Is he real or just raed?
Paul Boutin takes a shot at finding out for sure.

Rather than guess, I emailed Salam and asked for proof of his location just before the first attack on Baghdad this morning. “how can i do that?” he emailed back. “you don’t expect me to run out in the street and take a picture near something you’ll recognize.” Actually, I pointed out, a +964 phone number where I could reach him would do. Dialing into Iraq from here is tough right now, but not impossible, and rerouting a phone number would be much tougher than posting a blog from outside the country. Salam hasn’t given me one, but that’s understandable.
Instead, I mixed what I learned as a Unix sysadmin in the 80s with what I learned as a daily reporter in the 90s. A barrage of late-night phone calls and emails to bloggers, Google, and network engineers produced the following evidence:
– Salam claims to connect to the Net via Uruklink, the state-run Iraqi ISP, using Web-based email from the British music magazine New Musical Express. Remember the Sex Pistols line, “I use the NME?” So does he.
IP addresses in his email headers aren’t sufficient to pinpoint his location, but they’re consistent with his story, being in the same range used by past Uruklink posters. I’m reluctant to publish his exact headers.
A whois and traceroute on Salam’s most recent originating address got as far as Transtrum, a unit of the Lebanon-based ISP TerraNet. Requests for further routing info from Transtrum went unanswered, but senior network engineers who looked at the headers for me in the US think they’re legitimately from Iraq.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2003/03/20
Paul Boutin Technology writer for Slate, Wired, The New York Times, Salon, etc
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