First there was Wired Magazine‘s national security blog, Danger Room. Then there was Danger Room‘s senior reporter, Sharon Weinberger, who’s got her own website. Then there was Subtopia: A Field Guide to Military Urbanism,  which is listed in the  "Underground Sources" section of Weinberger’s right-hand navigation menu. That was the path that took me to it; Subtopia’s latest entry, "’Block D’ Enters the Pantheon of GWOT Space" is fascinating. Bryan Finoki, who pens Subtopia, refers to a "nebulous pantheon of war space"; "less formal territories of roving cars and disguised suicide bombers that lurk below the surface of the Middle East like a kind of unpredictable predacious root system"; "geospatial domains of ominous surveillance networks". From Abu Ghraib to Gaza’s tunnels, Finoki wonders: "Even if we could calculate the cement tonnage of this footprint, I imagine an even larger volume of GWOT’s unholy vault could only be truly gaged by its cavities of architectural secrecy."

Finoki is now my favorite.

Brilliant. 

There’s more. Go read it. 

Interesting interview with Ted Sorensen, J.F.K.’s counselor, advisor, and speechwriter of 11 years, in this week’s NYT Magazine. He refuses to take much credit for Kennedy’s words, either in his new book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, or in the interview… which is in pretty stark contrast to a more recent generation of presidential wordsmiths, David Frum, Matthew Scully, and Michael J. Gerson. Between Gerson’s claim-staking on Bushisms in his book Heroic Conservatism and Scully’s pan of Gerson’s account of their work in last September’s issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the idea that insiders would actually let a President take credit for anything got lost somewhere in the scrum. Which is interesting, despite the fact that there aren’t too many out there who believe in Bush’s ability to craft a coherent sentence, much less the kind of rallying rhetoric that played out post-911. Setting that aside, one would expect a fair degree of megalomania, but there’s something downright wrong-headed about a coterie of speechwriters trying to take credit for this particular U.S. administration’s presidential verbiage.

Kudos to Sorensen: old school.

Solomon, Deborah. "The Speechwriter." New York Times Magazine (27 April 2008). 

Associated Press reported that AQ No. 2 Ayman Al Zawahiri “will soon answer the hundreds of questions submitted by journalists, militants and others about the terrorist network’s future”, citing an AQ press release to that effect. In response, the New Yorker, with it’s usual wit, has cobbled together an interesting exercise in relative banality. A sampling of what an AQ Q&A over the web could look like:

Dear Ayman al-Zawahiri:

I am a member in good standing of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and am considering switching my terror membership to Al Qaeda. Is there a difference in dental?

—Confused in Cairo

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:

Unfortunately, that is not my department. Please call the office between the hours of eight and five and ask for Al Qaeda No. 37.

Dear Ayman al-Zawahiri:

I am a journalist for the U.S. publication Tiger Beat. When I heard you would be taking Web questions, I was like OMG, I totes have to write to him!!! Here are three questions we’re asking celebrities this month:

1. If you could be any character on “Gossip Girl,” who would you be?

2. Who would be a better friend, Lauren on “The Hills” or Ashley Tisdale in “High School Musical”?

3. Who is hotter, Zac Efron or Joe Jonas? (LOL)

—Stacy in Manhattan

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:

May you and everyone at your magazine burn in Hell.

Greetings and compliments to you, my good sir:

I am the widow of the late Nigerian head of state, General Sani Abacha. Please wire $15,000 in U.S. funds to the bank information provided below and in two weeks’ time you will receive $150,000 for your kindly services, my goodly gentleman.

—Mrs. Maryam Abacha

Lagos

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:

What kind of simpleton do you take me for? I sent you $15,000 last month and I never heard back.

 

There’s more. Go read it.

 

Borowitz, Andy. “Ask the Jihadist.” New Yorker (28 April 2008) 

 

There I was, thinking that it would be a simple thing to contrast the cultural turn in US foreign policy and counterinsurgency, against the persistence and evolution of geo-spliced spatial analysis of conflict. Not so. Never underestimate the ability of scholars to adapt, improvise, and overcome – or to get it completely wrong; trust well-resourced academic departments at well-heeled U.S. universities to innovate.

