More shrapnel from blogospheric steel [h/t The Hedge].

Dipnote, the US Department of State official blog, sums up the findings of UNESCO’s ‘Youth@the Crossroads’ conference in Manama, Bahrain:

Organizers of violent radical groups are aware of this need for separation and identity and exploit it. They appeal to and recruit these underdeveloped young people, who then take on the identity of the group. Once a person is part of this group, the person is willing to act in violent, extremist ways that he or she would never act as an individual. Hence, the work that the NGOs gathered in Manama are doing - providing programs that build and reinforce a young person’s sense of self and positive relation with his or her community - counter the dangerous influence of an exploitive violent group.

Another Human Terrain Operator Killed, this time in yesterday’s Sadr City bombing, and Mike Innes takes issue with employer BAE System’s opportunism in their reporting Nicole Suvege’s death. Bad timing by State then, bigging up PRTs and the Holistic Approach the day before.

Speculation is everywhere as to its substance, so why did the US Government classify its “National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030″ asks Shloky Vaidya?

Shades of the Cold War as Pentagon Says, Missile Defense in Europe Needs Testing - this time it’s about Iran. But maybe we should be more worried about satellites? Terrorists will be launching strikes against them by 2020 - Noah Schachtman reports.

I’ve not read it yet, but Adam Hammond’s new article ‘The Cost of a Redundant State Media Strategy’ [available at SWJ] looks timely in the light of Matt Armstrong’s assertion that no-one seems to know what the hell public diplomacy is (and the US press is rubbish, says AJStrata). On this side of the pond, the UK defence community has Strategic Myopia, writes Charlie Edwards.

USAF seeks The Next Generation of UAVs.

Sam Liles on Cyber Warfare as Low Intensity Conflict, but how do you identify a cyber attacker? In other LIC news, the US Department of Justice launches a plan to combat and contain gang violence.

Steve DeAngelis on IARPA’s philosophy and game-plan.

The surge must be working, says Tom Barnett - oil companies are rolling into Iraq.

Shane Deichmans On Information beyond Arquilla et al, responding to a Liles-Tanji debate. Michael Tanji fires off his first post at Complex Terrain Lab with Information Warfare: Subduing the Echoes of History.

You’d think everyone had written something along these lines but it’s worth reading Jason Burke when he explains how not to prosecute the ‘war on terror’.

I’ve heard Rumsfeld quoted a lot recently and here’s an article about what he got right.

I have two new posts up at CTLab Review:

Mahmoud al-Massad at the Frontline Club - a review of al-Massad’s acclaimed documentary Recycle, in which he returns to Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and attempts to find out what makes a terrorist.

Monumentalising Defeat - a brief look at Christophe Abrassart’s photographic essay on the WWII Atlantik Wall.

Mike Innes has also been busy, and has has his legal hat on this weekend:

Khadr v. U.S. (D.C. Cir. June 20, 2008) - The D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Sentelle, has dismissed a petition by Omar Khadr asking the Court to address certain procedural issues relating to Khadr’s war crime trial before a military commission at GTMO. The opinion relies on language in the Military Commissions Act providing that the D.C. Circuit’s jurisdiction in this context comes into play only after a final judgment by the commission that has been approved by the Convening Authority and after all aother MCA appeal options are complete.

Constitutional Cartography & the Parsing of Terrorist Space - I’ve been reporting on the Opinio Juris Insta-Symposium (OPJIS) on the Boumediene Case in dribs and drabs as I stumble through the wealth of offerings from various contributors [Mike's piece is also cross-posted at Small Wars Journal, where it sits nicely next to a companion article by Robert Lamb on Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens]

Benjamin Wittes on Law and the Long War - The smash book of the season… reviews and commentary on Benjamin Wittes’ new book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, 2008) have been popping up all over. Mike takes a look at them.

More news and views from the blogosphere and beyond.

First on the parade ground, Abu Muqawama’s newest recruit, Troy (Six of Seven?) kicks off with an easy one, How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Pashtun? and concludes that the wisdom of some convincing commentators “runs diametrically opposite” to current strategy.

Stephen Corman asks what the US can do to address foreign perceptions of unilateralism, Narrowing the Listen-Do Gap in US Public Diplomacy. Within this piece he cites the “numbers showing 2 out of 3 Americans said the Iraq War was not worth it” argument, which ties in nicely with a debate at CTLab in response to my post on Joseph Stiglitz and cost-benefit analysis. James Denselow in The Guardian suggests applying just such an analysis to the British role in Untangling Afghanistan.

