Pentagon and Intel Community Trying (Again!) to Counter ISIS Propaganda Machine

Eric Schmitt

February 17, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is revamping its effort to counter the Islamic State’s propaganda machine, acknowledging that the terrorist group has been far more effective in attracting new recruits, financing and global notoriety than the United States and its allies have been in thwarting it.

At the heart of the plan is expanding a tiny State Department agency, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, to harness all the existing attempts at countermessaging by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.

The center would also coordinate and amplify similar messaging by foreign allies and nongovernment agencies, as well as by prominent Muslim academics, community leaders and religious scholars who oppose the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, and who may have more credibility with ISIS’ target audience of young men and women than the American government. 

With the Islamic State and its supporters producing as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media responses every day, American officials acknowledge they have a tough job ahead to blunt the group’s digital momentum in the same way a United States-led air campaign has slowed ISIS’ advances on the battlefield in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Syria.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said by telephone on Monday. Until now, he said, the efforts to counter ISIS could have been better coordinated.

Many of the plan’s details are still being worked out, but administration officials are expected to describe at least its broad outlines during three days of meetings, sponsored by the White House and beginning Tuesday, intended to showcase efforts underway in the United States and abroad to combat what the authorities call violent extremism.

Senior administration officials on Monday described the conference, coming in the wake of extremist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, as a way to help communities counter the efforts of groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda. President Obama will speak twice during the meetings, which are expected to draw local leaders from around the United States and foreign ministers from more than 60 nations.

Created at the direction of Mr. Obama in 2011, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications has coordinated countermessaging against extremist groups, mainly aligned with Al Qaeda, and devised ways to counter extremists’ narratives. It also employs so-called digital outreach specialists fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali to counter terrorist propaganda and misinformation about the United States on the Internet in real time.

The same analysts also post messages on English-language websites that jihadists use to recruit, raise money and promote their cause.

The online messaging has aimed to create a competing narrative that strikes an emotional chord with potential militants weighing whether to join a violent extremist group. One online image two years ago, for instance, showed photographs of three American men who traveled to Somalia and died there, including Omar Hammami, a young man from Alabama who became an infamous Islamist militant. The accompanying message reads, “They came for jihad but were murdered by Al Shabab.”

Another image showed a young man weeping over a coffin. The message read, “How can slaughtering the innocent be the right path?”

Each of the online posts carried a warning: “Think again. Turn away.”

Last June, Islamic State supporters warned fighters to beware of the center’s Twitter account and not to interact with it.

Mr. Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, said the new campaign against the Islamic State would carry out strategies now routinely employed by many businesses and individuals to elevate their digital footprints, including resharing news items or opinion articles on Twitter, forwarding hypertext links and taking other steps to optimize content online.

It would use more than 350 State Department Twitter accounts, combining embassies, consulates, media hubs, bureaus and individuals, as well as similar accounts operated by the Pentagon, the Homeland Security Department and foreign allies. The State Department used this approach in condemning the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Mr. Stengel said.

Key points in the terrorist group’s rapid growth and the slowing of its advance as it faces international airstrikes and local resistance.

“These guys aren’t BuzzFeed; they’re not invincible in social media,” Mr. Stengel said.

Skeptics of the new campaign voiced concerns that the program is an attempt by the White House to end a long-simmering turf war with the counterterrorism center’s director, Alberto Fernandez, and exercise more control over the kinds of messages that are produced and coordinated with domestic and international partners.

Other officials questioned whether even a newly empowered center at the State Department would be up to the task. Operating the center on a shoestring budget of about $5 million a year, Mr. Fernandez, a respected Middle East specialist and career Foreign Service officer, and his supporters have long complained that neither the State Department nor the White House fully supported or properly financed the center’s activities.

“After its first year or two, it was never taken seriously and got little support from higher-ups,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department terrorism coordinator who is at Dartmouth.

Mr. Fernandez, who is retiring in April, declined to comment for this article.

The new director will be Rashad Hussain, a Muslim American who has close ties to the White House and is currently the special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

“Its main shortcoming was that it operated too independently and rarely integrated its efforts with others in the federal government focused on countering violent extremism,” said John D. Cohen, a former top counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security who is now a professor at Rutgers.

“When the U.S. government works with faith communities, including the Arab-American and Muslim community, to prevent violence at the local level in the U.S., that is not only effective but it also serves to counter the narrative we are at war with Islam,” Mr. Cohen said.

Under the new plan, the digital outreach teams will continue, but a new entity called the Information Coordination Cell, staffed by intelligence and Pentagon analysts among others, will be responsible for the broader coordination functions. With just 30 people in that cell, and 50 more in the center, the overall effort will still be quite small.

That is why the center will need to leverage “a network of networks” to be effective in preventing or mitigating extremist violence, Mr. Stengel and other American officials said.

“Unfortunately, as we all know, the government is probably not the best platform to try to communicate with the set of actors who are potentially vulnerable to this kind of propaganda and this kind of recruitment,” Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.

“We try to find ways to stimulate this kind of counternarrative, this kind of countermessaging, without having a U.S. government hand in it,” Mr. Rasmussen continued. “People who are attracted to this don’t go to the government for their guidance on what to do, not the U.S. government and certainly not their governments in the Middle East.”