Several months ago, President Obama signed an executive order establishing an interagency center to coordinate the US government’s public messages against terrorist organizations. A major component of this Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) was in the news lately for its clever campaign against AQAP on Yemeni tribal forums. Because the center is new, most people are unfamiliar with its mandate or how it operates. More broadly, people are unaware of the complexities of government messaging against terrorist organizations. To shed light on these subjects, the first coordinator of the CSCC, Ambassador Richard LeBaron (now retired), has given me permission to post his recent remarks on what he learned during his tenure. It’s very instructive for anyone interested in counter-propaganda and how the US government is coping with the new information environment.

Well, perhaps not quite. Nevertheless, readers of Jihadica will be interested to know that my book on Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, one of the most prominent jihadi ideologues alive, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Maybe the book doesn’t tell you everything you want to know about the man, his ideas and his influence, but together with some of my articles, it will surely satisfy most people’s curiosity.

Over the past several days, Leah Farrall and I have been debating on Twitter about her recent blog post on the killing of Abu Yahya al-Libi by a US drone. In her post, Leah argues that the US policy of killing senior al-Qaeda Central leaders is wrongheaded because those leaders are “a moderating force within a far more virulent current that has taken hold in the milieu.” Leah compares these strikes to the practice of killing older elephants to thin a herd, which leaves younger elephants without any respectable elder to turn to for guidance as to how to behave. By analogy, killing senior al-Qaeda Central leaders means there will be no one with enough clout to rein in the younger generation of jihadis when they go astray. As a measure of the moderating influence of al-Qaeda Central’s senior leaders, Leah contends that those leaders are very discriminating about the