by KEN HECHTMAN

The Gazette's banner headline of Wednesday, March 26 read, "Basra's People Rise." The story, filed 800 kilometres from Basra with a British general as its sole source, was scooped 36 hours earlier by a peace activist's e-mail dispatch sent from the ground in Basra. The dispatch denied there was any anti-Saddam popular uprising. Al-Jazeera, Reuters and the Guardian later confirmed the activist's version.

Of all the different versions of the war being followed, the anti-war activists are getting the better news and getting it first.

Mary Foster, recently returned from two weeks with the Iraq Peace Team, now collects and disseminates reports from team members, including Quebecers Robert Turcotte, Lisa Ndejuru and Zehira Houfani. She says her IPT-Canada list had over 300 direct recipients at the start of the war, it has more today and there's no way to know how many copies are being forwarded.

The team members themselves are based in the Andalus Hotel in Baghdad. "It's right near the Palestine Hotel, where the straight press is staying - it's the safest place in town," says Foster. They're accompanied wherever they go by one of the ubiquitous Iraqi government "minders." Travelling in Baghdad is a negotiation process. The team members want to meet with Iraqi families, particularly to follow up on the ones they've met in hospitals. The minders always want to take them to see bomb sites.

One of the stories the Iraq Peace Team broke was the dropping of fragmentation and cluster bombs on Baghdad. Robert Fisk, a journalist for the British daily the Independent, confirmed the fragmentation bombs a day later, on March 30. Another was the arrival of foreign volunteers and arming of the civilian population. During her trip to Iraq in February, Foster says, "A group of Yemenis had us over for dinner. They wanted us to address their meeting - which we couldn't do," because of the IPT's mandate. "That's Iraq's hope for the future," she continues, "a popular movement fighting against the invader, but not necessarily for Saddam."

From Russia with news

Montrealer Marc Azar has been in the mailing list business since 1996. "The Life to Iraq list began with 10 personal friends getting four to eight stories a day. Now I have 120 direct recipients and I send out up to 50 war stories a day," says Azar, who requested that the list subscription address not be published. His by-invitation-or-recommendation-only list is small, but it includes the upper leadership of the Montreal anti-war movement. The high volume of material he sends out, he says, would swamp any e-mail account with a size limit, such as Hotmail.

Azar sends clippings, not his own original stories. His main sources include the European and Arab press as well as selections from other mailing lists such as Electronic Iraq, Al-Awda and the Global Network of Arab Activists.

"I don't try to be neutral," he says. "I try to show what I believe, and that means more on the left-wing side. After 15 years of studying the region, I have a sense of who's a credible source. If I see multiple sources on a story, that helps. I don't send out anything about the Iraqi underground because it's just too hard to confirm."

Recently, he's included some incredibly detailed military analysis pieces from the Russian news site www.iraqwar.ru. "The Russians are getting their information by scanning for radio transmissions," explains Azar. "Most of the American ones are encrypted, but they obviously have a way of decoding some of them. Even so, it could still be disinformation. You never know.

"Overall, I have a better record than most newspapers and when I'm wrong, I send out a correction. I ran a story about [Minister of Foreign Affairs] Bill Graham's son being in Baghdad as a human shield. Turned out he was a reporter for the National Post. But overall, the Internet is faster and a hell of a lot more reliable," says Azar.

On March 30, a Robert Fisk story went out on the Net, debunking the American claim that an Iraqi missile killed 62 civilians in a Baghdad market. He quoted the serial number and lot number off a fragment of bomb casing. Within hours, Pearse Stokes, an Irish peace activist had plugged the numbers into Google, discovered a match with bomb casings found during the American bombing of Serbia four years ago and sent out his confirmation story. CNN is still carrying U.S. Central Command's version of events.