AMERICANS ARE BRUSHING UP on Afghanistan, Islam, anthrax, the capabilities of precision-guided weapons, and a score of related subjects–notable among them our old adversary Iraq. Anyone looking for current information on that singularly forbidding country should know about the Iraq Report, updated weekly, courtesy of the U.S. government. It’s a byproduct of Radio Free Iraq, created by Congress three years ago to broadcast Iraqi and regional news into Saddam Hussein’s police state.

Call it a news sampler, though one drawn from problematic sources, the only kind there are: the government in Baghdad; defectors from the government in Baghdad; Kurdish and other opposition groups; newspapers, radio, and satellite TV in the region; the Iraqi press abroad including two London papers, one Saudi-backed, the other associated with the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC); and Western news services. All this information, gathered by the staff of Radio Free Iraq, is sifted and winnowed, cross-checked to the extent possible and summarized by a regional expert–a Columbia Ph.D. named David Nissman, who has a working knowledge or better of Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian, Tajik, Russian, German, French, and more, who has lived and worked in Cairo and maintains extensive contacts with Iraqis in the diaspora.