Armchair warriors
Want to feel as though you're playing a role in the war on terror? Log on to ItsHappening.com and fire away
BY CHRIS WRIGHT
Illustration by Jeff Soto
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AAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGH HHHHHHHHHHH! I'm addicted to chat! Oh . . . no!!" Though this cry of anguish did not come from me, it easily could have. For the past few months, I've spent a good part of every day tippety-tapping a manic Morse code on my computer keyboard: refresh . . . post . . . refresh . . . post . . . refresh, refresh, refresh. My work's becoming an annoying distraction. My girlfriend insists she can detect a glazed, Charles Manson-ish look in my eyes. The other day, while visiting a friend's house, I snuck away for a few minutes to engage in a quick online confab. Rude? Maybe. The thing is, I cannot help myself. Like Jim, the author of the above post, I am hooked on chat. Actually, Jim and I are not so much hooked on chat as we are on a particular chat site: ItsHappening.com. More specifically, we're hooked on the site's subject matter. ItsHappening bills itself as a "discussion board relating to current world affairs surrounding Islamic Jihad and the US-led war on terrorism." And this -- terrorism -- is what draws us in. Elemental, Axl, Roman Agenda, Professor, Winter, Stupid Guy, Bag Sniper, Lucifer, Debunker, Old Dutch, Jas2000, CentaurMyst, AJ Crowley, Allan Jennings, Hoodwinker, G-Nome, B.A.D., Jim, me, and the rest of the site's pseudonymous die-hards have one thing in common: we are Al Qaeda addicts, jihad junkies. It's a sickness. Yet the question remains: why should we all be drawn so compulsively, so inexorably, to this particular site? NOBODY, EVEN me, fully understands my obsession with this," writes the site's owner and operator, Jon Messner, in, appropriately, an e- mail interview. "As obsessed as I am, there are many others who quite literally live on the board." He's not exaggerating. One recent evening, I left ItsHappening in the middle of a debate about Israel's right to exist. When I turned my computer on the next morning, the same people were there, having the same debate -- they'd been at it all night. "ARGH," as Jim so succinctly puts it. "AAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!" "I am addicted to this site," Jim writes. "I feel like I personally know these people!" But Jim, like the rest of the ItsHappening crowd, does not go there to make friends. Despite the fact that you'll find some light banter, and even flirting, on the site, it is not what you'd necessarily call a friendly environment. "As a matter of fact," writes a recent poster in response to a perceived slight, "I'll give you a loaded gun which you can point at my head and before your pudgy little finger can depress that 4lb trigger I'll have your sorry as* on the ground upside down with both your gun and your arm shoved so far up your as* that you'll blow your own f****** brains out." Because ItsHappening is largely unmoderated, the site is raw, emotional, and often highly entertaining. It is also hugely popular. "[On] the slowest days the site gets between 5000 and 7000 visitors," Messner writes. "But when certain issues are prominent -- for example, when Dirty Bombs were in the news -- the spikes in traffic have gone as high as 70,000 visitors a day." Though many of these visitors take a quick look and then clear off, there are many who don't. On a good day, or a bad day, scores of us stick around to babble, lament, pontificate, browbeat, threaten. ItsHappening is not so much a marketplace of ideas as it is a sprawling flea market. On any given day, the site will contain dozens of wildly disparate discussions -- or threads -- ranging from explorations of America's reliance on Iraqi oil to debates over the existence of God. And then, of course, there are the rabid back-and-forth exchanges that everybody loves so much: "I am bring forth an army that loves death as much as you love life"; "You are fools to believe that all Americans love life more than death. That will be your undoing." This may be ugly stuff, but there's no doubting that it comes from the heart. In the ongoing public debate over America's war on terror, ItsHappening is where the rubber meets the road. "The site is something different," writes B.A.D., a long-time regular. "It is not just another conglomeration of articles through a media source, but rather real thoughts, from real people." More important, perhaps, those "real people" include me. In a conflict that often leaves ordinary citizens feeling powerless, there's something oddly reassuring about having a forum where you can chip in with your own two cents -- even if your audience is made up, in the words of one poster, of "250 armchair experts." At the very least, when you post on ItsHappening, you can expect a diverse audience: bored housewives, old soldiers, policy wonks, professional wags, office laggards, sociopaths, and people claiming to be Islamic militants. Moreover, should you so desire, you can discuss Donald Rumsfeld's obfuscation or Osama bin Laden's kidneys with people from all over the world: Messner has tracked users back to Italy, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Botswana, Kirghizstan, Rwanda, Swaziland, Algeria, Ireland, Antarctica, Iran, Ghana, Lebanon, Guadeloupe, and a hundred other countries. It's not too rare to find an Al Qaeda sympathizer in Stockholm swapping insults with a true-blue patriot in Montana, with dramatic results. "All supporters of jihad and terrorism will have your children feasted upon. I'm blood thirsty and am ready to sink my knife into some towelhead motherf*****." "And we are ready to sink our AKs into your ugly little coward faces. May the curse of God