"AAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! I'm addicted to chat! Oh… no!!"

Though this cry of anguish did not come from me, it easily could have. For the past few months, I’ve spent a good part of every day tippety-tapping a manic Morse code on my computer keyboard: refresh ... post ... refresh ... post ... refresh, refresh, refresh. My work’s becoming an annoying distraction. My girlfriend insists she can detect a glazed, Charles Manson–ish look in my eyes. The other day, while visiting a friend’s house, I snuck away for a few minutes to engage in a quick online confab. Rude? Maybe. The thing is, I cannot help myself. Like Jim, the author of the above post, I am hooked on chat.

Actually, Jim and I are not so much hooked on chat as we are on a particular chat site: ItsHappening.com. More specifically, we’re hooked on the site’s subject matter. ItsHappening bills itself as a "discussion board relating to current world affairs surrounding Islamic Jihad and the US-led war on terrorism." And this — terrorism — is what draws us in. Elemental, Axl, Roman Agenda, Professor, Winter, Stupid Guy, Bag Sniper, Lucifer, Debunker, Old Dutch, Jas2000, CentaurMyst, AJ Crowley, Allan Jennings, Hoodwinker, G-Nome, B.A.D., Jim, me, and the rest of the site’s pseudonymous die-hards have one thing in common: we are Al Qaeda addicts, jihad junkies. It’s a sickness.

Yet the question remains: why should we all be drawn so compulsively, so inexorably, to this particular site?

Nobody, even me, fully understands my obsession with this," writes the site’s owner and operator, Jon Messner, in, appropriately, an e-mail interview. "As obsessed as I am, there are many others who quite literally live on the board." He’s not exaggerating. One recent evening, I left ItsHappening in the middle of a debate about Israel’s right to exist. When I turned my computer on the next morning, the same people were there, having the same debate — they’d been at it all night. "ARGH," as Jim so succinctly puts it. "AAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"I am addicted to this site," Jim writes. "I feel like I personally know these people!" But Jim, like the rest of the ItsHappening crowd, does not go there to make friends. Despite the fact that you’ll find some light banter, and even flirting, on the site, it is not what you’d necessarily call a friendly environment. "As a matter of fact," writes a recent poster in response to a perceived slight, "I’ll give you a loaded gun which you can point at my head and before your pudgy little finger can depress that 4lb trigger I’ll have your sorry ass on the ground upside down with both your gun and your arm shoved so far up your ass that you’ll blow your own fucking brains out."

Because ItsHappening is largely unmoderated, the site is raw, emotional, and often highly entertaining. It is also hugely popular. "[On] the slowest days the site gets between 5000 and 7000 visitors," Messner writes. "But when certain issues are prominent — for example, when Dirty Bombs were in the news — the spikes in traffic have gone as high as 70,000 visitors a day." Though many of these visitors take a quick look and then clear off, there are many who don’t. On a good day, or a bad day, scores of us stick around to babble, lament, pontificate, browbeat, threaten.

ItsHappening is not so much a marketplace of ideas as it is a sprawling flea market. On any given day, the site will contain dozens of wildly disparate discussions — or threads — ranging from explorations of America’s reliance on Iraqi oil to debates over the existence of God. And then, of course, there are the rabid back-and-forth exchanges that everybody loves so much: "I am bring forth an army that loves death as much as you love life"; "You are fools to believe that all Americans love life more than death. That will be your undoing." This may be ugly stuff, but there’s no doubting that it comes from the heart. In the ongoing public debate over America’s war on terror, ItsHappening is where the rubber meets the road.

"The site is something different," writes B.A.D., a long-time regular. "It is not just another conglomeration of articles through a media source, but rather real thoughts, from real people." More important, perhaps, those "real people" include me. In a conflict that often leaves ordinary citizens feeling powerless, there’s something oddly reassuring about having a forum where you can chip in with your own two cents — even if your audience is made up, in the words of one poster, of "250 armchair experts."

At the very least, when you post on ItsHappening, you can expect a diverse audience: bored housewives, old soldiers, policy wonks, professional wags, office laggards, sociopaths, and people claiming to be Islamic militants. Moreover, should you so desire, you can discuss Donald Rumsfeld’s obfuscation or Osama bin Laden’s kidneys with people from all over the world: Messner has tracked users back to Italy, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Botswana, Kirghizstan, Rwanda, Swaziland, Algeria, Ireland, Antarctica, Iran, Ghana, Lebanon, Guadeloupe, and a hundred other countries. It’s not too rare to find an Al Qaeda sympathizer in Stockholm swapping insults with a true-blue patriot in Montana, with dramatic results.

"All supporters of jihad and terrorism will have your children feasted upon. I’m blood thirsty and am ready to sink my knife into some towelhead motherfucker."

"And we are ready to sink our AKs into your ugly little coward faces. May the curse of God be upon you!"

Even though such outbursts are scorned by many of the site’s faithful — the above exchange was followed by a post asking, "Do you two want something to drink with that?" — this stuff can get pretty bloodcurdling at times. As Messner puts it: "This is a unique forum in that you actually have the opportunity to dialogue one-on-one with someone whose passion in life is to see you dead, your society and culture destroyed. Every now and then, there is an exchange that gets scary, and one of the participants disappears. These people are playing for keeps here on both sides."

Hold on a minute: death? Destruction? Playing for keeps? Why don’t we throw in a few aliens and some talking rabbits while we’re at it? Who knows, maybe the Abominable Snowman frequents the site from time to time. Actually, in fairness to Messner, he doesn’t seem to be your average Internet conspiracy nut. In a profile aired earlier this year, CNN described the ItsHappening creator as a "Web warrior," and that’s what he is. In the electronic front of the war on terror, Jon Messner is firmly entrenched on the frontlines.