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Blackwater: When Things Go Wrong (continued) (The Virginian-Pilot - HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com)

emmineb — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:57:53 GMT

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Global Guerrillas: TERRORIST NETWORKS: Advanced Topics 070216

emmineb — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:02:12 GMT

The media term "amorphous terrorist network" doesn't provide much for us to work with. That changes when you apply advanced network theory to the topic. A recent paper by the student Mitch Stripling called, "Embodying Terror Networks: How Direction Creates Structure" (PDF) is a great example of this. The paper starts with a strongly written review of how network theory has been applied to this topic. This review starts with the early work by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (Networks and Netwars) and their simplistic chain, star, and all-channel network topographies and continues to the highly connected hubs (which embodies both the vulnerability and resilience of this type of network topology) and power-law distributions of scale-free networks (for more, read the bri

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities Flashed [Mesopotamia Macromedia]

emmineb — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:09:11 GMT

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities is a chart of the US and coalition military fatalities that have occurred in Iraq since the onset, mapped across the dimensions of time and space. It is an ongoing project that is updated regularly, and will continue to go on as long as the war does. The animation runs at ten frames per second -one frame for each day- and a black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred. Each dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot which fades to black over the span of 30 frames/day, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war. Accompanying the visual representation is a soft 'tic' sound for each fatality, the volume of which increases relative to the number of fatalities that

PressThink: Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop

emmineb — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:59:43 GMT

Even realism has an obligation to be realistic. — George Packer. [...]Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events.

The Gaza Bombshell - Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

emmineb — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:19:39 GMT

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

TomDispatch - Mark Danner, How a War of Unbound Fantasies Happened

emmineb — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 20:31:29 GMT

In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan. Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the ninety-eight-year-old Father of Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who duri

TomDispatch - Proliferation Wars in the Intelligence Community

emmineb — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 09:05:09 GMT

VANITY FAIR : The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed (Craig Unger)

emmineb — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:47:21 GMT

iraq niger yellowcake uranium sismi plame ledeen p2 disinforamtion cutout dgse kwiatkowski rocco martino

An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare - washingtonpost.com

emmineb — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:24:48 GMT

In today's Washington Post, a former interrogator working with the US government in Iraq, Eric Fair, shares some of his disturbing memories: A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine. That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators

BBC NEWS: Middle East | Iraqis use internet to survive war

emmineb — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:29:23 GMT

Google is playing an unlikely role in the Iraq war. Its online satellite map of the world, Google Earth, is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad. As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads. One tip - on the Iraq League site, one of the best known - is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth's detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block. It's another example of the central role technology plays in the conflict - with the widespread use of mobile phones, satellite television as well as the internet - by all sides and for many purposes.