"It was the usual fireworks, which was beautiful, you know." Esam Pasha's voice is strong, his accent melodic. He continues: "It's sad that you can see this light only because bombs are falling and people are getting killed. It feels like the movie Titanic when the ship was sinking and musicians kept playing."

Pasha's story of nights spent painting the bomb-lit sky from his roof in Baghdad is broadcast on War News Radio (www.warnewsradio.org). The weekly show is reported and produced by a group of students at Swarthmore College who, over the past several months, have been trying to shake some life into the current coverage of the Iraq war. Over their 26 half-hour shows, the WNR reporters have interviewed subjects as varied as a professor at Basra University, an American platoon leader stationed in the Sunni Triangle and Wal-Mart shoppers.

The project has its roots during the Vietnam War, when Swarthmore graduate David Gelber spent several years with Pacifica Radio. More than three decades later, as an executive producer for CBS's 60 Minutes, Gelber watched as another war unraveled without due treatment from the mainstream press.

Remembering the groundbreaking work done at Pacifica, Gelber approached the Swarthmore administration with a proposal: Let's have a group of intelligent and curious college students produce a radio show presenting unconventional coverage of the war. Within weeks several students were holed up in a campus building for two 15-hour days recording WNR's pilot episode.

"I wanted to contribute to the debate about the war," says Eva Barboni, 21, who, like most of the other students, had no previous experience in journalism. Regardless, the administration was impressed and immediately signed on to fund the project.

The group met challenges from day one. Among the many professionals who passed through WNR's door was former New York Times and NPR reporter Mike O'Connor, who remembers not only the students' technical struggles but also "the not insolvable but inherent challenge of telling a story that is happening on the other side of the earth."

While WNR is not without its critics, it has been simultaneously staffed by the heads of the heads of the College Democrats and the College Republicans. Recent graduate Alan Smith, 22, says that "there is a vaguely liberal bent in that we are questioning the people in power and like to think that we would do so regardless of who was in power. We try to keep our own voices as far from the front as we can."

And as for the leagues separating the WNR staff from its material, the work has shown that physical distance need not be a constraint. In a paper-strewn room with a single telephone, the WNR reporters make connections beyond the scope of what some of their more eminent peers have accomplished.

O'Connor tells the story of one student who had never called overseas trying to get in touch with the State Department. "She didn't know what to do," he says, "but pretty soon she had contacted all the right people." It was not long before the students were interviewing Iraqi former prime ministers and middle school students.

In one program, titled "President, Interrupted," President Bush's June 28 speech imploring Americans to "stay the course" in Iraq is annotated with commentary from a host of specialists, including Baghdad medical student Jamal Nagamie, psychologist Robert J. Lifton and Kurt Vonnegut, who asserted that "television has removed all seriousness and fact from what's going on." In another episode, in an attempt to discover why North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones — he of Freedom Fries — co-signed a bill calling for a withdrawal date, Barboni interviews not only his conservative constituents but Sister Grace at the church where he worships.

Guided by Marty Goldensohn, whose reporting credits include NPR's Marketplace, the WNR reporters kicked up their 30-hour-a-week schedule of the spring semester to full-time over the summer, and, in their steamy news room with folding tables and Gothic windows and doors, have sketched out a proposal for receiving course credit for their radio work.

In the weeks before September, WNR will be broadcasting a best-of series, featuring reports on vacationing

Iraqis, American soldiers delivering school supplies, and a history lesson on the Shia/Sunni divide, while the student journalists return home to collect their bean-bag chairs.

As the staff plunges into its second semester, no plans exist for War News Radio after the war. "Our purpose is not the purpose of an anti-war publication," says Goldensohn, "where one prays to go out of business." Rather, he hopes this project "is a little wider." Students, he says, will always find imperative issues. "Hopefully, this will gain so much momentum, the war will end quickly, but this will keep on going."