I'm sure it's a bunch of teenagers and not the CIA . . . I've been waiting for a long time for an independant english Arab news service and the propoganda police in Washington are making me wait even longer . . .

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035779892677&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724

It's been a difficult week for Al-Jazeera, the largest Arab satellite news network.

Al-Jazeera's new English-language Web site (english.aljazeera.net) launched Monday, was flooded with Internet traffic.

Whether that traffic came from hackers or was due to an abundance of interested readers is still unclear. But the net effect was the same: many Web surfers found they couldn't view the site yesterday.

Two Al-Jazeera reporters also had their credentials revoked by the New York Stock Exchange.

Al-Jazeera's English site was unavailable yesterday from four out of five locations in the U.S., said Roopak Patel, a senior analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that tracks Web performance.

The site had experienced periods of very poor availability — which may have been caused by hackers, Patel said.

The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the U.S. Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at Horizons Media and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began yesterday morning local time.

He said he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the U.S. servers were affected, leading him to suspect that the attackers were in the U.S.

The news network has faced much criticism from the United States for broadcasting Iraqi footage of five U.S. prisoners of war and at least eight dead Americans. The English-language Web site contained photos from the footage, which potentially also made it a target.

In what's known as a "denial-of-service" attack, hackers send bogus download requests to the target Web site so it is unavailable to the general public.

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web site, denied an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it was difficult to access because of traffic that was almost four times more than expected.


Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange barred Al-Jazeera from broadcasting from its floor, citing a lack of space.

The network, which has broadcast from the facility for about five years, claimed the move was retaliation for its war reporting, and said it would seek an alternative venue, such as the Nasdaq Stock Market studio in Times Square.

Nasdaq spokesperson Scott Peterson said the request would be denied "in light of Al-Jazeera's recent conduct during the war ..."

With files from Star wire services