be upon you!" Even though such outbursts are scorned by many of the site's faithful -- the above exchange was followed by a post asking, "Do you two want something to drink with that?" -- this stuff can get pretty bloodcurdling at times. As Messner puts it: "This is a unique forum in that you actually have the opportunity to dialogue one-on-one with someone whose passion in life is to see you dead, your society and culture destroyed. Every now and then, there is an exchange that gets scary, and one of the participants disappears. These people are playing for keeps here on both sides." Hold on a minute: death? Destruction? Playing for keeps? Why don't we throw in a few aliens and some talking rabbits while we're at it? Who knows, maybe the Abominable Snowman frequents the site from time to time. Actually, in fairness to Messner, he doesn't seem to be your average Internet conspiracy nut. In a profile aired earlier this year, CNN described the ItsHappening creator as a "Web warrior," and that's what he is. In the electronic front of the war on terror, Jon Messner is firmly entrenched on the frontlines. UNTIL LAST YEAR, the closest Messner had come to online warfare involved a cease-and-desist order from the drug maker Pfizer, which was incensed that he had registered a domain name with the word Viagra in it. Back then, Messner and his wife, Cherie, were quietly going about the business of making a small fortune in Internet porn. Their Web site Wetlands.net ("Where wives get naked") had become "one of the largest adult communities on the net." Though Messner had to make peace with the fact that hundreds of men were ogling his naked wife every day ("Cbaby on the boat"; "Cbaby at the office"), it was a pretty good life. Then came September 11. "My wife and I witnessed the events of 9/11 live on our television screen," Messner recalls. "I was totally blindsided. I was truly at a loss as to why we, as citizens of this country, were attacked." While most Americans attempted somehow to absorb these feelings of shock and confusion and move on, Messner felt he had to do something. For him, this was personal. The day after the attacks, he set up an Internet message board, in order to, as he puts it, "attract the enemy long enough that I might actually ask them exactly where in the hell they were coming from." To do this, Messner registered hundreds of September 11-related domain names -- al-qaeda.com, islamic-jihad.org, land-of-the-free.org, binladenmustdie.com, suitcasenukes.com, and so on. "My theory was to point all these Web addresses to one centralized board," he explains. "Because these domains had such a broad interest base, I felt I could get a diverse representation posting to the board." The experiment worked. Within days, ItsHappening had received thousands of postings, representing "wide and often antagonistic views." By monitoring the discussions on his board, Messner continues, he "began to grasp the intensity [with] which the Muslim community hated our culture." But he still wasn't satisfied. "I decided to monitor the communications among hostile radicals on the net. [I] was able to link back to Islamic message boards and see what they were saying. It wasn't good." The site that really caught Messner's eye was one called Alneda.com, which, he says, "was pretty much regarded as the official Al Qaeda Web site." Infuriated by what he saw on Alneda, Messner went to work. At first, he figured he would simply redirect the site's traffic to his own board -- a fairly mild up-yours. Then, he says, "My wheels started turning." By using a complex (and legal, he insists) process of Internet manipulation, Messner "hijacked" the Alneda site, set up a decoy of it on his own server, and started tracking everyone who logged on to the site. Messner had, through a combination of ingenuity and guts, set up an elaborate and effective electronic sting. He decided he would share the intelligence he had gathered with the FBI -- an experience he now likens to "dealing with the Motor Vehicle Administration." "I don't want to come off as bashing law enforcement," Messner writes. "But the agency is . . . a big cumbersome bureaucracy, and as such things happen at a snail's pace. When I hijacked the Alneda site, it took me a full five days to be able to dialogue with anyone within the Bureau who had even a rudimentary understanding of the Internet. I had an agent sit on my couch and tell me, `Jon, when it comes to kidnappings and bank robberies we are really on top of our game, but with this Internet stuff we're pretty much lost.' " He adds, "Our local FBI office doesn't even have e- mail!" By the time the FBI had gotten its act together, the radicals Messner had been tracking had gotten wind of his ploy. "The person who maintains the real Alneda Web site posted on a board at Muslim.net that the infidels had set a trap," he writes. Even so, the damage had already been done -- Alneda's cloak of secrecy had been breached. "I don't want to be too specific, but I will say that more than a few individuals have had a knock on the door." TODAY, THIS "Web warrior" spirit endures on ItsHappening. The site serves, for instance, as a sort of war room for groups of hackers who track and hack pro-terrorism sites on the Internet. The following "damage assessment" was recently posted by one of ItsHappening's more high-profile hackers, who goes by the name Hoodwinker:
83 Webservers hit with Trojan horses. 67 websites permanently destroyed. 22 websites defaced. 3 websites servers taken offline. 2494 Email accounts flooded and rendered useless. 457 Email accounts traffic diverted to various intelligence agencies. 3 Islamic forum sites flooded to the extent that their content was erased. Not bad for 2 days of work. But our finest hour is yet to come.
