt says. "You have to show how democracy is starting to grow."

Similarly, U.S. officials should make public the trials of military personnel accused of the torturing: "You have to put that out there and show how the military cleans out a mess."

No Mogadishu

While Hirschmann doesn't expect such isolated killings to become more frequent in the future, Pratt says this depended on the media reaction to the Berg video. "If there were no reaction, you probably wouldn't see it again," he says.

Analysts agree, however, that unlike the image of a dead U.S. soldier getting dragged through the streets of the Somalian capital Mogadishu in 1993 that ultimately led to an American pull-out, the video of Berg's beheading was unlikely to provoke the same in Iraq.

"The stakes in Iraq are much greater than in Somalia," Pratt maintains. "What we have to do is make this country a democracy. If we can't do that, this problem is going to be there."