Matt Armstrong is putting together a reading list on public diplomacy.

Shi’ites bombing Shi’ites in Baghdad? Who Are the Target Audience? asks Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008.

Olivier Roy says, “all the ethnic maps of Afghanistan are inaccurate”. With that in mind Ghosts of Alexander has fun with a series of such maps. The CNN one is, as GOA says, truly dreadful. Hand me the crayons.

How I learned to love the bomb: Why bad science fiction informs Department of Homeland Security policy. The title says it all in a great post by Sam Liles.

Is Sweden really implementing a full internet monitoring strategy on the Chinese model based on “vague arguments about terrorism”?

Evan Kohlmann interviews Hamas spokesman Ahmad Said al-Hamad. The internet as global madrassa? And more on Irhabi007, this time Tsouli’s links to the US [all via The Jawa Report]

More news and comment from the blogosphere and beyond. Today’s post is short, as is time.

Speaking of the blogosphere, ever quoted directly from a wire story? Associated Press lawyers want your ass. Blogger’s response: take me on, take us all on (more on this all over the place). And while the U.S. Navy is encouraging sailors to blog, the EU wants to shut blogs down and more bloggers are being arrested worldwide.

IntelFusion wants to know who paid Raytheon to develop Griffin missiles for Predator UAVs, while Think Artificial writes about the Predator’s successor, the totally non-aggressive Reaper.

In anthropology news, the Pentagon rolls out Project Minerva, as one of the Human Terrain System’s leading lights allegedly loves a man in uniform, grrr [h/t Marisa].

Abu Qatada released. US Special Forces COIN manual leaked.

Islamic Jihad’s Cyber-War Brigades - Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, says it has a new division of its armed Al-Quds Brigades - a cyberwar unit that claims it has hacked into the websites of several Israeli media outlets.

The Islamic Army in Iraq launches its Monthly Harvest email round-ups to journalists.

I’ve been using the beta for a while, and Firefox 3 is now officially out and available for download, if you can get to the servers. It’s good, but I’m waiting for the add-on developers to catch up. I need my Copy as Plain Text extension.

[Sky Soldiers of Vietnam, 'The Agony of War', 173rdairborne.com]

I have been exhorted by His Excellency Safranski to propagate the ‘randomness meme’ …

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Here goes:

One: Prior to my current career, I was a professional archaeologist.

Two: As an archaeologist, I once excavated a six-foot Mayan. His teeth were sharpened to points and inlaid with jade and haematite. His skull had been bound into a conical shape, and he was buried with an enema assemblage consisting of a jaguar pot and bird bone tubes. The dude was seriously whacked out.

Three: I used to collect typewriters. All three of them.

Four: In the early ’90s I was an extra in a Christmas ‘Scotland Against Drugs’ video.

Five: For all his nuttiness, my hero is still Hunter S. Thompson (RIP). Man, did he hate Nixon.

Six: Many years ago I fell off the roof of a house in Belize. Onto my head.

Seven: I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Hmm, who to tag? How about this lot?

Matt Armstrong

Michael Innes

Helmut

Cati Vaucelle

Hrafn Thorri Thórisson

Drew Conway

Justin Boland

Update: undoubtedly the best response to the whole tag shebang.

Today’s essential reading: Lawrence Ampofo from the New Political Communications Unit is interviewed by the International Affairs Forum about his work on international terrorism and web technology. The NPCU blog should also be required reading for anyone with the slightest interest in media, technology and strategic communication. A short extract from the IAF interview:

… what we are seeing now is terrorist organizations able to use the file sharing tools of the Web to appeal to the MySpace generation by using video, audio and images to quickly and powerfully convey their message. Young people in particular are bombarded with emotive images and audio, highlighting the causes of these organizations. The answer to your question should combine the fact that logical arguments are fusing with new technologies to render contemporary terrorist organizations as an extremely difficult and resilient adversary.

Getting robots of war to act more naturally: researchers look to swarms and colonies - Faye Flam at The Philadelphia Enquirer [via Quality Leadership Weblog]

ShrinkWrapped tells us why the received wisdom that Israel-Palestine is the key conflict in the Middle East is probably a myth.

What Divides bin Laden’s “Jihad” from Serial Murder? - possibly not much, suggests Subadei.

Jihadists called brilliant, resilient by Glen E. Howard and Stephen Ulph of the Jamestown Foundation.

