Reference:
Chalabi, an exiled former banker wanted for fraud allegations in Jordan, is popular amongst the powerful US oil lobby – whom he predicted would have great opportunities in the Iraqi oil industry after the invasion. His fortunes did not promise much after the abortive coup launched in 1996 from the Kurdish region in the north. It soured relations with Kurds who felt it exposed them to Saddam’s revenge. However, with Bush’s election, the US Congress pledged $97 million to fund INC efforts against the Iraqi government.

The US Department of Defence insist that the INC is an umbrella group of various different factions. Inside Iraq, where the two main Kurdish parties and the main Shi’i opposition groups helped set up an alliance to counter his party, the International Crisis Group confirm that he has virtually no support. Despite this, it seems the FIF is to perform the functions assigned to it for at least six months after the war, with Chalabi suggesting this may last as long as two years.

Chalabi, who left Iraq in 1956 at the age of 11 and has lived all his adult life in the US and UK ...
Al Jazeera

Notes:
How to win hearts and minds, not only of Iraqis but also of Americans -- bring in an interloping carpetbagger whose only recommendation is strong ties to US oil interests. These kind of actions continue to belie all the flowery words describing this "war" as all about liberation of Iraqis and security against WMDs.

Reference:
If he soon pops up in Baghdad, you can bet that the "clash of civilizations" is imminent, if it has not begun already. To Woolsey's mind, the US is already engaged in what he and many of his fellow neoconservatives call "World War IV", a struggle that pits the US and Britain against Islamist and Wahhabi extremists like al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, Iranian theocrats, and Ba'ath Party "fascists" in Syria and Iraq. In their view, the Cold War was World War III.
Asia Times

Notes:

Reference:
British troops who have witnessed the Americans at close quarters in this war are baffled at their approach to Iraqi civilians. One captain in the Royal Marines, watching a US unit monitor a checkpoint, said: "The Americans are still behaving like invaders, not liberators. They behave as if they hate these people."
....
The rhetoric of US soldiers is often provocative. An American colonel, asked what the role of the Fifth Corps would be, replied: "We are going in there. We are going to root out the bad guys and kill them." His men whooped and punched the air as if they were watching a football match.

A British officer who witnessed this exchange shook his head, saying: "We are working from a different script but you won't get anyone in Whitehall to admit it."
news.com.au

Notes:
Silly Brits -- they bought the bullshit, too.

As we go forward, it seems that all standard rationalizations are false. This is indeed a crusade that even the Church disparrages. A secular crusade.

Reference:
A Republican leader in Congress is proposing drastic changes in Pentagon procurement that would allow defense companies to win contracts of up to $200 million apiece without competitive bidding and other safeguards.

The current limit is $7.5 million.
Washington Post

Notes:
First they increase the Pentagon budget by 25%, then they want to up the discretionary spending limits by 2600%. How can they argue that this is not a give away and that it is not contrary to taxpayer best interests?

Reference:
Killing Saddam alone will not bring America the thank-yous it expects because Iraqis are not yet feeling free. Only replacing Saddam's order with a better order will do that. "There is no freedom because there is no security," said Dr. Mohammed al-Mansuri, the (Umm Qasr)hospital's director.
Thomas L. Friedman/NYT

Notes:

Reference:
Many if not most of today’s surveillance networks were set up by government and big business, but in years to come individuals and small organizations will set the pace of growth.
....
As thousands of ordinary people buy monitoring devices and services, the unplanned result will be an immense, overlapping grid of surveillance systems, created unintentionally by the same ad-hocracy that caused the Internet to explode. Meanwhile, the computer networks on which monitoring data are stored and manipulated continue to grow faster, cheaper, smarter, and able to store information in greater volume for longer times. Ubiquitous digital surveillance will marry widespread computational power—with startling results.
....
Data quality problems that cause little inconvenience on a local scale—when Wal-Mart’s smart shelves misread a razor’s radio frequency identification tag—have much larger consequences when organizations assemble big databases from many sources and attempt to draw conclusions about, say, someone’s capacity for criminal action. Such problems, in the long run, will play a large role in determining both the technical and social impact of surveillance.
....
To create a digital dossier for every individual in the United States—as programs like Total Information Awareness would require—only “a couple terabytes of well-defined information” would be needed, says Jeffrey Ullman, a former Stanford University database researcher. “I don’t think that’s really stressing the capacity of [even today’s] databases.”

Instead, argues Rajeev Motwani, another member of Stanford’s database group, the real challenge for large surveillance databases will be the seemingly simple task of gathering valid data.
....
But if a national terrorist-tracking system has the same 1 percent error rate, it will produce millions of false alarms, wasting huge amounts of investigators’ time and, worse, labeling many innocent U.S. citizens as suspects. “A 99 percent hit rate is great for advertising,” Spafford says, “but terrible for spotting terrorism.”
Dan Farmer and Charles C. Mann

Notes:

Reference:
Corning researchers have found a way to form tiny, barcoded beads that are small enough to be embedded in ink and attached to DNA molecules.
....
The microbeads could be embedded in inks to tag currency and other documents. They can also be added to substances like automobile paint and explosives. The beads can also be used to tag different types of DNA or other molecules in drug discovery experiments.
MIT Technology

Notes:
How are the micro-codes scanned? At what distance?

Reference:
Fernandes said he endorsed Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha's recent comments that India had "a much better case to go for pre-emptive action against Pakistan than the United States has in Iraq."
Yahoo News

Notes:
Silly peaceniks, wringing hands like nervous Nellies that the US incursion into Iraq would legitimize the use of pre-emption by others. Good thing India's on OUR side, though.

Reference:
Why does the government accept the "sales are down" without any consideration of other, equally plausible explanations? And why does the press?

When the majority of the public is guilty by default, then something is terribly wrong.
George Ziemann

Notes:
What Ziemann is talking about is RIAA claims that downloading is the culprit for its sales problems. His comment does point out a disturbing trend of our government and public policy adopting an attitude of a presumption of guilt, rather than the long-standing presumption of innocence. Another current example is the detention of Mike Hawash, a US citizen and Intel employee, without charges under provisions of the unPatriot Act.

It's seems all a part of the pre-emptive mentality affecting public policy in this country. One would like to think that our public employees are looking out for our best interest but the fact that so far no credible threat of either economic destruction or WMD or a plethora of terrorist cells has materialized leads one to question their motives.

Reference:
At issue are the so-called "Super-DMCA" bills under consideration in seven states, which have already become law in six others. Similar in some ways to the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- which made it a crime to distribute software that cracks copy protection schemes -- the state measures appear to target those who would steal pay-per-view cable television shows or defraud broadband providers. Though the bills vary in language and scope, they are patterned after model legislation pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America along with the Broadband and Internet Security Taskforce, the latter a consortium of cable companies and premium channels.
SecurityFocus

Notes:
This is stupid for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that the tail is wagging the dog. Think about it: the concerns of the entertainment industry are hampering a lot of innovative computer networking research AND is threatening the very security of our networks by literally choking security exploit research. Are these politicians really that star struck?

The worst of it is that most of the DMCA strong-arming has not been about real intellectual property issues. Threats have been used by companies to either squash competition (Lexmark) or hide defects (Blackboard, Adobe).