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KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait (AP) -- When a toy soldier with a gun to its head on a Web site briefly tricked the world into believing a U.S. soldier was in Iraqi rebel hands, the glare of public attention shined once again on one the Internet's darkest corners.
On insurgency-friendly Web sites, videos of actual beheadings have shared the limelight with occasional hoaxes and bogus attack claims. The ansarnet.ws site, an Arabic-language bulletin board that carried the toy soldier hoax, also features posts from Iraqi rebels and sympathizers from places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Bosnia.
Internet sites such as ansarnet have proven crucial to getting out the message from Iraqi guerrillas who otherwise have little contact with journalists and cannot challenge the information dominance of their opponents in the U.S. and budding Iraqi militaries.
Governments have tried and mostly failed to keep the sites and the guerrillas offline. The Web sites pop up on new computer hosts or are replicated elsewhere by sympathizers.
Rebel Web sites also happen to be primary sources of intelligence for the troops pressing the counterinsurgency war: U.S. military, the CIA and others grappling to understand Iraq's shadowy guerrilla bands.
"They're useful for everybody," said Jeremy Binnie, an Iraq analyst with Jane's, the London defense consultancy. "The insurgents get to publicize their side of the story and make their claims, try to attract support and show their strength. And from the intelligence point of view, it's a good way to find out how these guys are thinking."
But the credibility of the sites is uncertain and reporters who cite them do so at their own risk, as was learned again this week.
On Wednesday, a visitor to ansarnet posted a grainy photograph purporting to show a kidnapped U.S. soldier dressed in desert fatigues, wearing a vest and knee pads. A gun was held to its head. But the photo turned out to depict "Cody," a U.S.-made toy action figure produced for sale on U.S. military bases in Kuwait.
The accompanying statement was posted in the name of a group that has claimed previous kidnappings, the Mujahedeen Brigades. The Arabic text, however, contained several misspellings and repetitions.
Analysts asked about potential perpetrators of the hoax said it was possible the scam was a so-called "black" information operation intended to hurt the credibility of the ansarnet site, because journalists were reporting its posts and giving Iraqi guerrillas a useful voice.
"There might be some motivation to detract credibility from these Web sites," Binnie said. "But there are already so many outlandish claims on them that they already lack credibility to a certain extent."
A U.S. military counterinsurgency expert who monitors the sites said guerrillas' claims may be bogus or inflated, but the sites still carry useful nuggets of information.
"Some of their claims are a little outlandish," said the expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If they say an action took place, I can corroborate that with facts. But then they have claims saying 50 coalition soldiers were killed. We know that's not likely. They tend to exaggerate their infliction of casualties."
After reading a U.S. press release about soldiers killed in a guerrilla bombing, Binnie said he often searches the Internet for rebel video clips or statements about the attack.
"You can download all the videos and see the war from the insurgents' point of view," Binnie said. "Generally you have to try and balance the two sides."
Government efforts to take the sites off line have failed, since the authors are able to shift them to new Internet providers. A site's disappearance often sparks a flurry of copycat sites or hacker retaliation on government sites.
"It's like putting your fingers in the dike," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at the Rand Corp. in Washington. "There was a concerted effort to take down the al-Qaeda site a few years ago and it kept popping up. The Israelis tried to do it with the Hezbollah site, and it prompted a war of escalation. The result was a live-and-let-live mentality."
On bases across Iraq, U.S. military intelligence analysts and Arabic linguists pore over such Web postings for clues to the guerrillas' morale, their noms-de-guerre and details of "martyred" suicide bombers and other rebels killed in action.
"They don't give information on upcoming operations or on their cell structure, but the Web sites enable you to build a picture of the various groups and what motivates them -- nationalism or religion," the U.S. military expert said.
Since anyone with a few dollars can create a Web site -- and anyone with Arabic skills can post a message on bulletin board sites -- the Web has occasionally allowed hoaxes to find their way into print.
Beyond the toy soldier hoax, other bogus news stories in Iraq have been traced to fictitious Internet postings.
In September, two Arabic Web sites posted claims that a pair of Italian aid workers taken hostage in Baghdad had been executed. A week later, after various news agencies reported the claims of their deaths, the two women, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, were released unharmed.
In January, two Iraqi insurgent groups went online to claim responsibility for the car bombing of a police station that killed six and injured 12 in the northern city of Tikrit.
The largely Kurdish group Ansar al-Sunna claimed it had placed an explosives-laden car near the police headquarters then blew it up.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, posted a competing claim saying one of its members had carried out a "martyrdom attack" or suicide bombing.
A reporter in Tikrit learned from police that there was no suicide bomber in the car. Rather, the explosives-laden car had been parked outside the station for hours, and police had asked the U.S. Army to check it before it exploded. |
发表于 2005-2-6 23:21:03
