The US state department, departing from traditional diplomacy practice, has admitted it has a three-person "digital outreach team" posting entries in Arabic on "influential" Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote alternative futures for Islamic youths besides terrorism.

"Our bloggers speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a US government spokesperson," Duncan MacInnes, from the state department's bureau of international information programmes, told the house armed services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats recently.

"Because blogging tends to be a very informal, chatty way of working," MacInnes said, "it is actually very dangerous to blog." A senior experienced officer, who served in Iraq, acts as supervisor and discusses each posting before it goes up.

The team's approach is to join a blog conversation, often when it turns to the motivation for US policy toward Iraq, and when others are claiming that the occupation is meant to help Israel or to secure oil.

"Our job is to address that motivation issue and show them that that's not the motivation," MacInnes said.

"You can't just say, 'well, here's our policy,' and drop it into the blog. You have to have what I call a bridge," MacInnes said.

He then described using a sporting or current event or even poetry that would "allow one to get to be in a conversational mode with people".

Even though they were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, he said, was that after identifying themselves as state department employees and using their own names, "we would be, in the parlance of the internet, 'flamed' when we come on," meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

They weren't and there were such posts as, "we don't like your policies but we're sure glad you're here talking to us about it," MacInnes told the subcommittee.

As a result, the blogging team is expanding to six speakers of Arabic, two of Persian and one of Urdu.

"Our core message must outline an alternative future that is more attractive than the bleak future offered by the terrorists," said Michael Doran, deputy assistant secretary of defence for support of public diplomacy. - (LA Times/Washington Post service)