Scott Fisher

UPDATE 5/28/06:

Video Game Touted as Muslim Militant Recruiting Tool Revealed as Joke

The Hague - A video game that the U.S. government said was a "modded" version of Electronic Arts' "Battlefield 2" created by Muslim militants as a recruitment tool has been exposed to be a joke created by a 25-year-old Dutch gamer, Reuters reported. At a May 4 Congressional hearing, a Defense Department contractor paid $7 million to monitor militant websites called the homemade game a terrorist recruitment tool. "Samir," the game's creator, told Reuters he altered the game as a joke and to show off his production skills. "Government agencies should do more research before coming to conclusions," Samir told Reuters. "The movie wasn't what they presented it to be." Samir added that part of the modded game's soundtrack was taken from the satiric film "Team America: World Police."
http://tinyurl.com/etoxj (Reuters)

From digitalmediawire:

Defense Dept: Islamic Militant Video Game "Mods" Make U.S. Bad Guys
Washington - lThe U.S. Defense Department reports that it has discovered militant websites where popular combat video games have been modified so that young Muslim players can virtually take up arms against U.S. soldiers, Reuters reported. Electronic Arts' "Battlefield 2" is among the games for which tech-savvy militants have developed such "mods". "What we have seen is that any video game that comes out ... they'll modify it and change the game for their needs," said Defense Department public diplomacy specialist Dan Devlin. "I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters," a narrator's voice says in the modded version of "Battlefield 2," which also features an inserted recording of George W. Bush's statement from Sept. 16, 2001: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."
http://tinyurl.com/gsuxw (Reuters)