I caught a CNN piece this week about terrorist web sites. Citing research by Dartmouth College, the AP and Gabriel Weimann of the U.S. Institute of Peace in DC, the piece presents an instructive list of the key uses to which terror groups are putting the Web. What struck me was that it was a more streamlined, lucid presentation of the elements of Internet advocacy than you'd ever get in big media coverage of domestic, issue-driven web-work, perhaps even of politics. I suppose fear clarifies one's thinking and accelerates one's learning curve. Check this out:How terrorists use Internet Separate research conducted by Weimann, Dartmouth College and The Associated Press found terrorists to be using the Internet in several ways: * Propaganda. Terrorists make demands, try to elicit sympathy, attempt to instill fear and chaos and to explain themselves. The Web lets them offer up gruesome video images that broadcasters would…

The other day I rented "The Siege", the 1998 movie about an Islamic terrorist cell that attacks New York City. The things they got right are as striking as the things they got terribly and naively wrong. For all it's sympathy and attempted accuracy about Muslims, the movie still portrays the terrorists as religious fanatics. They really do "hate our way of life." The filmmakers are the same crew that made "Glory" (also starring Denzel Washington), so there's no shortage of American accountability for the evils that befall America, but the movie misses the mark when it comes to the venomous hatred for the U.S. that we've now all seen on the streets of Iraq. It's conveniently colonial to think of the terrorists as misguided fundamentalists. What if they just hate our country? Not for its culture, but for its actions, for its politics. Too scary for Hollywood pre-9/11. Too…

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