Newsday (New York, NY) March 21, 2003
Offbeat Web Sites Offer Some Different Views
By Lou Dolinar
From one-person Web logs to professional think tanks, some offbeat Web sites are providing an unusual level of coverage and analysis of the war in Iraq.
Clandestineradio.com, a volunteer site run on a shoestring, for example, has broken some fascinating tales of the United States' multimillion-dollar psychological operations campaign against Saddam Hussein. It specializes in covering the obscure radio stations run by assorted dissidents, intelligence agencies and official government propaganda teams around the world.
Just yesterday the site reported how Commando Solo aircraft pirated the uplink signal of Radio Baghdad, and substituted the American point of view on the first night of hostilities - along with a recording of the actual broadcast.
A relative newcomer to this side of the Internet is defensetech.org by Noah Shachtman, a freelancer well known to readers of Wired magazine and Salon.com. "There's a lot of sites out there covering military affairs," Shachtman says, "but they tend to be a little too think-tank geeky."
Shachtman and other Web military sites often cite John Pike's globalsecurity.org as one of the best overall sources on troop movements, order of battle and weaponry. In the past year, Pike's beefed up both his staff and his Web presence, and is an often-quoted military technology analyst, formerly with the Federation of American Scientists.
The so-called blogosphere, that loose network of thousands of Web sites that provide running commentary by individuals, is increasingly offering original reporting as well as its more traditional commentary. Uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds at instapundit.com, tries to sort through it all.
And then there's the "Where is Raed?" Web log, ostensibly written by an Iraqi dissident, "Salam Pax," in Baghdad. Shortly after the first U.S. attack yesterday, he posted a dispatch at http://dear_raed.blogspot.com.
His dispatches describe a city under siege. But there's no proof that he's in Baghdad and not Brooklyn.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
