THE PENTAGON — Intelligence officials have just informed Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno that the Syrian Electronic Army took over the US Army's primary website www.army.mil in 2009 and has been operating the Army's homepage since then.

Odierno was stunned. Reached for comment via AOL Instant Messenger, he said, "We should have noticed the signs of foreign influence. The army.mil content writers barely have any command of the English language, the depressing layout causes an instant loss of morale, and nobody can remember the last time the website had any relevance."

Experts were shocked by the discovery as well. "Army.mil went down without an explanation on Monday, and that's what tipped us off," CIA digital intelligence analyst David Ross told Duffel Blog. "We started looking deeper, and it turned out to be hackers, but we couldn't figure out how they got the website down. We finally just picked up the phone and called Syria. Turns out the Syrians had been in charge of the whole thing since '09. The hackers had just taken army.mil down for routine server maintenance."

The last U.S. update to the site prior to the hostile takeover included the addition of an 8-bit flaming Army logo .gif animation and a "Be All You Can Be" scrolling banner. After the Syrians took over, they updated the look, streamlined the servers, and fixed many of the issues with Army Knowledge Online, the Army's web interface. "We can all agree the Syrian shift was an improvement in general," Ross concluded.

Army IT staff breathed a sigh of relief after their control was restored.

Syrian Electronic Army's official Twitter account, @SyriaPwnzUrMom, Tweeted a response shortly after being discovered. "@GENRayOdierno You can have your website back. Nobody ever came except by accident LMFAO #LastToKnow."