Pentagon spy effort serves a purpose, by Mark Bowden

We are no longer in the Cold War, when spying meant monitoring the activities of an empire such as the Soviet Union. Infiltrating and targeting terror cells is work that requires boots on the ground - as with the unit in Jolo - who have relationships with the local military and police, who know the language, the culture, and the politics in obscure theaters of operation, and who are capable not only of gathering intel but acting upon it fast.

Some of the things Rumsfeld did were right.

He was also on the radio recently, talking about Iran.

Move over, James Bond

The problem is that audiences tend to prefer spy movies of the Mission: Impossible variety. Despite winning critical plaudits, The Good Shepherd has only made around $60m (£30m) in the US - a modest return for a big-budget, 167-minute all-star movie. Other downbeat spy yarns have also struggled. Michael Apted's Enigma (2002), about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, failed to capture the public imagination. Cinema goers don't always warm to tales about desk-bound cryptographers or tormented double agents.

There is a revealing anecdote in Leo Marks's memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, chronicling his experiences as a codemaker for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. As far as Marks was concerned, he was doing work of the utmost national importance. But that wasn't how his neighbours saw it. They posted him a letter containing a white feather and the message, "shirker". To them, the idea that he could be contributing to the war effort by sitting in an office solving puzzles didn't stack up.

Manuel Castells, on blogs

Most importantly, the Internet increases the belief that you have power. And the belief that you have power, in Castells' formulation, constitutes real power.

Did you know that Larry Lessig gave the key note speech at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha? (See also here)

An American Family

Ten years ago, HBO bought a pilot script for a show that no one—not creator David Chase, lead actor James Gandolfini, or any of the original cast—thought would ever get made. Today, The Sopranos is perhaps the greatest pop-culture masterpiece of its day, a fearless series that has transformed television. With the story of Tony Soprano, mobster in midlife crisis, just nine episodes from a finale, the players behind the phenomenon tell how it all went down.

Disney and Bruckheimer Eye Jihadists

Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have acquired screen rights to Jihadists in Paradise, a Mark Bowden article published in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly. Variety says Bowden is set to write the screenplay.
The deal puts Bruckheimer back in business with Bowden. Bruckheimer produced the Ridley Scott-directed drama Black Hawk Down, which Ken Nolan adapted from Bowden's book.

Jihadists in Paradise details the emergence in the Philippines of the Islamic terrorist faction Abu Sayyaf and one of its leaders, Aldam Tilao. Tilao put his group on the map by sneaking by boat into a diving resort and taking 20 hostages, including three Americans. He and his armed thugs beheaded one of the Americans and dragged the other two -- a missionary couple -- across the jungles for a year and a half.

Tilao was eventually tracked down and killed after a long search by the CIA and Filipino military forces.

If you thought you were done with books, you should check out Danielewski.

Work at this, be rewarded

MARK Z. Danielewski should be acknowledged as one of the most unique writers of the new millennium. In a time when books are written almost generically with an eye firmly fixed on lucrative film rights, Danielewski has produced an epic prose poem that is entirely distinctive.

Only Revolutions is a perfect representation of this iconoclastic author’s belief that no book should be similar to other forms of media – or even to his own earlier title! This is nothing like Danielewski’s 2000 debut, the labyrinthine House of Leaves.

Through the meat grinder

For years they hone the art of monitoring and catering to our every market-tested whim, delivering the most unobjectionable, preapproved, shiny, sexy product possible, and this is how we repay them: fragmented viewership, niche-ification, knee-jerk disaffection, snark.

But media conglomerates don't get mad; they get out their wallets so the same companies that own the networks and studios that make the shows and movies that get lambasted and lampooned or fawned over or recapped (Television Without Pity, MySpace and YouTube, it's a new, new paradigm now) will soon own all the well-known online distribution channels they are currently not suing. Even this can get complicated, as Valleywag recently reported on the whole Viacom-YouTube-Comedy Central legal pile-up, but not so much that it will stop the march of consolidation. Marshall McLuhan said that the content of any medium is another medium, and never has this seemed truer than now.

The war on terrorism is now an information fight

In earlier times, it might have been acceptable to put America’s propaganda operation in the hands of a conventional political operative. But we are now living in a time when something as crude as a grainy cellphone video of Saddam Hussain’s execution can rocket around the Arab world in a day or two via the Internet and do more damage to America’s policy in Iraq — in terms of further radicalising Sunnis in Iraq and in the region — than a month of car bombs.

Some at the State Department understand the dire situation the US is in. Strategist David Kilcullen explained in The New Yorker that the global war on terror is “fundamentally an information fight. The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that. And I think that’s why we’re losing.”
Terrorists, he said, blow up Humvees more for the sake of the video. The images are distributed on the Internet, where they spread virally and are used to win supporters and donations.
“Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it,” said Steve Fondocaro, a retired colonel who served in Iraq. “We have to fight on the information battlefield.”

Al-Qaeda and Algeria's GSPC: Part of a Much Bigger Picture, By Michael Scheuer

the GSPC's decision to come under al-Qaeda's umbrella is in itself an important story; it is a lethal and talented group that will benefit from its ties to al-Qaeda while extending the capabilities and reach of bin Laden's fighters, especially in Europe and Canada. Yet its accession is clearly part of a bigger story which is seeing al-Qaeda's plans for instigating Muslims to join a jihad aimed at the far enemy beginning to bear fruit, and also how those plans are being furthered by al-Qaeda's ability to operate from bases in Iraq. As the late Sheikh Abdullah Azzam claimed when he and bin Laden worked together in the 1980s, it is the job of Islamist leaders to persuade Muslims to join "the caravan fighting in God's way." Bin Laden is carrying on his mentor's work successfully.