Posted on 31-3-2003

Info Wars 3/03
by Jason Deans, Guardian (London), Friday March 28, 2003

The al-Jazeera website has suffered further attacks from hackers, who
hijacked the Arabic news broadcaster's domain name and redirected users to
what appears to be an American patriot's website.

Users trying to log onto the al-Jazeera website in the US found a message
that read "Hacked by Patriot, Freedom Cyber Force Militia" beneath a logo
of the US flag. A spokeswoman for al-Jazeera in London said users trying to
access the website from the US were also being redirected towards other
internet destinations, including porn sites. In the UK, both al-Jazeera's
Arabic and English language websites could not be reached today.

Staff at al-Jazeera's HQ in Doha, Qatar, have been trying to sort out the
hacking problems for the past two days, the spokeswoman added. The hacking
of the al-Jazeera websites began on Wednesday and at first it was thought
the problem was so-called "denial of service" attacks, when sites are
deliberately taken out by unprecedented volumes of traffic. Salah Al
Seddiqui, al-Jazeera's IT manager, said the new problems had started after
someone hijacked the domain name and redirected it to another server. "Our
website is working but nobody can see it," Mr Seddiqui said.

The Arabic news service has also moved its data centre from US hosting
service DataPipe to a new location in France, according to Mr Seddiqui.
Hackers started attacking the al-Jazeera websites after they carried video
footage of US soldiers captured by the Iraqis on Sunday.


Al-Jazeera Truths About War

My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it, by
Faisal Bodi, senior editor for aljazeera.net

Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was
irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar
for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others
bedded down at the £1m media center at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I
found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm
of al-Jazeera.

And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most
sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel
screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most
searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as
many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western
media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a
15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could
not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has
been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as
an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign,
the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants
and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has
provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring
occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising"
which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in
the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat
verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a
spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply
mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN
sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as
saviors.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia
authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern
uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led
forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the
coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the
country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled
by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western
reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western
media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under
"coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could
confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been
attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time
- despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen little
except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has
unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of
goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and
that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second
video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the
outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of
Iraqi soldiers either dead or captured and humiliated. Amid the battle for
hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one
measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of
the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe" hacking
campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war. As I write,
the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that
the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting
company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying
by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my
homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case
scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern
Shia regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in
surrounding countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much
work to be done.