Mideast Analysis, Fast and Furious

WHEN an Iraqi insurgent group releases a new videotape or claims responsibility for an attack, Western reporters in Baghdad rarely hear about it firsthand. Nor do they usually get the news from their in-house Iraqi translators.

Instead, a reporter often receives an e-mailed alert from a highly caffeinated terrorism monitor sitting at a computer screen somewhere on the East Coast. Within hours, a constellation of other Middle East analysts has sent out interpretations — some of them conflicting — and a wealth of contextual material.

Most of these analysts are unknown to the reading public. But that is changing. Last month, Rita Katz, founder of the SITE Institute, was profiled in The New Yorker. (A terrorist Web site that her group monitors promptly posted a link to the article.)

And Juan Cole, a University of Michigan historian with a blog about Iraq and the Middle East, became involved in a dispute about a translation of a comment by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many felt the comment was a direct threat to Israel, but Mr. Cole did not.

For reporters, all this freelance sleuthing and interpreting is a welcome new resource. But like the 17th-century dragomans who were the first official translators between the Islamic world and the West, the analysts often disagree among themselves, leaving the journalists with their own interpretive challenges.

"Now the problem is almost one of information overload," said Gregory Gause, the director of the Middle East Studies program at the University of Vermont. "How does one choose among such a variety of interpreters?"