In amongst reams of newsprint and flying bits dealing with the entirely unnecessary Hoffman-Sageman handbags-at-dawn showdown I enjoyed this ‘tag team’ effort at Arabic Media Shack, What Makes an Expert? I’m too bored of the whole thing to comment myself, so I’ll continue to pass on links by people with no axes to grind or egos to massage.

Will Hartley breaks down General Sir Richard Dannatt’s speech earlier this week, Tomorrow’s Army, Today’s Challenges. Sounds like Dannatt’s been reading Generals Smith and Kiszely. Good thing too.

General Petraeus and the ‘Information War’ - Felix Gilette at the New York Observer on Petraeus’ skilful manipulation of the media [via MountainRunner].

The other day, I noticed the same commemorative blue plaque Spook86 did, where the first V-1 hit London on 13 June 1944. Spook tells the story of The Doodlebug Summer at In From The Cold.

Looks like Will Hartley is back in the saddle at the Insurgency Research Group, with a new edition of UK CT & COIN Features. In more British news a London court is told of Plans to set up a secret Islamist state in Scotland [via Jihad Watch].

The Guardian sums up the current issues and concerns over al-Qaeda in New front with al-Qaida feared as terror group switches focus from Iraq (it’s better than the headline suggests). Elsewhere in the paper, Jason Burke says Al-Qaida is doomed to progressive marginalisation, but it’s a process that will take decades.

I don’t know who it was, but I know a man who does … Intelligence official suspended over al-Qaeda file left on train. Too many G&Ts after work, methinks. The U.S. release their documents through official channels, Leaderless jihad in Iraq? Not so much.

B. Raman [does anyone know his first name?] gives his Indian perspective on the Sageman/Hoffman spat - “Both are right, both are wrong” - which is pretty much how I see it.

Jeni Mitchell is off to Tajikistan - at Kings of War she addresses some of the issues facing this oft-forgotten state on Afghanistan’s northern border.

Mark Safranski’s proliferating web presence is manifest in his first post at Progressive Historians, The Virtues and Vices of Historians as Public Intellectuals.

Anand Varghese has a very well-researched piece on Naxalite use of new media at Burning Bridge.

Jim Harper reviews Michael Sheehan’s Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves.

Fabius Maximus asks, Was 9/11 the most effective single military operation in the history of the world?

FBI special agent predicts ‘catastrophic attack’ in ‘revenge’ for torture, Abu Ghraib - U.S. continues as AQ’s best recruiting sergeant, at ThinkProgress.

National Security and government agencies embrace Web 2.0 [via Security Debrief]

Time is short. Normal posting will resume soon. It better do - I’ve got a stack of half-written posts I need to finish off. Until that happens …

Raffaello Pantucci in The Guardian suggests in Why talk to al-Qaida? that any attempts to negotiate with Islamic extremists would undermine attempts at combating violent radicalism and alienate populations left stranded in a partial caliphate. Shouldn’t be a problem - I can’t remember AQ offering us the chance of a cosy chat recently.

Roadrunner computer busts through the petaflop barrier. Not impressed? “If each of the world’s 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.”

It’s not possible to resist a post titled Iran’s Mini-Quasi-5GW?. Read what Soob means, and why he’s killing “two birds with one multigradient stone”.

Liz Losh at VirtualPolitik:

one might hope that lawmakers would refrain from overemphasizing the opportunistic rhetoric of criminality when it comes to characterizing the policy implications of distributed information technologies. Unfortunately that is still not necessarily the case.

Read the rest of her post addressing institutional responses to the online threat.

I had no idea Steven Metz had a blog - Strategy and National Security Policy [h/t ZenPundit]

Chris Levesque at Historicus adds more to the debate on the Human Terrain System, in part a response to my original post on the issue at Complex Terrain Lab.

Top billing has to go to Dave Dillege’s eagle-eyed unearthing of The Counterinsurgency Library at SWJ Blog. It looks like it could be a useful resource alongside Abu Muqawama’s Counterinsurgency Reading List and the SWJ Reference Library, which Dave says is heading for a revamp.

I can’t say I’m totally surprised by the news that Sikh groups trying to revive insurgency in Punjab, judging by the pro-Khalistan demo I recently witnessed outside the Indian embassy in London. On the other side of India, a new terror threat emerges in the shape of Bangladesh-based group Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami (HuJI). Luckily for everyone, HuJI are pally with those inveterate meddlers, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

I really like the look of this upcoming paper: Spatial Syntax of Insurgency in Iraq, reviewed by Michael Innes at Complex Terrain Lab.

