GREEN SCREEN ZAWAHIRI

“Whoever makes a picture will be punished for it on Judgment Day and will be ordered to put a soul into that picture which he will not be able to do.”
–A hadith collected in the Sahih al-Bukhari

Green screened Ayman Al-Zawahiri: surrounded by beautiful, dense units of rococo Arabic letters which must be read leftward in a kind of locked yet fluid web. The terrorist does the green screen jog through as-Sahab, “the Clouds.” Green is the color of Islam. It was also chosen by software manufacturers of ChromaKey technology because it is the farthest color from basic skin tones, so video post-production produces no visual glitch. You can’t wear anything green or the background image will shine through your garment.

Khuftullah when he was in Kashmir was taught that whenever a jihadi is martyred there’s the scent of perfume, war noises recede, and birds can be heard singing in glassy reverb.

A drone (called by USAFRICOM MAPREXE NB 002) drops glitter over the battle space.

If the spy Maria Gravelle weren’t currently too busy to take a vacation, she would look through European museums for two marble nudes: slut-shamed Roman empress Messaline, sleeping and stretching, “hushed into depths beyond the watcher’s diving,” and Phryne by the sculptor Barzaghi, who according to Greek mythic history saved herself from a death sentence by flashing her superstitious male judges.

Green screen ChromaKey magic allows the foregrounded figure to be seen anywhere. Another magic, that of the marble nudes, gives the foregrounded figure sculpted apotheosis. The jihadi Khuftullah has written he wants to cover up all nude statues as decadent representations of sin. Maria, betraying her Western feminism perhaps, is afraid she can slightly see where Khuftullah is coming from sometimes. She’s been tracking him a long time from afar and feels she knows him like an enemy friend one believes one can control like a puppet through subtle incentives and persuasions.

The West wants to block the jihadi’s media productions. Maria can see that, too—it’s her job at INDICIA in England to monitor this media, collect it, and thwart it where possible through counter-propaganda, espionage, agents of influence, redirecting the hydrodynamics of jihadi media consumption like you might redirect sewer water beneath London streets.

Seeing the reasons why Khuftullah does what he does, knowing him better than he knows himself.

The story goes that when Bin Laden was found and shot by Seal Team Six, they discovered a huge cache of pornography in his living quarters. The battle space is the eye, as usual.

Another drone which USAFRICOM called MAPREXE NB 003, fires two missiles: one for the male side of Khuftullah’s Islamic wedding in Mali, one for the female, the sexes are separate targets,  divided by a curtain, because the thinking of the new security white paper Maria Gravelle had no input into—which takes a cue from the Samantha Lewthwaite “7/7 White Widow” case—is to see women as the depository or cradle of Islamist terrorist revanchism who will strike back or produce the next generation of terrorists.

There are no survivors.

But no drone could fire any Hellfire missile at the secular wedding, the “cover wedding,” which Khuftullah and his bride Rula had in London, England several months prior. That is where the real dangerous terrorist suspects were present, where the two party-going genders mixed, where the receivers risked sinful damnation by drinking alcohol to fool MI5 counterterrorism eyeballs.

KHUFTULLAH SPEAKS ABOUT HIS WEDDING VIDEO:

A secular wedding, as opposed to an Islamic one, is like a formal date you go on with everyone you know. Two whole families along for the ride. So I felt the need to make it worth their while. Or something special to please them all. And the video shows evidence of that while putting the lie to it.

Rula: I suppose you hated watching yourself, but I loved your bridal screen time, the way you pivoted at the altar once, moving eyes from groom to the imam officiant — a sense of magnets torn apart, twisted enough to let one free for a moment. 

I admired one or two things about myself, my body language when Ahmed couldn’t start the CD track. “It’s alright,” it said. “It’s not a pit of time we can’t climb out of.” I felt friendship for myself, for once, watching that shrug: “This person would be so forgiving.” It was nerves not showing, not glowing with marriage enough for the Pakistani photographer — “You’re a married man” — “what is the face of a married man?” It’s his objective to make it all objective.

The cube of the wedding album, the video, they’re all just things. 

I remember at the reception not wanting to drink but wishing I wasn’t a true hidden westernized drunk so I’d at least have a few and lighten up. The cover story I was given said I was a recovering alcoholic. My leader Abol Khaseb, giving me that legend, didn’t know I truly drank when no one was looking. Surely the groom’s dourness was damming up his guests’ happiness, not allowing it to flow.

My sobriety interfered with others’ jollity and thus their hope—a wedding is a persuasion of a crowd, a rhetoric against the notion this all could end one day. An honest smile resembles its siblings. A false smile is “original,” it’s an alien thought trespassing onto the visage your family gave you. A flaw in the coin of your birthright. Those who know your family can tell. So at weddings false smiles stand out. But they’re what the photographer feel they must have.

***

INDICIA found Khuftullah through his writing on the internet, yes, but they also found him through an arrangement with the Egyptians. Some clever soul in the Egyptian intelligence apparatus had the idea to figure out a way to sell suspected terrorists tainted software packages for ChromaKey video production. When you see videos of people talking in front of a beautiful garden or a canyon or something, but they are in reality in their basement in front of a green screen. Zawahiri loves ChromaKey. He is the foregrounded image in white clothes in many green screen videos produced by as-Sahab (“the Clouds”), which is the propaganda arm of al-Qaeda. He is frequently seen in front of a curtain or a library full of ornately decorated books, talking about strategy or the ideological and theological justifications for al-Qaeda’s actions. He’s actually in a room somewhere, perhaps in a cave, perhaps in a boat circling the Maldives. Jihadi videographers and their mouthpieces love green screens, especially when they can’t be out and about speaking in a field or ravine or anywhere they can be droned.

Some Egyptian genius who Maria Gravelle wants to hug and kiss figured out a way to implant a back door in the software of a ChromaKey green screen video package so that it would inlay a digital watermark into any piece of video made with the software, a watermark that can only be seen with the help of a special “spy decoder ring” or what have you. It means INDICIA can trace the source of videos to the purchaser of the software, which means that you can watch a whole raft of certain jihadi propaganda “talking head” videos and have an idea about where they came from beyond where they say they came from. The seller of the ChromaKey software in Cairo or Karachi or beyond will in turn sell that information to thinktanks like INDICIA for a pretty penny, or trade in kind for intelligence. Such is the marketplace where spies haggle and barter over lives.