In an extraordinary and unprecedented move the International Criminal Court today issued a statement confirming what has been in the pipeline for a while, i.e. that Sudanese President Hassan Ahmad al Bashir can be held responsible for genocide and other crimes in Darfur.

ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has presented evidence today showing that Sudanese President, Omar Hassan Ahmad AL BASHIR committed the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

Three years after the Security Council requested him to investigate in Darfur, and based on the evidence collected, the Prosecutor has concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe that Omar Hassan Ahmad AL BASHIR bears criminal responsibility in relation to 10 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The Prosecution evidence shows that Al Bashir masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups, on account of their ethnicity. Members of the three groups, historically influential in Darfur, were challenging the marginalization of the province; they engaged in a rebellion. AL BASHIR failed to defeat the armed movements, so he went after the people. “His motives were largely political. His alibi was a ‘counterinsurgency.’ His intent was genocide ”, the Prosecutor said.

Read the rest of the press release here. The ICC has applied for an arrest warrant [PDF here].

The International Crisis Group broadly welcomes the statement but warns of potential pitfalls in pursuing this action. ICG spin-off Enough also comments on the ICC decision and reminds us of al Bashir’s track record in human rights.

Although I wouldn’t ordinarily submit to such requests, the nice folks at the ODNI wrote to me today, asking that I post a flier to their conference in September. On the basis that a) I’m in the habit of posting conference details, b) I’ve known about it for ages, and c) that I’d like to go if I’m in DC at the time, I’m doing just that. Now, how about my ticket, just in case? The conference is free btw.

Conference: DNI Open Source Conference 2008

Date: 11-12 September 2008
Location: Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 2004

Web Site: http://www.dniopensource.org

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is pleased to announce the “DNI Open Source Conference 2008: Decision Advantage” to be held on Thursday, 11 September and Friday, 12 September, 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington DC. We invite participants from the broader open source community of interest including academia, think tanks, private industry, federal, state, local and tribal entities, international partners, and the media to attend.

Building on the success of the first DNI Open Source Conference held in July 2007, this two-day event will highlight ideas and contributions from open source experts residing outside the US Intelligence Community. The conference will raise awareness about open source and offer a unique networking opportunity, with projected attendance of over 1500. This premier gathering of the broader open source community will be free and open to interested members of the public who register online in advance. The conference will offer numerous sessions and several keynote presentations from senior government officials; confirmed speakers include Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Source (Acting), Mr. Daniel S. Butler, and Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection, Mr. Glenn A. Gaffney. Examples of conference session topics include:

The Open Source Innovation Challenge - Managing the Balance between Privacy and National Security with Open Source - Presentation of the National Open Source Enterprise - Creating Decision Advantage with Open Source - Combating Non-State Actors via Open Source - Developing Open Source Early Warning Capabilities - The Convergence of Social Networks and New Technologies - Young Analysts Talk about the Value of Open Source - Confronting the Counterintelligence Issues in Open Source - The Best Open Sources - The Evolving Role of Open Source in Protecting the Homeland - Improving the Ability to Access Foreign Language - Open Source in All Source Analysis - Open Source Growing International Partnerships - Making Use of Emergency Media Source - The Open Source Innovation Challenge: Presentation of Solutions

Detailed information about the content and agenda is available online at www.dniopensource.org. Conference registration can only be completed via the Web site. All registrations must be received no later than Thursday, 31 July 2008; early registration is encouraged due to space limitations and demand.

Flier also available as a PDF.

It’s a little known fact that the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was involved in plans to modernise the Iraqi capital Baghdad. He visited the city in May 1957, as an old man nearing his 90th birthday and, inspired by both Arab and Persian art and architecture, began to draft a series of blueprints for a new city.

Then monarch King Faisal II invited several prominent architects to contribute ideas to establish Baghdad as a modern world city. This included Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti and Walter Gropius. Faisal was assassinated in 1958, after which a military junta seized power, setting the scene for the modern history of Iraq with which we are depressingly familiar. None of Wright’s buildings were ever constructed, the new revolutionary government deeming them “too grandiose”, although some of the other plans were later implemented: Gropius’ Baghdad University (1960), Ponti’s Ministry of Planning building (1958), and a Le Corbusier sports hall (the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium, erected in 1981).

