Posted on 09/29/2001 5:12:17 AM PDT by foreverfree
A Web Site With the Inside Dope on the Middle East
by Sridhar Pappu and Gabriel Snyder
No matter how much President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plead that their new war on terrorism will require a severe clampdown on media access, the public’s appetite for up-to-the-minute leaks and inside reporting shows no sign of abating.
Part of this is generational, of course. Lines like Mr. Rumsfeld’s “the Defense Department is not going to discuss operational issues” won’t cut it with an audience that got accustomed to hearing about grand-jury testimony as soon as it was given, blue Gap dresses and their stains, and admissions of affairs during allegedly closed police interviews.
But in this new battleground, it is natural to assume there will be new sources of inside dope. And in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and as the U.S. geared up for a military response—people have begun passing around a link to Debka.com, a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations. At its best, Debka.com reads like a tip sheet from the desert, from people who seem to know a lot more than Jeff Greenfield.
The Web site begins ominously, with one-line updates at the top of the page like “German KSK Commandos Dropped by Helicopter into Afghanistan Sunday Night, to Join U.S. and British Special Forces,” or “Russian Intelligence Officers Guide U.S. CommandosThrough Afghan Mountains Following Putin’s Offer of Cooperation.” Many of these “tips” offer little or no sourcing. Then there is a series of brief items of about 600 words or so, often sourced just to “Washington sources” or “Palestinian sources” or “Israeli intelligence sources.”
A lot of the material on Debka.com is just plain scary, the kind of stuff that makes you want to close your eyes and hide under your desk. On Sept. 14 there was an unattributed report of “an estimated 30 to 50 suicide killers … waiting inside the U.S. for their orders to strike.” And then there was another report (also unattributed) describing Osama bin Laden’s army as “not ragged rabble, but a well-drilled, dedicated Islamic legion of at least 110,000 zealots, raring to take on Western armies and unafraid of elite U.S. Delta, Rangers and Seals or British S.A.S. commandos descending on their strongholds.”
But on several occasions, Debka.com has beaten the Western media to information that has later shown up in U.S. newspapers. On Sept. 16, for example, the site was reporting that U.S. war planners were airlifting the 82nd and 101st Airborne to Pakistan, as well as contemplating a campaign into Iraq. This was reported before the Bush administration leaked that one of the hijackers may have been connected to Saddam Hussein.
As a result of information like this—and some pretty quick word-of-mouth in the U.S.—Debka.com has experienced a massive surge of traffic in the past two weeks. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, it has gone from 150,000 visitors a week to 250,000 per week, said Giora Shamis, one of the two Israeli journalists who run the site. (Mr. Shamis and his partner, Diane Shalem, also publish a weekly newsletter at $120 a year, which at the moment has 320 paying customers.) Debka.com claims its readers include American military and intelligence officials, as well as foreign correspondents covering the Middle East.
As for the veracity of Debka.com’s information, that is harder to assess. Considering how tight-lipped the Bush administration is being about its war plans—and the current level of rumor-mongering, paranoia and conflicting reporting—it’s tough to cross-check many stories about military planning.
But one Debka.com story that looked particularly prescient was its report on Saudi Arabian reluctance to allow the U.S. use of a major airfield as its central base of operations. On Sept. 22, when the Associated Press was moving a story headlined “Saudi Arabia, Turkey Cooperating in Anti-Terrorism Effort, Encouraging U.S. Officials,” Debka.com reported that Saudi Arabia had “refused to let the U.S. use the kingdom’s new combined air operations command center at Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh.” That refusal, the Web site said, would delay the beginning of the American offensive against Afghanistan. Indeed, two days later, on Sept. 24, The New York Times published a front-page story about problems the U.S. was having in getting permission to use the Saudi air base.
Mr. Shamis—who was born in Israel and says he’s worked as a military and intelligence reporter in the region since the 1970’s for daily papers and The Economist—said he started the site because of the circumspect nature of foreign-affairs reporting. Journalists covering international affairs often write their dispatches in the same cautious and euphemistic language as the diplomats they cover, Mr. Shamis said. Which is not to say their reports aren’t accurate, he added—it’s just that their messages are not always apparent to the average reader.
The Saudi Arabian story, he said, was a prime example. “With all due respect, The New York Times’ fragile, handle-with-care, approach on U.S.-Saudi relations has not changed in the last 10 years,” Mr. Shamis said. “Hinting and not telling may serve diplomatic purposes, but does not always satisfy the informed reader.”
Ms. Shalem, who was born in England, has lived much of her life in Israel working as a journalist for The Economist and other news organizations. She agreed with her partner’s assessment of foreign coverage: “I think [readers] are a lot more intelligent than they are given credit for being. And I think very often, people get very resentful when you patronize them. And we try not to do that.”
But what about the warnings from American officials? After all, Mr. Rumsfeld has, in his public comments, made revealing information tantamount to putting lives at risk. Mr. Shamis said the site’s received some calls and e-mails from readers in the American military or intelligence services to express concern. “And somebody from the American embassy here [in Israel] called us, concerned.”
Ms. Shalem added, “They are all very polite.”
Mr. Shamis said he’s not worried about publishing damaging information. “I think we have enough experience to put out information that will cause no harm to anybody,” he said. “Somebody might say, ‘Oh my God! They’re telling them the troops are in Tajikistan!’ But people who are in the field, they know it. It doesn’t mean the enemy doesn’t know it.”
So what is Debka.com’s mission in its dispatches from the murky world of intelligence and counterintelligence? The two reporters acknowledged a pro-Israeli bias. “Let’s put it this way,” Mr. Shamis said. “We are Israelis. So whatever bias is coming out of this, that is possible. It doesn’t mean that we are presenting and defending the official Israeli points of view, certainly. You can imagine that officials in Israel, the people who are in charge of whatever they call it, information or propaganda or whatever … they don’t like us very much.”
Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, Debka.com was, according to a Google search, most popular among right-wing sites like WorldNetDaily.com, as well as Zionist supporters of Israel and, in a few cases, religious apocalyptics who, one supposes, wanted a real-time account of the Book of Revelation. And in any case, having an agenda does not necessarily mean that your information is always inaccurate. Just ask Matt Drudge about that blue Gap dress.
foreverfree
If Shamis has worked since the 70's in Israeli military and intelligence reporting, he has no doubt many contacts with 30 years of experience under his belt.
Something to keep an eye on, in my estimation.
Indeed, Ron...
I recently had a thread pulled because the source was DEBKA. It involved the reluctance of the Saudis to give us bases. A week later, it is pretty apparent that there was at least as much "fire" generating the "smoke" of that article as most of the "mainstream" press articles posted on here.
The thread nanny insisted I "prove" DEBKA was reliable before he or she would permit it. This attitude, as well as the chicken little approach towards military news stories is not producing ignorant terrorists. It is producing ignorant Freepers.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
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