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Subject:
Infowar - Iraq/American teamwork
Elbandeedo
3/23/2004 6:45:03 AM
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From NY Times - a partial cut and paste with link. Please go to the website for further info.
U.S. Team in Baghdad Fights a Persistent Enemy: Rumors
The American project to build a stable democracy in Iraq has encountered many obstacles. But perhaps the most elusive enemy is an old phantom called rumor.
Less than 24 hours after a bombing in central Baghdad that tore the facade off the Mount Lebanon Hotel, the rumors began circulating in the marketplaces and teahouses: that the hotel was demolished not by a bomb, as the Americans maintained, but by an errant American missile.
Or, the whispers had it, the terrorist attack was actually an assassination attempt, because one hotel resident was said to be a relative of the man who had identified the hideout of Uday and Qusay Hussein, two of Mr. Hussein's sons, in Mosul last summer.
More chatter: Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, far from defeated, was even now operating from a secret exile headquarters in London and planning more such attacks ahead of the June 30 transition to a sovereign Iraqi state.
Those are just a few of the rumors collected by the staff of The Baghdad Mosquito, a daily intelligence document that chronicles the latest street talk in the Iraqi capital, however ill founded, bizarre or malevolent.
The Mosquito's staff includes 6 American intelligence analysts, 2 Arab-American translators and 11 Iraqis. One of the Iraqis is a doctor and one a university professor, but several come from some very tough neighborhoods. They are Sunni and Shiite and Kurd and Christian. Some of the women wear traditional head scarves; others work with heads uncovered.
The Mosquito began last fall after American military leaders realized that rumors themselves had become a security problem, and decided to fight back. It is distributed via e-mail to an elite group of military officers and policy planners and is posted on the military's classified Web server.
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