Stanford’s anthropologists have started a Human Spatial Dynamics Lab. That’s not quite the same as the Human Complex Systems Program at UCLA (Phil Bonacich, anyone?), and it’s got to be a step up from the braindead Laboratory For Human Terrain at Dartmouth – mathematicians and engineers jumping on the military human terrain bandwagon. Neither is brand new, exactly, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to compare mission statements and rationale.

According to the Stanford site:

Research in the Human Spatial Dynamics Lab at the Stanford Anthropology Department draws attention to processes of spatial dynamics. It focuses on a range of issues that cut across conventional sub-fields, but are united by attention to the constitutive role of space in social affairs. Relevant work includes the spatial dynamics of ancient urban transformations, studies of human-environment interaction as documented through global information systems, analysis of the social construction of landscape and region, and modeling of the spatial dynamics of disease transmission.

Whereas at Dartmouth:

The Laboratory for Human Terrain at Dartmouth College is focused on the foundational science and technology for modeling, representing, inferring and analyzing individual and organizational behaviors. Specific areas of current interest and activity are:

* Individual and organizational behaviors

* Adversarial intent modeling, simulation and prediction

* Dynamic social network analysis

* Discovery of hidden relationships and organizations

* Game theoretic foundations of individual and group behaviors

* Inferences of structure and intent from diverse data sources

* Human terrain markup languages and architectures for interoperability of HT systems

* Applications to national security and commercial domains.

 

OK. Dartmouth has been doing some wild tech-oriented research, but one hopes that Dartmouth is speaking to Stanford. I suspect not:

Human Terrain (HT) is an emerging area of study with significant national security and commercial applications. Its major goal is to create operational technologies that allow modeling, representation, simulation and anticipation of behaviors and activities of both individuals and the organizations to which they belong. Human Terrain technology has applications in:

* International affairs and geopolitics

* Pre- and post-conflict modeling

* Culture modeling and dynamics

* Tactical military operations

* Peacekeeping, humanitarian and relief operations

* E-commerce

* Online communities

* Financial and market systems and behaviors

* Consumer behavior and network analysis.

This is muddled and confusing. Human Terrain is "an emerging area of study"? No it’s not. Human "terrain" is a label, a metaphor, for guess what? History, geography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, communications, etc., etc. It’s "major goal is to create operational technologies"? No it’s not. That’s what mathematicians and engineers can deliver on multimillion dollar DoD contracts. Human terrain is, just in case anyone hasn’t read a newspaper or wireclip over the last few years, about people, what they think, their perceptions, their loyalties, the consequences they bear in wartime, the support they may or may not provide to insurgents, the physical, cultural, and informational spaces they create and occupy in  times of conflict and crisis. 

Freaking mad scientists. They’re everywhere. Technology is a tool, not the answer. Someone please go tell them. I’m going back to the Stanford Site to read some more. Using something the Dartmouth lab probably built.

The New America Foundation’s Nicholas Schmidle again, in Slate‘s "Dispatches" section,  this time writing about the state and the state of blogging in Saudi Arabia. The focus of the piece is a Saudi blogger, Raed al-Saeed who, in response to Geert Wilders’  inflammatory anti-Islamic film, Fitna, crafted his own video on the less savory elements of Christian contemporanea and biblical history. According to Schmidle, the exercise in relativism was, in addition to being a healthy exercise in comparative propaganda, an online smash.

Schmidle is one of my favorite new(ish) writers, and his reporting is worth noting (no, we don’t know each other, and no, I don’t get a cut for promoting his work). You can see his personal website here; it’s second only to Hugh Miles’ personal site in the Writers category of Groovy Online Portfolios.

Interesting that the Saudi blogger Raed’s name is Raed. Reminds me of Salam Pax’s Baghdad Blog (see background stories here and here). 

Schmidle, Nicholas.  " Blogging in Support of the Saudi Government." Slate (17 April 2008).