Lloyd Wright’s “Plan for Greater Baghdad” was drawn up over the course of several months following his visit, and his romantic vision drew heavily on the myth and memory of Harun al-Rashid, the 8th century caliph under whom Baghdad rose to pre-eminence as the regional cultural and political capital in the Islamic period. That Baghdad was destroyed in 1258 by the Mongols, but has remained alive in the Arab memory ever since.

Lloyd Wright rejected the modernist notions of the other architects, “those glass box boys”, as intent on glorifying western industrial achievement, and focused instead on creating architecture that spoke of both Baghdad’s heritage and that of the broader Arab world. Not only al-Rashid, but also Aladdin, Scheherezade, the Arabian Nights, ancient Mesopotamia, and the Garden of Eden.

The Harun al-Rashid monument (above) drew directly on the circular ziggurat style. This was an Islamic modification of the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, and can be seen in Iraq at the Great Mosque at Samarra (damaged in the current conflict) and other sites. The style was also exported to other places in the Islamic world, such as the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo, the city’s oldest.

Mindful of the necessities of modern life, Lloyd Wright also designed elements of infrastructure, such as a Postal-Telegraph Building:

Other buildings included an opera house (echoed by the Grady Gaggage Auditorium in Tempe, Arizona), a marketplace - complete with concrete domed ‘merchant kiosks’ - a university, art gallery and museum. I couldn’t find any explicit reference to housing in the plans, which would have been interesting, given Lloyd Wright’s skill at designing houses mindful of their historical and landscape setting. The designs made use of the domes, towers, curves and other motifs familiar in middle Eastern architecture to this day.

A new interventionist regime has played its part in the destruction of revolutionary Baghdad. It is hard to see a new Iraq - with or without American influence - harking back to the plans of Frank Lloyd Wright, or of Le Corbusier and others, if and when the opportunity to revitalise a once-great city arises. Development is more likely to adhere to tenets of low-cost, expedience, population management and immediate economic sustenance. How the ability of Baghdad to breathe life into the modern city pans out, who can tell?

Links:

Building for Democracy: Frank Lloyd Wright may yet “build” Baghdad, Wall Street Journal (2003)

Babylon Dreamer, The Scotsman (2003)

The Genie in an Architect’s Lamp, Washington Post (2003)

When Iraq Looked West, LA Times (2003)

The 1957 Baghdad Project, All-Wright Guide

Jeffery Aronin interviews FLW in 1957 for WNYC

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Disclaimer: this is a reworked 2007 post from my previous blog KuiperCliff.

I’ve recently abandoned my pre-Ubiwar protoblogging persona, but was trawling through some old posts and found the following, duly edited for contemporary purposes:

An article by Michael Agger in Slate, Le Browser: saluting Jean Baudrillard, is an affectionate tribute to the deceased French provocateur. It includes this passage, quoted from America (1988):

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning with death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with machine.

Although not quoted in the article, the next sentence is:

This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic.

See, I find that funny. I’m sure people took Baudrillard too seriously. Too literally as well, if the incredible furore over his ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ thesis is any yardstick.

[Cross-posted at Complex Terrain Lab]

Partly in response to the recent arrest of a Nottingham student for downloading the al-Qaeda ‘Manchester Manual’, Poetix writes on the dangers to academic freedom posed by the current security climate, and the nature of the university experience itself:

The right to radicalisation

Today, the very idea of the university as a space of unconditional freedom seems anachronistic; such are the times we live in. “Academic freedom” is now to be considered a freedom under condition, a freedom amongst other freedoms to which it stands in a relationship of mutual limitation. The model for this system of mutually limiting (or competing) freedoms is cybernetic: its twin goals are homeostasis (stable reproduction of the “primitive” conditions under which it functions) and efficiency (optimal ratio of output to input). The state simultaneously declares its commitment to the utmost self-realization of every individual citizen, and constantly intervenes to manage the “balance” of individual freedoms in order that no particular project of self-realization should locally destabilize the system. Threats to the system as a whole are rare, but the vexations of terrorism, deliberately calculated to elicit a disproportionate response, are severe enough to be treated by it as a source of existential menace.

