Tuesday, March 23, 2004

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.

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