Messner, for his part, says he suffers persistent retaliatory assaults. His network has been crippled by "denial of service" attacks. Mass anti-Jewish emails have been sent out with Messner's name on them ("I get a lot of hate mail from Jews"). But it's not only electronic attacks that trouble Messner. "I've taken measures," he says, "to beef up security where I live." Despite the seething hatred directed at him, Messner insists that "hostile radicals" still frequent his board. For one thing, he says, when the real Alneda site finally went back up, its operators announced the fact on ItsHappening. "I have been talking to another reporter who found our site through the `Favorites' on a laptop he recovered from a cave in Tora Bora. How's that for knowing the enemy is here." Meanwhile, Messner continues, US intelligence agencies stick around to keep an eye on the radicals. "I know some of the `regulars' are here in part because they are required to monitor the board. I have been contacted by the FBI, US Marshals, the Secret Service." And this is all part of the allure of the site. ItsHappening doesn't only offer us a chance to comment on the war on terror, it allows us to feel as though we are somehow involved in it -- albeit from a safe distance. There is something of a prewar-Vienna, Third Man-type feel to the site -- a sense of shadowy intrigue, of half-hidden strangers and creeping, undefined menace. The boards seethe with rumors, including one -- described by Messner as "not so nutty" -- that Stupid Guy, one of the site's regulars, is Zacarias Moussaoui, composing anti-American diatribes from his prison cell. Of course, there's really no way of verifying that Stupid Guy is Moussaoui, or even that he is a guy. CentaurMyst, an early-middle-aged mother who claims to have "awesome t***," could just as easily be a terrorist in disguise. USMC Retired, who claims to have helped train the Saudi army in 1976, could very well be an early-middle-aged mother with awesome t***. Stupid Guy may be less interested in fighting jihad than he is in fighting his raging acne. There's simply no way to know. As Messner puts it, "We have had our share of high-school kids coming in and talking shit." As if to drive home the point, a regular named Winter recently speculated that ItsHappening may be nothing more than an elaborate performance piece. "Is everyone," she asked, "going to come out and [take a] bow?" One of the most enigmatic regulars on ItsHappening, Old Dutch, is also one of its most popular. "It's impossible to beat Ol' Dutch," writes one regular. "The more you engage him, the more he'll drag your religion through the mud." In the battles that take place on the site every day, Dutch is viewed by many as one of the biggest guns. But it's Dutch's delivery, not his ideas, that garner him so much attention. Indeed, while you may not like what Dutch has to say, it's hard not to be mesmerized by the way he says it:
Old Dutch has only been laughing, with his feet cycling up in the air, when watching you nutty hotheaded bozos on telly. And I find it particularly funny when you pack of idiots start running through the streets with bouncing coffins, doing the ape-men's coffin dance as you go at flying speed. It looks too ridiculous to be true to me. . . . Fancy running fast with a bloody coffin on your head. What dumb purpose does that have? Those dumb sandbrains really believe that this impresses the Western World, because their own dumb tribe is impressed by it. And who the f*** is impressed by a dumb screaming mob carrying framed photographs of martyrs around, once again running and screaming while doing so. Good riddance to the stupid b*******. They may all run through a mine field, as far as I'm concerned. One day during the Iran-Iraq War, I saw those young slim and fit wrapped up antheaps (those ladies wrapped in black) run through a minefield, carrying little baskets whatever for. I nearly choked drowning in my tears laughing. "Alahu-Ackbar" (Allah is Great) they screamed in a high pitch, while running through the fields like upright black umbrellas, with legs borrowed from the Flintstones. A few of them vapourised in a "huff and a puff." Nothing left but a puff of smoke, squirting human tissue all over the field. Those were damn good mines, perhaps made in the USA, leaving nothing but a bloody puff of human tissue rain. God damn it, did I laugh. Should I cry? . . . She deserves to go up in smoke doesn't she? MAN IS LEAST himself when he talks in his own person," said Oscar Wilde. "Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth." If this is true, Internet message boards, with their immovable masks of anonymity, should be places of unrivaled candor. But then what to make of Old Dutch? In a calmer moment, he describes himself as "a vegetarian who opposes the killing of anything," and adds, "I don't hate people, whatever race, colour or religion." Bloodthirsty brawler or vegetarian pacifist? It's impossible to know which Dutch is real. If Wilde was