FIGHTING THE RUMORS

Very interesting piece.

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...

One of the problems they face is that against all odds, some of the street talk proves to be true. For much of last year, for instance, the word on the street was that Mr. Hussein had evaded capture by living low, having jettisoned his security entourage, and was riding in taxis. Sure enough, when American forces captured him in December outside Tikrit, a taxi was parked nearby.

As a result, almost no tale is too outlandish to be believed. Consider the following item, which made the pages of the latest Mosquito: American commanders, supposedly humiliated by a rising death toll, were seen throwing the bodies of American soldiers into lakes and rivers all across Iraq, especially troops who had been identified as having no next of kin. (A similar rumor is making the rounds on the Internet.)