Lone website that 'finds ISIS link'

Rita Katz

Since the September 28 murder of Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella in Dhaka's diplomatic zone, one website seems to have taken it upon itself to link Bangladesh with ISIS.

Rita Katz, director of SITE Intelligence Group, has repeatedly posted in her official twitter account and the group's web page that ISIS claimed responsibility for the September 28 murder of Tavella, the October 3 killing of Japanese citizen Kunio Hoshi and Saturday's Hossaini Dalan blast.

Katz never mentioned exactly where and how ISIS, also known as IS, made the claims. Media outlets around the world had to report the claims citing SITE Intelligence Group's postings alone.

Normally terrorist outfits claim responsibilities for any attack through their own media platforms, some jihadi sites, or by sending releases to the media.

For example, ISIS claimed responsibility for the September 2 bombings at a Yemeni mosque on its social media, CNN reported.

The group broadcast a statement on its al-Bayan radio station to claim responsibility for the May 5 Texas attack, according to the Guardian.

The 2014 beheading of American journalist James Foley was produced and distributed by Al Hayat Media Center, a media outlet of IS. It was posted on YouTube.

There are numerous such examples, but in Bangladesh's case, the “IS claims” come only through the SITE intelligence.

'NOT AUTHENTIC'

It is true that over the past few months, Bangladeshi law enforcers have arrested some people for their alleged connection with the IS and some of them are under trial.

But the government and investigators maintain that there is no IS link with the two murders and the attack on the Ashura programme. 

About two hours after the Hossaini Dalan blast in the early hours of Saturday, SITE tweeted: “the 3rd operation claimed by #ISIS in #Bangladesh in less than a month.” Rita Katz re-tweeted it at 5:35am.

The tweets drew questions from social media users, mostly expressing their doubts about its authenticity. One user commented, “I can't understand why IS first inform [sic] you. Why they can't give any status or media release?

Talking to the media yesterday, Monirul Islam, joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, said IS makes its claims publicly and those can be found on the web. He said investigators did not find the claims that SITE attributed to IS anywhere else.

DMP Commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia said the IS claims as reported in the SITE page was not authentic.

He also claimed that they contacted Rita Katz through email, asking her the sources of those claims.

However, Katz on October 16 tweeted, “I was never asked by DB [Detective Branch of police] to provide the links to tweets of the #ISIS claims, nor did they directly contact me.”

But this is not the first time that Katz or the SITE is under question.

On September 4, 2014, the UK-based Independent newspaper ran a report headlined: Who are the SITE Intelligence Group that distributed the Sotloff video before the jihadist?

“The publication of a video showing the murder of American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff surprised even the terrorists who supported the killing. Why? Because a little-known research group known as SITE Intelligence spotted the video (and alerted the media) before even the jihadis did,” read the report.

ISIS reportedly beheaded Sotloff on September 2, 2014. The American journalist appeared in the terrorist group's propaganda video of James Foley's beheading.

Foley was beheaded reportedly in August 2014 “in a response” to US airstrikes in Iraq, thus becoming the first American killed by the Islamic State.

In the first video, the executioners threatened Sotloff would meet the same fate if the US military did not comply with the terrorists' demands.

SITE made the decision to publish the Sotloff beheading video though its authenticity was yet to be confirmed.

Numerous mainstream news outlets in possession of it declined to release the video, likely influenced by the overwhelming negative public reaction to the sharing of images of Foley's beheading, which quickly and inescapably proliferated on social media before YouTube and Twitter removed them, reports International Business Times.  

SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities) is a for-profit US-based consultancy group that monitors and tracks the activities of “international terrorists and the global jihadist network”.

A profile of Rita Katz by the New Yorker magazine in 2006 described SITE'S customers as “people in government frustrated by how long it takes to get information through official channels” as well as “people in corporate security and in the media”.

TERRORIST UNDER EVERYBODY'S BED

Born in Iraq, Katz did her military service in the Israel Defence Forces after high school and graduated in middle-eastern studies from Tel Aviv University. Later, she has served as a consultant in the US government and other foreign governments.

Finding terrorists has become a crusade for Katz, who began going to pro-Palestinian rallies and fund-raisers disguised as a Muslim woman in the late 1990s, then presented information to the federal government to prove there were ties between Islamist fundamentalist groups in the US and terror bodies like Hamas or al-Qaeda, the New York Times reported on September 23, 2004.

She was also a consultant in a controversial $1 trillion wrongful-death suit seeking to hold Saudi government and business interests accountable for the September 11 attacks, according to a 2004 LA Times report.

Many of her critics believe she is giving terrorists a bigger platform than they would otherwise have.

It's possible that her immersion in the world of terrorism has removed whatever scepticism or doubts she may have had. “Much as Al Jazeera underplays terrorist threats, SITE at times overhypes them,” said Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, in a New Yorker article on May 29, 2006.

''She does serious research, and a lot of that research is good and accurate," said one of her peers, who requested anonymity while talking to the LA Times in 2004. ''But she fits everything into a mould -- that there is a Muslim terrorist under everybody's bed."