right, however, then there are an awful lot of twisted, scary people out there -- at least if the postings on ItsHappening are anything to go by. Messner, for one, says he is "ashamed and disgusted" by the number of "kill-the-camel-jockey" postings he sees on the board. "It's pathetic," he writes. "[It] enforces the horrible stereotypes the world has come to associate with `The Americans.' " Yet the level of rage on ItsHappening is nowhere near as intense as it was in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Messner has often described his board as a "sociology experiment," and it does offer us some interesting insights into America's response to the events of 9/11 (at least as represented by the kinds of people who are given to frequenting message boards). Indeed, the site could be seen as a sort of barometer, a register of the nation's gradual recovery from the terrorist attacks. In September 2001, the postings on ItsHappening suggested that the world had gone completely mad. Messages were generally written in all caps, as if screamed, and contained the most vile, profane outpourings of bloodlust. Back then, any statement that didn't toe the God-bless-America line, no matter how innocuous, would incite a flurry of insults and death threats. Today, although hate-spewing extremists are still plentiful on the board, you get the sense that their hearts aren't really in it anymore -- at least not to the extent that they were in the days and weeks after September 11. These days, the most vehement anti-American voices on the board are as often gently mocked as they are violently abused. "Oh behave!" writes one regular in response to a posting by a self-proclaimed Islamic radical. "You lil' terrorist you." Another poster inquires, in mock horror, whether "Al Qaeda might fly this message board into the Microsoft HQ." A year ago, such quips would have been unthinkable. "The rage has subsided somewhat," writes Messner. "Now the overall mood is lighter -- even the hostiles will occasionally exchange a humorous swipe at the enemy. But, knowing that if they ever met they would immediately kill each other brings a chill back to the overall tone." Perhaps. Yet there's no escaping the fact that today the site very often reads like some sort of Al Qaeda Love Connection, or that some of the most chilling exchanges on the board take place between regulars who, over time, have developed run-of-the-mill grudges. These days, instead of a clash of cultures, you have clashing egos. In the process of researching this article, for instance, I started a thread asking for people's thoughts on the ItsHappening message boards. Before long, the thread had devolved into a furious spat between two long-time antagonists, Roman Agenda and CentaurMyst. "Know what," CentaurMyst wrote as the argument raged on, "if you don't like me being here, then f****** leave." Within an hour, Roman Agenda had stated his intention to do just that. "This is another reason I love this site," wrote Jim. "I picture CM and RA, all red-faced, sitting at their computers, hitting the keys on their keyboards really hard and typing as fast as they can. I just love you guys!" Other regulars were less enthusiastic. "Ah, you whiney f**** are pathetic," wrote Watchful I. "My neighbor's dog leaves more intelligent piles on my yard than you do here in the forum." TODAY, THERE is an ongoing debate on ItsHappening as to whether it has outlived its usefulness -- whether the site is, to put it bluntly, in danger of disappearing up its own ass. Regular visitors say they're getting fed up with the silly flirting, the incessant bickering, the chat-for-chat's-sake mentality that's becoming increasingly prevalent on the boards. "The site was so vibrant and full of intelligent people to learn from and discuss things with," laments Roman Agenda. "Now . . . well it's pretty sad at best." In recent weeks, several regulars -- some of whom have been posting since the site's early days -- have taken Roman Agenda's lead and said they're quitting ItsHappening for good. When a rival message-board operator came sniffing around the site recently ("i am here trying to steal visitors"), he was swiftly pounced on by Regis, Jon Messner's online alter ego. "Go find yer own hate mongers," Regis wrote. "These are mine!" It was a funny line, but you wondered whether there wasn't a hint of panic behind it. Two days after that exchange, on September 17, a long-time ItsHappening member named Alexis joined the exodus. "I'm leaving this site," she grumbled. "I've had my fill of conspiracy theories and knuckleheads and pissing contests." Less than a week later, Alexis was back. "That's bulls***," she wrote in response to someone who claimed Islamic warriors are nobler than their American counterparts. "Mujihad fights for his ideology just like any other combatant." Her fellow brawlers quickly and warmly welcomed Alexis back into the fray.
Chris Wright can be reached at cwright@phx.com.
Issue Date: September 27 - October 3, 2002 |
