He calls himself Abu Maysara al Iraqi, and he's a master at being everywhere and nowhere in the virtual world, constantly switching his online accounts and taking advantage of new technologies to issue his communiques to the world. American Internet sleuths know next to nothing about him, whether Abu Maysara is his real name, whether he's an Iraqi or even whether he's in Iraq. What is clear is that he is one of the most important sources of information from the country's insurgency, getting his message out through the Internet. His updates, terse and businesslike, are released several times a week on radical Islamic Web sites. Acting as a spokesman for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted guerrilla leader in Iraq, he variously reports attacks on U.S. soldiers and killings of hostages. His words and images reach millions of people when they open their newspapers, turn on their TVs or go online. "There's no way of stopping it anymore," said Evan Kohlmann, a counterterrorism consultant. "It's extremely frustrating. They can send out quality videos to millions of people uncensored."
The Bush administration finds itself in a propaganda war, trying to promote a picture of security and progress in Iraq. But Abu Maysara's Internet communiques convey another image. Abu Maysara declared in a Sept. 19 posting that he issues his reports so that his perspective "does not become lost in the media blackout that America imposes in order to deceive its people and its allies." The Internet has emerged as a prime tool of Islamic radicals. They use its anonymity to coordinate operations secretly and to get their message to the public sphere with little fear of detection. Half a dozen U.S. agencies have assigned teams to monitor sites that carry postings from Abu Maysara and other radicals. The Justice Department has tried, with limited success, to use the authority of the USA Patriot Act to shut down Internet sites that carry such postings, on grounds that they incite violence. The government's aggressive pursuit of Web hosting services, as well as the people who post the material on them, has led civil liberties groups to protest that security initiatives are impinging on free speech. Another problem is that U.S. legal authority stops at the borders. Many of the sites with the target postings are located in other countries, so American officials must depend on the good will of foreign governments to shut down the sites. |