Al Qaeda Media Massacre

Something you don't think about until someone points it out to you.

August 27, 2008: Over the last few months, al Qaedas Internet propaganda department has been virtually destroyed. The most visible evidence of that is the sharp decline in al Qaeda press releases (often accompanied by vids of attacks on U.S. or Iraqi troops). Last year, there were as many as 200 of these items a month. Over the past few months, this fell over 90 percent.
The reason for this sharp drop was the physical capture of the al Qaeda news and production staff, along with their PCs and data files. Over the last few months, several dozen of these specialists were captured or killed, and nearly a terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) of raw video, sound files, documents and software was captured. This put many key terrorist PR operations out of business. This in turn led to fewer cash donations, or volunteers for combat, or suicide missions. Moreover, the sudden collapse of the al Qaeda PR operation caused the Arab media to move towards more coverage of the Iraqi government (which was now distributing more of its own very professional combat videos).