Israeli Connected SITE Institute Hypes Dead Grecian Formula Terrorist

In an effort to explain away the glaring discrepancy between the 2004 and the 2007 Osamas, Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, tells us “bin Laden’s beard appears to have been dyed, a popular practice among Arab leaders,” and if that is not absurd enough, Anne Giudicelli, a former French diplomat specializing in the Middle East who now runs the Paris-based consultancy Terrorisc, adds “bin Laden is well aware that his reappearance on the world stage—looking fit and with his beard dyed a youthful black—was itself a victory that went beyond anything he actually said” in his latest video. As for the message, the AP informs us it “is a hodgepodge of anti-capitalist vitriol, impassioned Islamic evangelism and what can best be described as a twisted attempt at reconciliation: Join us, or we’ll kill you.” Of course, it is not explained how a dead nemesis will kill us, a few million infidels.

Indeed, it is a victory, considering the prognosis of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN medical correspondent, who declared back in early 2003: “You can look [at pictures from a December 2001 video] and notice that he has what some doctors refer to as sort of a frosting over of his features—his sort of grayness of beard, his paleness of skin, very gaunt sort of features. A lot of times people associate this with chronic illness. Doctors can certainly look at that and determine some clinical features…. The sort of frosting of the appearance is something that people a lot of times associate with chronic kidney failure, renal failure, certainly someone who is requiring dialysis would have that.”

Naturally, we can dismiss the latest Osama video as yet another weak and transparent effort to keep Osama and “al-Qaeda” front and center, especially as the anniversary of September 11, 2001, looms. However, the purveyors of this latest sham, the SITE Institute, of are more interest, not that we can expect the corporate media to do a background check.

SITE, described as “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, that provides information related to terrorist networks to the government, news media, and general public,” has a rather suspicious history. “The listed staff consists of two individuals, and the website seems to be an aggregator of publicly-available data on the internet, mostly consisting of current news items,” notes the SourceWatch wiki. SITE’s “Terrorism Library, on cursory investigation, looks to be a straight data scrape from the U.S. Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism - 2003, Appendix B.”

Not surprisingly, SITE is connected to Israeli intelligence. “Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and immigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.”

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2007/090907SITE.htm