Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Insurgent web sites making full court press, but on defensive

NY Times:

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But in the past two weeks something has changed. Every day now, new messages appear on the Web offering encouragement to resistance fighters, and last week Mr. Zarqawi's group started an Internet magazine, complete with photographs and 43 pages of text. Other Islamist groups are joining the effort, including one calling itself the Jihadist Information Brigade.

The Iraqi insurgency appears to have mounted a full-scale propaganda war.

And while the methods are not new - most militant groups now rely on the Web to recruit new adherents - the recent flurry of propaganda from Iraq has a distinctly defensive sound. The violence here has not let up, but the relatively peaceful elections, and the new movements toward democracy in other Arab countries, appear to have had a dispiriting effect on the insurgents, terrorism analysts say.

"I think they feel they are losing the battle," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, an American nonprofit group that monitors Islamist Web sites and news operations. "They realize there will be a new government soon, and they seem very nervous about the future."

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But the jihadists seem highly sensitive to perceptions that they have been weakened or demoralized in recent weeks.

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The new magazine, for instance, addresses this issue in its first section, titled "What Is Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia?"

After laying out the group's aims - mainly ridding Muslim lands of Westerners and reviving the "pure" Islam of the seventh century - the statement concludes, "One of the basic rules of our religion is not to spill a drop of Muslim blood unless it is justified, because the destruction of the world is no less an offense than that."

The magazine goes on to defend attacks on members of the Iraqi Army and police officers, saying they have abandoned their religion and become mere pawns of the West.

The text then continues in a somewhat plaintive tone: "Why are our brothers the mujahedeen denounced? Those who left their countries, their wives and children, and sacrificed their blood, all to protect your honor and expel the invaders from your land?"

It is pretty clear they are sensing defeat. In the war for the hearts and minds they have already lost. All they can do now is making the ending as bloody as possible.