Earlier today, we ran a story from ABC, “FBI: Al-Qaeda Tape to Call for Use of WMDs.”
But we, along with ABC and the FBI, were “punk’d” by a “jihad fan.”
Noah Shachtman of Wired quotes Evan Kohlmann of Counterterrorism Blog that “The intel community appears to have (once again) fallen victim to poorly researched open source news reporting,” and continues
In recent days, several fringe media organizations have published stories about a video recording posted by anonymous Al-Qaida miscreants on extremist Internet chat forums. The video consisted of a remarkably amateurish mash-up of Discovery Channel documentaries, widely published sermons by radical clerics, and stolen propaganda footage. While it is perhaps true that the video offered subtle encouragement for nuclear attacks on the United States, it featured no original content and could have been clumsily strung together with little more than two VCRs. The video was meandering, boring, and difficult to follow — and it certainly was not the product of Al-Qaida.
