From WNYKRs in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week in Washington, the State Department assembled 17 Iraqi dissidents from North America and Europe to train them to use the media to more effectively spread their message against Saddam Hussein.

As Undersecretary of State Donald Faith said recently on a

U.S. funded Arab language radio station, the question has been, in the absence of military action,

what can we do? So ratcheting up the rhetoric is the kind of thing we can do now. We can stir the

pot and see what happens. It could push someone over the edge to act.

One of those prospective pot stirs is Muhammad Ishakar, an architect from Irvine, California,

who serves on the board of the Iraqi Forum for Democracy. We called him in the midst of the training

to find out how it was going. Well, it's actually a workshop where we had Iraqis worldwide who had been separated by geography

to meet together in one spot.

I knew most of the men and women who showed up, and they knew me.

And we just had very fruitful discussions and how to form a strategy for the media.

And we also were given the benefits of experts in the field of media.

What have they shown you about dealing with the media that you didn't already know?

Are there any sort of tricks of the trade?

Yeah, well, there's stuff like, let's just take one example that I just

caught to my mind is that when you're in front of the camera, that's an opportunity to talk to

millions of people around the world, so just don't waste that opportunity. Don't waste that

opportunity with questions back and forth where you're beating around the issue. Just go straight

to the issue. Is there anything that the activists found that they were doing wrong, according to the experts,

and that needed a major rethinking?

Yes, I think the Iraq is in exile.

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