In a thin notebook discovered along with a man’s partly mummified corpse this summer was a detailed account of his last days, recording his hunger pangs, his drop in weight and, above all, his dream of eating a rice ball, a snack sold for about $1 in convenience stores across the country.

“3 a.m. This human being hasn’t eaten in 10 days but is still alive,” he wrote. “I want to eat rice. I want to eat a rice ball.”

These were not the last words of a hiker lost in the wilderness, but those of a 52-year-old urban welfare recipient whose benefits had been cut off. And his case was not the first here.

One man has died in each of the last three years in this city in western Japan, apparently of starvation, after his welfare application was refused or his benefits cut off.

the dark side of prosperity and free market economics

Death Reveals Harsh Side of a ‘Model’ in Japan - New York Times

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Rita Katz and the SITE Institute have been mentioned on MemeStreams often.

Looks like someone at the White House toasted SITE's humint...

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

In the early spring of 2006, perhaps the most important document in Baghdad was known as the MOASS -- the Mother of All Spreadsheets-- a vast compilation of radio frequencies that insurgents used to trigger roadside bombs.
...
Eventually, 18 weapons intelligence teams, drawn largely from the Air Force, began collecting evidence both from bombs that detonated and from those that did not. At Task Force Troy in Baghdad, four cyanoacrylate fuming chambers now use a concoction of Super Glue and high humidity to tease latent fingerprints from electrical tape or IED components. One million known Iraqi fingerprints are stored at a Pentagon biometrics center in West Virginia. In the first seven months of this year, technicians examined 112,000 items and recovered an average of 600 latent prints each month.
...
To anticipate future bomb designs, scientific "red teams" last year began building IEDs that insurgents might build, while "blue teams" calculated how best to defeat them. Other red teams include 100 cadets and midshipmen from the nation's military academies, who have also been recruited as surrogate bombmakers. "Show me how many different ways you can flip a switch at a distance," the students were told. "Be conceptually sophisticated, but use the most simple, cheap and available material that you can."

'If you don't go after the network, you're never going to stop these guys. Never.' - washingtonpost.com

Russians and a lot of Russia watchers have been wondering not if, but how Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, would hold on to power. We fear we got our answer Monday.

There is a better job for Vladimir Putin - International Herald Tribune

President Vladimir Putin announced Monday that he would be the leading candidate on the ticket of Russia's dominant political party in parliamentary elections in December, and said he might become the country's prime minister next year.
...
One senior Western diplomat also proposed the idea that the latest public remarks were in part a charade, and that Putin, fearing betrayal or a loss of influence in the Kremlin's mercurial inner sanctum, may yet reverse his course and decide to serve another term.

"I think what is clear, one way or the other, is that he is setting up a parallel structure," the diplomat said by telephone. "But in the end he may ditch it all and decide to stay."

Putin says he'll lead party in next election - International Herald Tribune

It began with a bang and "a huge white blast," in the description of one witness who outlived that Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. At a U.S. Army checkpoint straddling Highway 9, just north of Najaf, four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division, part of the initial invasion of Iraq, had started to search an orange-and-white taxicab at 11:30 a.m. when more than 100 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive detonated in the trunk.
...
This introduction and the four-part narrative that follows are drawn from more than 140 interviews with military and congressional officials, contractors, scientists, and defense analysts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington and elsewhere. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the subject, or because they are not authorized to comment. Ten senior officers or retired officers, each of them intimately involved in the counter-IED fight, were asked to review the findings for accuracy and security considerations.

'The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces' - washingtonpost.com

The American economy may be teetering on the brink of a recession, but there's an industry our hedge fund gurus believe has an almost limitless future: the Chinese police state.

Harold Meyerson - China's Hot Stock: Orwell Inc. - washingtonpost.com

The rush of customers taking money out of Northern Rock has continued for a second day, amid concerns over its emergency Bank of England loan.

Long queues built up outside branches such as Kingston, Surrey, where some 250 people waited to take out money.

Experts insist that customers' money is safe, but banking sources suggest that on Friday alone clients pulled out �1bn - or 4-5% of retail deposits.

Northern Rock has struggled since money markets seized up over the summer.

your sub primes and so we are haing what looks like on old fashioned bank run
welcome to "it's a wonderful life"

BBC NEWS | Business | Rush on Northern Rock continues

In this video letter to the editor, Charles Ferguson, director of the acclaimed documentary No End in Sight, responds to Paul Bremer's September 6 op-ed, How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army.

If you haven't seen No End in Sight, I recommend it. Here's a sampler of review blurbs:

...a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

...the best and saddest film of the year so far...

Someone in the film notes that there were 500 ways to mess things up in Iraq and that the U.S. seems intent on going through them all. After watching No End in Sight, the inescapable conclusion is that that prediction is depressingly, but exactly right.

Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.

Charles Ferguson, On the Dismantling of the Iraqi Army

What soldiers call the “battle space”... is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army...

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear....

Two of the authors of this essay were KIA on Monday.

The War as We Saw It - New York Times