But within hours, firm suffers denial of service attack

The Arab-based news service Al Jazeera launched a bare-boned English-language Web site on Monday, but within hours, it was knocked offline by hackers. A spokesman for the site’s Web hosting company said a denial-of-service attack overwhelmed English.AlJazeera.net with traffic, rendering it intermittently unavailable. The Web site is designed to carry a limited number of stories and is focused entirely on the war in Iraq. THE SLIM WEB site (english.aljazeera.net)had about 35 headlines so far, including war news, features, and analysis, before it was knocked offline. Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and Information Services, the site’s Web host, said the attack began Tuesday morning local time. 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 United States, at the the firm’s Contra Costa, Calif. location. Only the U.S. servers were under attack, said Arrashid, so the attackers were likely in the United States. He said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not estimate when the site would be fully available again. Stories on the site viewed Monday questioned the accuracy and fairness of U.S. media reports, such as “Saddam dead until proven alive,” which criticizes speculation about the fate of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after the initial air strikes on Baghdad last week.