Field Notes, First Drafts, & Foreign Correspondence
This, in today’s Guardian:
A cabinet minister last night raised the spectre of a return to 1930s fascism, warning of “parallels” between rightwing groups planning protests in Muslim neighbourhoods and Oswald Mosley’s incendiary marches through Jewish areas of east London in the 1930s.
Read the rest here.
Underestimating Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
It’s Always The Fixer Who Dies, George Packer, The New Yorker
The Architect of 911: Mohammad Ata, Daniel Brook, Slate
Reality Check: Human Terrain Teams, Christian Caryl, Foreign Policy
An Agenda For NATO: Toward A Global Security Web, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Foreign Affairs
Where’s Bin Laden? Peter Bergen, The Af-Pak Channel
Sci-Fi Surgery, Michael Conroy, Wired UK
SAS Trains Lybian Troops, Thomas Harding, Daily Telegraph
The Odd Couple: Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, and Mystic Numbers, Georgina Ferry, Times Literary Supplement
MI6 Officer Investigated Over Torture Allegation, Richard Norton-Taylor & Ian Cobain, The Guardian
It wasn’t until I read Dan Drezner’s note on the date – 9/11 – that I realized I was starting my personal blog on the eighth anniversary of 11 September 2001. Completely unintentional. Drezner offers a couple of good points on threat inflation and resilience. Me? The personal referent for this was that 11 September 2001 coincided with my first day of teaching, for an undergraduate course on non-Western history. I had three early morning classes in a row, 25 students each. Students in the first session were muttering about the news, although nothing was clear at that point. By the time the second session started, people were better informed, but I was still completely clueless. When a couple of them related what they’d heard, I cancelled the lecture, then went back to my apartment and stayed glued to the tube for the next 24 hours.
Stephen Farrell, the British New York Times journalist kidnapped for four days last week, has written a candid and vivid account of the ordeal and his rescue. Gripping.
Low-tech. Faster than broadband in South Africa, apparently:
A company is to start using a carrier pigeon to transfer data between its offices – because bosses believe it will be quicker than broadband.
IT experts at a firm in South Africa said it takes up to six hours to transfer four gigabytes of encrypted data between two of its offices which lie 50 miles apart.
Today staff at the financial services company will save valuable time by instead having the information transported by a homing pigeon named Winston.
MICHAEL A. INNES 