Global Guerillas covers “networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st.” This is some of the best writing anywhere on the changing structure of conflict and war, written at a high intellectual level, but also by a seasoned counter-terrorism expert who has been there.

Emergent intelligence in open source warfare

Open source warfare, like what we see in Iraq and increasingly in other locations, relies on networks of peers rather than the hierarchies of command and control we see in conventional militaries. This structure provides an open source movement with levels of innovation and resilience that rigid hierarchies can’t match. Unfortunately, these attributes are likely not constrained to merely local tactical activity. Open source movements can exhibit emergent intelligence that guides the movement’s collective actions towards strategic goals.

Here’s a real life example of how rigid US military hierarchies can’t respond nimbly. A new robotic device designed to destroy roadside bombs in Iraq works in tests 90% of the time yet hasn’t been deployed due to “red tape.”

Also, as it patrols the road ahead of the convoy, sending out electrical charges to ignite detonaters on bombs, would this not have to slow the convoy down, making them better targets for snipers, etc. Also, when the robot is patrolling ahead of a convoy or out on its own blowing stuff up, does anyone check to see if innocent civilians are in the area first? If not, then it’ll just drive more into the welcoming arms of the insurgents.

The whole idea is a ungainly, expensive, probably unworkable high-tech ’solution’ to a problem that is really no solution at all and will probably make  things worse instead, something rigid hierarchies are known doing.

Analysis of the Iraqi insurgency indicates that emergent intelligence is evident. What this means to the outcome of the war is as follows:

-The insurgency will continue to improve over time.
-Breakout is possible.
-It is impossible to discern the motives of this movement until it fully matures.

Read the whole post

And since it’s clear the US is losing the war, let’s bring the troops home now.

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The photo is of Bush, Abramoff, and Chief Raul Garza of the Kickapoo tribe

From Think Progress

[The picture] “leaves unanswered questions about how Mr. Abramoff and the tribal leader, whom he was trying to sign as a client, gained access to a meeting with the president on the White House grounds that was ostensibly for a group of state legislators who were supporting Mr. Bush’s 2001 tax cut plan.”

The photo of Abramoff with Bush at a private meeting undermines White House claims that any meetings between the two occured at “widely attended” holiday parties. The White House has confirmed the picture’s authenticity.

Time has a color photo, which includes Rove. They note -

This meeting was a relatively small gathering attended by some two dozen people, including Garza and another Indian tribal leader who was Abramoff’s client. At least two tribes, the Coushatta of Louisiana and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, contributed $25,000 each to the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, which is headed by Grover Norquist, a well-known conservative ally of the White House. Garza is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling more than $300,000 from his tribe.

A den of thieves indeed. Grover Norquist must be getting quite nervous about now wondering if he will be indicted. Good. And this is just more proof of Bush/Abramoff links, no matter how much highly paid neocon liars try to spin it.

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The LA Times reams Abramoff today, detailing his sleazy “charities”, which were anything but that.

There was the time he laundered money through a religious group’s accounts to try to bribe a congressional aide. He diverted funds from a youth athletic foundation to bankroll a golf junket for a congressman and to bolster the bank account of his Washington restaurant. He used two other nonprofits to line his own pockets with millions of dollars defrauded from clients.

The Capital Athletic Foundation was particularly noxious, as “more than $140,000 of the foundation’s funds, reports Newsweek, was used to purchase sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, camouflage suits, thermal imagers and other material” to Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, settlements that were illegal under Israeli law. The LA Times had to know this, yet didn’t report it, marring this otherwise excellent piece of investigative reporting.

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