Monicagate, the nearly forgotten Heaven's Gate mass suicide, and other news events have all been convincingly described as being The Story in which the Internet 'came of age.' If anything, the World Trade Center assault is the story where the Internet showed its age, generating little more than sound and fury from a largely depleted bag of tricks. From an assault that allowed television to re-assert its status as the world's foremost news source to an online barrage of hate mail and empty threats, America's 'War on Terrorism' has so far been something of a washout for the Internet as an instrument of policy and journalism. There's little in the way of either breaking news or background you couldn't have picked up from watching TV and reading the paper.

But there's a deeper disappointment, related to Sen. Hiram Johnson's statement about the first casualty of war. One of the supposed benefits of the Web, at least to true believers, was that the medium's capacity for instant exchange, for automatic second guessing, works against propaganda and toward a more skeptical approach toward the truth. Since the eleventh, we've heard plenty of lies, some white, others potentially catastrophic. And in our rush to pass around decades old tributes by Canadians and earnest reflections by Afghan Americans, Web journalists haven't done much to correct them.

Instead, the Web has offered a distressing exercise in the modern dilemma: knowing most of the information you're getting is biased and the rest is false, but still having to choose among the data and take action. You could almost set your watch by the barrage of counterintelligence, conspiracy theories and misinformation. About two hours after the attack, I received a forwarded email from a Palestinian arguing that Israel had to have been behind it. In true developing-story fashion, this tale grew in the telling, with learned references to advanced intelligence and military precision, and the inevitable early-morning phone call to '3000 Jews' warning them to stay home from work that day. If you happen to have Arab friends who are not shy about sending you half-baked spams, you'll recognize some of these details as warmed over bits from earlier Egyptair 990 theories.

Not all of the disinformation has had such a Snopes-like half life, however. Where the Palestinian Authority may threaten the lives of journalists who show Palestinians supporting the attacks, and Kuwait merely arrests them, the Web's culture police use more circular means. Soon after CNN began airing the much-disputed footage of Gaza kids celebrating the mass murder, a counterspam began circulating, spreading the close-enough-for-rock-and-roll fiction that this was actually 1991-era footage of kids cheering about the Gulf War.

Among commentators looking for evidence of Arab sympathy for the United States, this was enough to discredit the hot potato footage, and CNN eventually had to make an official statement testifying to the verity of the tape. Meanwhile, reels of counter-footage showing mourning Palestinians were rushed into action; the San Francisco Chronicle featured one such picture above the fold on its Saturday edition; but a story in the same day's paper made a pretty convincing case that in fact it was the mourning pictures - not the celebration pictures - that were stage managed for our benefit. In any event, hearts and minds of Americans were won. The Village Voice's Alyssa Solomon now fulminates - with no evidence in sight - that mourning in the occupied territories was 'far more widespread' than cheering.

This is important because the question 'How many Arabs hate us and how much?' has been foremost in so many minds lately - and the Web has been one of the main yardsticks. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on Tuesday grandly stated that Arabic Web sites and chat rooms reflect a '50-50' split in public opinion.

How the always-buoyant journo came by this nice round figure is a mystery. He cites 'Arab techies,' but I suspect his real source is the same Shangri-La that provided Dick Cheney with 'credible evidence' of Air Force One's being targeted and allowed Orrin Hatch to indict Bin Laden before the towers had finished collapsing. The poor distribution of phone lines and Internet access throughout the non-Gulf Middle East makes any Web-derived information highly questionable to begin with. English-language Web sites have since the attacks been too flooded with hate messages from apparent Americans to gather any meaningful statistics, and Arabic html is barely legible even if you can read Arabic. The Arabic language sites reviewed for this column offer little on which a wise commentator would build a general theory of public opinion (though interested parties may enjoy this expos? of Mossad's WTC conspiracy by the longwinded 'Sak11.')

Opinion pieces in the mainstream Arabic media do offer something like that 50-50 split. This strange Al Quds essay by one Dr. Iyad As-Saraj, in the form of a dialogue between a young couple, concludes with the groom-to-be making ominous reference to US support for 'certain regimes' (apparently a reference to Arab dictatorships supported or tolerated by the US, such as the Palestinian Authority that just barely allows Al Quds to publish), and his bride claiming it will be 'Sharon who gets the last laugh.' Even such unpromising materials are close enough for western reporters desperate to concoct arguments that there is one iota of popular support for the United States in the Middle East.

It may be a lesson in the self-negating aspects of technology. For the first time in history we have a war where you can email the enemy. You have ready access to the other side's propaganda. And because they're so easy, these things become meaningless.