"Yes, it makes you look fat, but I love you anyway..."
This is a snippet from a 20 minute long video marketed under the brand of "al-Hijrat" and distributed by the LEE Media Network via their leemedia.net site. Acquired by us in mid-February of 2008. There may be some details of the construction of the vest that the IC will find of interest, compared to the earlier Iranian design that was first put into broad circulation by Irhabi007 in 2005.
Name: LEE Media Network (LEE = La Elaha Elallah)
Founder: Tanzil Ahmed, Karachi, Pakistan
URLs: currently leemedia.net, formerly lee-media.net, and before that laelaha.18.forumer.com.
Affiliation: Tablighi Jama'at, specifically the Masjid Bait us Salam in Karachi. This Masjid is the home of the following Tablighi preachers: Maulana Tariq Jameel, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, and Maulana Shaikh Ahmed Awlaki. It is unknown to what extent they are aware of their acolyte's extra-curricular activities. Since the membership does include non-Muslims, the link to Tablighi Jama'at is on the level of the site rather than the membership as a whole.
Description: Dedicated to the distribution or re-distribution of high-quality jihadi recruiting videos, with a particular focus on subtitling videos to make them accessible to audiences of expatriate Muslims living in Western countries (for example from Urdu to English, or Arabic to Turkish). This network is notable for the considerable effort they have made from the very beginning to hide their existence. They obviously have not succeeded, but we give them an "A" for effort. It is not by accident that the first location was at forumer.com, which also hosted the antiimperialist forum. LEE Media Network has been in operation for about two years, give or take.
Membership: By invitation only, so there are no "innocent" members and no deniability for the administrators. Core members are known to scour other, better known sites for talent which they then recruit to the LEE Network.
Demographics: Core members number about two dozen and are located in Pakistan, the Balkans, northern and central Europe, Canada, and the United States. Members include non-Muslims, notably activists from the antiimperialist forum. During the Great Jihadi Forum Outage of 2007, when most of the primary forums were offline for a time, LEE Media Network allowed in more new members, people who were otherwise "homeless" on the Internet - a decision LEE Media Network will regret for some time to come.
Link Analysis: While considerable effort has been made to hide links between LEE Media Network and their products, this has not always been successful. Links are known to exist to the already mentioned antiimperialist forum, the pro-al-Qa`ida faction of the al-Boraq forum, fussilat.org, a site of the Ahle Sunnah wal Jamaat, the islamicnetwork forum, the blogs of Samir Khan AKA inshallahshaheed, and the English-language forum at al-Firdaws, along with an assortment of other less well-known sites.
See also: The original members of the LEE Media Forum
Posted on 02 March 2008 @ 02:01