Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report.

Around that time, the State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords.

Some Africa experts contend that the United States has lost its focus on how to deal with the larger threat of terrorism in East Africa by putting a premium on its effort to capture or kill a small number of high-level suspects.

This article is nominally about Somalia, but it's also about Zarqawi.

State says, "It's a Scene, Stupid," but Defense still sees it as a celebrity culture.

Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house.

“Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi and some of his associates who were conducting a meeting approximately eight kilometers north of Baqubah when the air strike was launched.

What no one is yet talking about is what else they gathered from the safe house. Clearly they've already been there since the strike, if they're talking about "facial recognition" and fingerprints.

Could this lead to a domino effect and the capture of the insurgency's leadership?

The next few days will be critical in determining how the insurgents respond to being headless. This is a major test for the 'scene'-ness of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Killed Dead

Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Thursday.

Seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

Leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Has Been Killed

This report from late May provides background and analysis on the situation in Somalia.

Expect Somalia's frenzied paralysis to continue. At present, there is no political force capable of prevailing on its own and no external power that is willing or has the capacity to impose a solution. The new and complicating thread in the web is the I.C.U. and Islamism.

Look in the near term for persisting waves of tension between the I.C.U. and the A.R.P.C.T., as all the other foreign and domestic forces struggle to position themselves around the central confrontation. The complexity and uncertainty of the political situation ensures that most actors will try to hedge their bets, lowering the chances for conflict resolution. The political configuration of the web has changed and become more fraught, but the familiar tangles and knots remain.

Even without taking the long view, there is not really much "news" in the latest round of reportage from Somalia. One wonders if the upswing in US national coverage is manufactured.

Somalia's Tangled Web Becomes Contorted | PINR

Although Westerns have evolved, the conventions are still often glaring, making even Westerns that have gray, shadowy moral areas a tough sell to some people. There’s just too much dust, leather, whinnying, shooting, and mud—too much brown—and not enough talking, understanding, humor, and complexity. The trappings of Westerns make them seem fake and message-y, even as they strain to be realistic.

David Milch’s “Deadwood,” which begins its third season on HBO on Sunday, is the exception to the rule; in what I’d assumed was very poor soil, he’s produced a gorgeously living thing.

... you don’t really notice the casting per se, because you’re too engrossed in the characters, listening to what they say, and trying to get inside their heads and hearts.

Deadwood rocks. Tune in on Sunday.

I was disappointed to hear this:

“Deadwood” has not been renewed for a fourth season ...

Dead On | The New Yorker

Freeman Dyson's latest review appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

If we wish to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we wish to take effective measures to lessen its attraction to idealistic young people, the first and most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we can understand them.

Religion from the Outside | The New York Review of Books

Did the Industrial Memetics Institute submit anything for this call?

Original research papers on the following topics are sought:

* Studies of human-computer trust
* Socio-technical examinations of reputation systems
* Trust-building systems for online interaction

The deadline for this call has already passed, but it may point to a continuing interest in these topics from the editors of this magazine. You could always submit something for a general issue on these and related topics. Also, keep an eye out for this issue to arrive -- it's scheduled for Spring 2007.

Calls for Papers: Special Issue on Security and Usability, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Paul Saffo calls it like he sees it.

Corporations and the military are at the point where they have extraordinarily powerful new tools, he adds, but to leverage that power they must think in radically new ways. "If you don’t do that, you are just paving the cow path. You’re wasting vast sums of money to do things in an old way, and you’re kidding yourself that you’re innovative."

Part of the challenge of changing how organizations operate is created by the term "network" itself. People think they have a common understanding of what the word means, but networks are not all equal, and over time the label evolves either into an invitation to think creatively or it becomes “intellectual wallpaper over unexamined assumptions.” This confusion contributes to making some unwise decisions when leaders come to believe that because they are networked, they are collaborating. But this is not always the case.

Moo.

Collaborative Technologies Demand Deep Change | SIGNAL Magazine

If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.

...

We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.

...

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

... It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

The conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace.

What if there was a non-military draft into the Long War of Ideas?

Is that not jihad?

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

In 2005, Greg Conti [2] presented a paper at the IEEE conference hosted by Georgia Tech and at which Rita Katz spoke. Included below is the abstract of his talk. The proceedings were published by Springer, linked here for subscribers. An extended version of the paper is also available directly from Conti, along with PowerPoint slides.

Intelligence analysts are flooded with massive amounts of data from a multitude of sources and in many formats. From this raw data they attempt to gain insight that will provide decision makers with the right information at the right time. Data quality varies from very high quality data generated by reputable sources to misleading and very low quality data generated by malicious entities.

Disparate organizations and databases, global collection networks and international language differences further hamper the analyst’s job. We present a web based information firewall to help counter these problems. It allows analysts to collaboratively customize web content by the creation and sharing of dynamic knowledge-based user interfaces that greatly improve data quality, and hence analyst effectiveness, through filtering, fusion and dynamic transformation techniques. Our results indicate that this approach is not only effective, but will scale to support large entities within the Intelligence Community.

I'd be interested in whether Conti had any recollections from the conference that he might be able to share.

Filtering, Fusion and Dynamic Information Presentation: Towards a General Information Firewall, by Greg Conti, et. al.