The radicalisation of students is a risk built into the university’s teaching function, the purpose of which is to reproduce the conditions of knowledge within each new generation so that the research function - which requires a continuous supply of peers competent to discuss new developments - can be upheld. That “there are students in the university” is a fact that must be continually confronted, ideally by graduating them. Yet in the process of acquiring competency, students must undergo a partial deculturation: the worldview of the research community is not that of most people’s “native culture”. One cannot create new researchers in a field without exposing young people to the crisis of knowledge at the root of that field, the irreducible problematic on account of which it - and not merely the spontaneous commonsense of “uninformed” people everywhere - troubles to exist. To be initiated into a field of study is to be seduced by it, to the point where its problems become one’s own. The first thing the student must learn is therefore how to be seduced; and the “best” students are in this sense the most seducible.

Read the rest here.

Although I don’t agree with this (possibly deliberately provocative) article at TechDirt, The Internet Isn’t Critical Infrastructure, it’s true that mobile telephony is the technology that’s really driving interconnectivity. The UN-sponsored International Telecommunications Union reports that Mobile phone users top 3.3 billion - that equates to a 49% penetration rate, far outstripping static ICT, whichever way you cut it. Nearly half the people on this planet now have a mobile phone. Look back at this earlier post for why I think this is significant.

[Gizmodo]

Update: emerging markets phone sales up, Europe and Japan down …

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

Will Hartley at the Insurgency Research Group has just posted a disturbing report from The Guardian:

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.

Read Will’s sound remarks on it here, and the rest of The Guardian’s article here.

SecDef Gates gets it, and the US House of Representatives does too. The 2009 Defence Authorization Bill

authorizes $90.6 million to continue to fund Human Terrain Teams to meet CENTCOM’s requirement for 26 teams in Iraq and Afghanistan [via Ares]

And the Society for Applied Anthropology has approved this motion regarding the HTS (via AAA News):

“The board of the SFAA expresses grave concerns about the potential harmful use of social science knowledge and skills in the HTS project. The SFAA believes that social scientists can be helpful to the military by offering training, analysis, and evaluation so long as these activities are compatible with this organization’s code of ethics.”

The vote on this motion was:

Yes: 13
No: 0
Abstain: 0

A new mask from Frog Design:

The future isn’t all rosy. Increasing pollution, overpopulation, poverty, and climate change – society’s impact on the earth is reaching a breaking point. And while we may work to slow the onset of these catastrophes, reversing them is no longer an option. The question becomes, how do we live with the troubles we’ve already caused?

We don’t wish to make any prophecies – but if we fail to do more to mitigate today’s cultural, climatic, and economic dangers, the future may not be a pleasant one. Natural disasters will become more frequent, society more stratified, diplomacy more volatile.

Technology can be used to combat this dangerous new environment – but also to escape from it. We already use mobile devices to provide on-demand escapism, channeling movies, music, and other distractions. Increased processing power and emerging technologies will enable holistic computing systems to be stored in wearable devices, providing a more immersive personal media experience. In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.

The device itself acts as a mask between the user and the outside world, expressing the internality of the human-device interaction. It offers a physical distinction between those moving in the real world and those who are “plugged in” to their private dimensions, the world as they wish to see it.

The visual design casts the mask as a lifestyle product of the future, as it plays with a glaring, exaggerated coolness of the wearer. It gives an almost robotic appearance, and suggests a diversion from what we define today as “normal” physical human interaction.

Within the mask, smells, sounds, even air quality would be imitated to create a full sensory experience. The facial expressions of those wearing the device would be detected and projected onto personal avatars visible to others also living behind the shield of the mask.

Similar technology could have military applications, re-skinning the contours of conflict environments according to gradations of risk, stripping out unnecessary facets of reality. Head-up displays are nothing new in military operations, of course, but a wholly immersive and transformative real-time wearable environment is, as far as I know.

(h/t Street Knowledge)