Haft of the Spear

“Isn’t there anything this fellow can be charged with, or is he completely free to aid the global jihad from North Carolina and give interviews to The New York Times?” Robert Spencer wrote on his site, Jihad Watch.

But those who are reading Mr. Khan’s blog include officials at the Combating Terrorism Center who, since last year, have been training F.B.I. agents and analysts with the government’s joint terrorism task forces.

Center officials say Mr. Khan’s blog yielded confirmation of an important discovery: that a host of militant sheiks and scholars, dead and alive, are today far more influential than Osama bin Laden …

Quite apart from the intelligence value of leaving the sites up, it’s not clear what can be gained by shutting them down. Operators of the sites have proved difficult to put behind bars …

Take downs make you feel good, but they accomplish little to nothing save for making it harder to monitor and disrupt online activity. That last part - disruption - is the key, and we would do well to learn a lesson from another quarter.