Teleportation between virtual worlds? The first demonstrable step in cross-virtual-world interoperability has been taken.

Michael Tanji thinks big and warns of The Long-Term Price of Rushing to Misjudgment.

In blatant contradiction to what the rest of the world thinks, UK is not a surveillance society, MPs claim. The Guardian editorialises.

David Foster at Chicago Boyz asks, Duz Web Mak Us Dumber? based on a Nicholas Carr article in The Atlantic. Conclusion: possibly, but people got equally exercised about telegraphy, railroads, radio and photography.

Nick Cohen in The Observer really brightens up my day with No one wins in modern-day academia, putting the blame squarely on New Labour, whose policies would have ensured Wittgenstein was out of a job.

It might sound strange for a city of nigh on 20m people but Cairo can be a truly dull place sometimes, especially when the heat comes down and traps a two-mile high pall of dirt over the chaos below. Twice in three years I found myself splashing out 25 piastres to visit Giza Zoo and gawp at the Sacred Baboon Sanctuary, carrot-fed ostrich, and easily the most depressed chimpanzees in the world. Arabic Media Shack has more on the sorry state of the Khedive Ismail’s former palace in Who Stole My Elephant?

If I was running a RagWatch series, the Daily Mail would win every time:

Controversial [i.e. gay] actor Rupert Everett has accused British soldiers risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan of being “whining wimps”, it emerged today.

That’s news? Seeing as how al-Qaeda are canvassing their constituency for ideas, how about taking down the Mail’s bloody awful website?

Postings are likely to be light for the next few days as the slew of summer weddings begins, combined with starting a new job and attending conferences, so here are a few links to sustain in the meantime:

James Petras at Atlantic Free Press pays Homage to Manuel Marulanda (RIP 1930-2008):

What make Marulanda’s achievements so significant are his organizational abilities, strategic acuity and his intransigent and principled programmatic positions consisting of support of popular demands. Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, had unmatched rapport with the rural poor, the landless, the subsistence cultivators and the rural refugees over three generations.

Jihadica presents the clearest explanation yet of jihadist justifications for the use of WMDs against civilians, as well as outlining how ideological indoctrination is actually implemented online.

Arms dealing and militarisation in Second Life - interviews with members of the Novus Ordo Imperialis. You can’t make this stuff up.

New research by Strategy Analytics suggests that 22 percent of all broadband users will register to a virtual world by 2018. That’s one billion people, estimated as a market worth eight billion dollars [via EuroGamer]. Eight bucks a person? Sounds low to me.

Some small towns opt to buy terrorism insurance, USA Today:

“If terrorists got this far into the country [West Baraboo, Wisconsin], there wouldn’t be anyone to make the claim anyway,” said village clerk Mary Klingenmeyer. But the village board voted 5-2 to pay $87 annually for the coverage.

“We had quite a few outlying areas laughing at us,” Klingenmeyer said. “Maybe we’ll have the last laugh.”

A neat neologism: Envirogee [via Culture Matters].

How does the Arab world view Barack Obama? Find out at Arabic Media Shack.

Hahahaha. I’d never heard of The Trumpet before, but apparently it’s published by the Philadelphia Church of God, who seem to have some, er, eschatological issues. That’s probably why I was a bit surprised whilst reading a perfectly bland assessment of America’s future destruction at the hands of foreign cybersomethings, World Cyberwar I [ouch, someone shoot the sub-editor]. Towards the end, this paragraph popped up:

As the basis of his analysis, [Trumpet editor-in-chief] Mr. Flurry pointed to a key Bible prophecy that might be fulfilled in part by cyberwarfare: “Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, also, thou son of man, thus saith the Lord God unto the land of Israel; An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land. … They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof” (Ezekiel 7:1-2, 14). Even though the modern nations of Israel, including the U.S., Britain and the Jewish nation, sound an alarm of impending attack and expect their mighty armed forces to respond, “none goes to battle.” There are a variety of ways the immediate future could play out, but one thing is certain to happen: Ezekiel 7.

Eh? Oh. I get it - he’s talking out of his trumpet. Meanwhile, as I reported a couple of weeks ago, Air Force Cyber Command is recruiting cyberwarriors, i.e. part-time geeks, to beat the bad guys.

A good, solid post at Burning Bridge, Kenyan media and the futility of restrictions - how a community radio station in Nairobi helped out during the recent crisis, and why national information spaces should be liberalised.