Click, Click, Boom

Shahda came to the United States in the early 1990s to earn a master’s degree from Northeastern University. He was grateful for the opportunity, because it meant escaping the horrors of Lebanon. He saw the worst of his home nation’s civil war. He will never forget, in the summer of 1976, his parents arguing over whether they should leave their hometown of Chekka for the security of the mountains in northern Lebanon. As they argued, a bullet ripped through the house, just missing Shahda’s mother in the bedroom. The family—which included a brother and two sisters—fled to safety that day. A week later the Palestinian Liberation Organization slaughtered dozens of the town’s Christian residents, among them the Shahdas’ next-door neighbors. So went Shahda’s youth: living in houses riddled with bullet holes, unable to cross into certain parts of the country because any owner of a Christian name would be killed at the checkpoint. While he was in college at the American University of Beirut, classes were canceled for a year because of the fighting. When Shahda returned to school, professors often had their lectures interrupted by the rumble of nearby bomb blasts.

The master’s degree led to the engineering job on the South Shore. Eager to show his gratitude to his new country, after 9/11 Shahda volunteered to be an FBI translator but never heard back—he believes because he was not yet a citizen (his application is still pending), just a man with a Middle Eastern surname and a green card. In 2005 he tried to enlist in the Army, but prior back problems made him reconsider basic training. The following year, a chance to exercise his sense of duty finally presented itself in a federal program called Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal, which had gathered several hundred thousand of the 2 million to 3 million prewar Iraqi documents in the U.S. government’s possession and put them up on a Pentagon website, where they appeared in their native Arabic, awaiting translation. The program asked for anyone with Arabic proficiency to donate their time: Just pick a document off the site, figure out what it said, and post the results for the world to see. It was an unprecedented effort, and—in the hope of Congressional backers—with luck its volunteer translators might find on paper the WMDs the Bush administration had failed to find on the ground. But Shahda, his patriotism unencumbered by political calculations, was simply eager to put his Arabic to use. “In my opinion,” he says, “it was the least I could do.”

He found amazing stuff. Saddam ordering $25,000 for the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002. An Afghani informant suggesting a link between al Qaeda and Iraq before 9/11. Iraqi officials meeting with bin Laden in 1995 to discuss ways to fight the “infidels.” Shahda took these translations and posted them to the conservative website Free Republic. The Pentagon then authenticated them and published them on its own site. Shahda’s work made the news. But by his estimate, only a few thousand translated documents made it onto the Pentagon’s site—and it’s not clear how seriously the findings were actually taken. The Department of Defense will only say the documents were used for “historical data.” (Perhaps for good reason: None included the infamous smoking gun. The 9/11 Commission, for example, knew of communications between Iraq and bin Laden in the 1990s but concluded in its report that theirs was not a long-lasting relationship. Indeed, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte’s press secretary at the time was careful in describing the Pentagon site as a tool to learn about a regime. Little else.)

By November 2006, Shahda had translated more than 300 documents, an accomplishment that had required poring over roughly 50,000 pages of Arabic text. It was around this time, however, that the Pentagon uploaded to its site translations from Iraq’s nuclear research program before the Persian Gulf war. These documents (which Shahda did not work on) provided a skeletal guide for building an atomic bomb. The New York Times, jumping on the development, consulted with various weapons experts who were distressed about the publication of such material. By November 2, and without much fanfare, Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal was abandoned.

It was a blow to Shahda, leaving him without his avocation. But emboldened by his foray into the intelligence world, he decided to continue working as an unpaid government freelancer, this time attempting to do nothing less than catch terrorists. He would lure them into the private chat rooms of hostile, anti-American Arabic forums and hope they revealed a name, a location, a plan of action. It never quite worked out that way, though. Little but brutality was divulged. Shahda saw that many websites included videos of beheadings. He saw that even more provided links to something called “The Encyclopedia of Preparation,” a compendium of weapons manufacturing, chemical and guerrilla warfare, and terrorist tactics, promulgated by a 22-year-old who called himself “Irhabi 007” (“Terrorist 007”), and who, before his capture in a London apartment in 2005, was the world’s foremost online terrorist. These sites were not the indignant howls of a few unhappy people. This was a movement, a real recruiting ground for al Qaeda. Shahda watched as new usernames became regulars on the forums, and then watched these regulars sign off for the promise of martyrdom.

Last February, Shahda started to wonder if the sites should be shut down. History was repeating itself; the online forums of today were no less radical or potent than the pleas of Muslim and Palestinian militias during the Lebanese civil war. Back then the unrest spread for many reasons but was certainly fueled by a fundamental interpretation, some might say misinterpretation, of the Koran. Namely, the infidels do not believe what you do; therefore the infidels should be killed. Thirty years later, only the medium had changed. So on July 19, Shahda posted a manifesto on a Free Republic comments page. “We should seek the shutdown of any known terrorist website and forum to deliver a shocking and devastating psychological blow to the islamic terrorists.” Shahda listed the URLs for 22 such websites, then concluded the missive with two words:

“Let’s roll.”

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