If pentagon officials, intelligence reports and news agencies are to be believed, “the makers of video combat games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States.”

Reuters last week broke the news that the private firm Science Applications International (SAIC) had located fundamentalist recruiting material and presented it to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in Congress. SAIC has a $7 million contract with the US Department of Defence to monitor militant websites and radical behaviour on the web.

SAIC presented a version of the popular Electronic Arts game Battlefield 2, which, they said, had been heavily modified by tech-savvy fundamentalists to create a version which allows Islamic militant heroes hunt down and kill American troops, to be used as a training tool for jihadists. Pentagon official Dan Devlin is quoted as saying: “What we have seen is that when any video game comes out [al Qaeda] will modify it and change the game for their needs.”

The Reuters report, the tone of which was predictably outraged, was picked up a number of news outlets including Fox News and the Washington Post.

Children as young as 7, we learn from the article, can play the games which are digitally re-mastered to include soundbites of American televangelists making disparaging remarks about Islam. Added also are Bush’s 2001 comments “This crusade, the war on terrorism, is going to take a while”. Naturally the juxtaposition of image and sound speaks for itself: the implication that the United States is waging a crusade against Islam in order to control Middle Eastern oil carries a clear propaganda message that Muslims should take arms to defend themselves.

To be fair, the United States itself uses a combat game called America’s Army to recruit young people, so it is not unreasonable they suspect al Qaeda of employing similar tactics. But online discussions reveal a different side to the story. If Reuters had dug a little deeper they would have found out that Congress had, in fact been, misled.

What the Select Committee had been shown was in fact a fan-film (gamsters can record their games and make short films from the footage), created in December 2005 by a 25 year-old based in Holland. The film is one of hundreds and has been available on the Planet Battlefield discussion forum for months. It contains no self-made modifications which would allow militants to use it as a recruiting tool and is seen by its creator and the gaming community as a bit of fun.

The footage opens with a line from Trey Parker, a character from the highly satirical movie from the makers of South Park; Team America: World Police. Online gamers and bloggers hardly seem to be able to believe that the film has been mistaken for terrorist material. One comments: “I’ve watched the video. I can say, with no doubt, if a person though this video was a terrorist training/ recruiting video they should be put in an asylum. I understand the technology gap that exists between generation, but this is ludicrous!”

What the US government doesn’t seem to realise, says another, is that people have been playing at terrorists for years on CounterStrike. “Anyone who doesn’t realise that has been living in a cave.”

The gamester who created the footage in question agrees. He is Samir aka Sonic Jihad (a name taken from the album of an American rap artist) and lives in Holland. In an interview with GamePolitics.com he said: “What’s wonderful about this game is that there are no politics at all. There is no good or bad, there are no evildoers. You can choose a side you want and enjoy the game. That’s not the case with America’s Army, a game that was meant to recruit people.”

While SAIC and the newspapers are protesting about modifications to combat games, peace activist James de Lappe is modifying the US Military’s online recruitment game, America’s Army, to protest about the war.

De Lappe logs on as “dead-in-iraq” and using the game’s inbuilt text option, individually announces the name, rank and date of death of each 2000 plus US military personnel who have met their deaths in Iraq. The information appears at the top of the screen before his character is shot dead by the potential recruits.

Moderators of the online game, presumably US military recruiters, reply to his text by typing: Dead-in-iraq will you shut the **** up, but De Lappe will not be silenced and the protest continues.