Excerpt:
"When are these crusaders gonna realize they can't win?," Baltimore bomb plotter Antonio Martinez boasted on his Facebook page on August 4th. "How many more lives are they willing to sacrifice. ALLAHUAKBAR." As details emerge about the plot to bomb a military recruitment center in Baltimore, MD, one thing is clear—Facebook is having a coming out party as the new go-to place for Jihadi recruitment, radicalization, and planning.
According to an internal DHS memorandum from early 2010, "jihadi supporters and mujahideen are increasingly using Facebook, one of the largest, most popular and diverse social networking sites, both in the United States and globally, to propagate operational information." While the DHS report, reported on earlier today by FoxNews.com, provides an academic study of terrorist groups' infiltration of social networking sites, an IPT analysis of the Facebook accounts of Martinez and his friends and associates shows that the threat is very real.
Facebook features pages devoted to convicted and suspected terrorists, radical clerics, and terrorist organizations. One page, dedicated to Faisal Shahzad, who's now serving a life sentence for trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, has been "liked" by 30 people. Another page for Omar Hammami—aka Abu Mansoor al-Amriki—a Daphne, Ala., native now serving as an operational commander for al-Shabaab in Somalia, has been "liked" by 26 people. Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader and spiritual advisor to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has 24 supporters. Al-Awlaki has been designated by the United States government as a terrorist; Hammami has been indicted for his close personal links to the designated, al-Shabaab.