Iraq: now a net exporter of terrorism?

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Well, perhaps not yet. But we’re getting there. Interesting New York Times report this morning…

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.

Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant…

I have a hazy memory of George Bush explaining to an interviewer how Iraq would become a ‘turkey shoot’. He seemed to imply that if the war sucked in Al Queda from abroad then that would be a good thing because they would all be in one place and ripe for elimination by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. My memory also records that he actually said “Bring ’em on!”

Can this be true? Perhaps I dreamt it.

Later… No I didn’t dream it. According to USA Today, 7 February, 2003,

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Wednesday that American troops under fire in Iraq aren’t about to pull out, and he challenged those tempted to attack U.S. forces, “Bring them on.”

[…]

Bush pledged to find and punish “anybody who wants to harm American troops,” and said the attacks would not weaken his resolve to restore peace and order in Iraq.

“There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on,” Bush said. “We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush’s combative tone was not meant to invite attacks on Americans. “I think what the president was expressing there is his confidence in the men and women of the military to handle the military mission they still remain in the middle of,” Fleischer said.

But Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president’s language “irresponsible and inciteful.”

“I am shaking my head in disbelief,” Lautenberg said. “When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander — let alone the commander in chief — invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.”

Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, “I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric.”

“We should be focused on a long-term security plan that reduces the danger to our military personnel,” said Gephardt, who is running for president. “We need a serious attempt to develop a postwar plan for Iraq, and not more shoot-from-the-hip one-liners.”

Great Firewall of China (contd.)

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Michael tells me that Answers.com is now being blocked by the Chinese authorities. Answers.com is an advertising-supported, free website which was launched in January 2005 and has become one of the leading information portals on the Internet. It claims to hold four million answers drawn from over 120 titles from brand-name publishers, original content created by Answers.com’s own editorial team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia, and user-generated questions & answers from its proprietary WikiAnswersTM system.

Follow the money

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Maplight.org is extraordinary — a database that links US legislators with their votes and the money they received from interest groups.

Consider, for example, H.R.5684 – U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement. This is a bill to enact a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Oman. Among the organisations lobbying for the Bill were aircraft manufacturers, pharmaceutical giants, construction companies, oil & gas companies, etc. In short, the usual suspects. Maplight reveals that legislators who voted in favour of the bill received about twice as much in contributions than those who opposed it ($163,111 to $80,856). Conversely, Representatives who voted against the bill received, on average, twice as much from lobbyists opposed to it as those who voted for. Information on campaign contributions comes from the incomparable Open Secrets site.

Money talks. When you look at the list of industries that give most to US legislators, you begin to understand how crazy intellectual property laws get passed.

Small pieces, loosely joined

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Amazing thing, this Internet. I’ve just had a phone call from Anthony Holden, a good friend I haven’t seen in ages, because he’d noticed that I’d quoted him in my post about mismanagement at Channel 4. He kindly pointed out that the Chairman of that benighted channel is Luke Johnson, not Johnston (now corrected — see below). The really interesting thing, though, is that Tony — who despite being a great emailer from earliest days could never be described as geeky — is now a driving force behind a site devoted to poker, one of his abiding obsessions and a subject on which he has written a couple of good books. Not only that but one of his sons has developed Dropping Knowledge, an ingenious site devoted to “the promotion of international understanding and the promotion of art and culture”.

Jam today

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Interesting Technology Review article.

A startup called eJamming claims to have solved some of the problems that have plagued musicians who jam together online. According to the company, its software, called eJamming AUDiiO, is able to let musicians collaborate in near real time with musicians halfway across the world. Additionally, the software simultaneously records each musician, combines and synchronizes his or her input, and creates files with CD-quality tracks, says Alan Glueckman, president and chairman of eJamming.

The main problems with remote jamming are bandwidth and network latency (the amount of time it takes a data packet to travel from source to destination). eJamming seems to have tackled the first with a new compression system, and the second by using P2P technology to put musicians in direct touch with one another rather than being linked through a server. Neat if it works.

Channel 4: screw-ups continue

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It’s weird what’s happening at Channel 4. A channel which began as the most innovative and interesting experiment in modern broadcasting history has become unbelievably tacky. Following on the fiasco of the racist exchanges on Big Brother comes this.

Graphic images of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, are to be made public for the first time next week in a Channel 4 documentary that has been condemned as ‘grossly intrusive’ and bound to cause distress to Princes William and Harry.

One photograph shows Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor, Frederic Mailliez, who had been travelling in the other direction and who had not yet realised the identity of his famous patient. It is clear that the princess has been thrown forward into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. At the front of the car, a passing student is shown trying to help Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana’s bodyguard….

My mate Tony Holden, who knows about these things, is quoted in the same article as saying:

‘It’s grossly intrusive and beyond the bounds of anything remotely tasteful, and will no doubt upset her sons enormously.’

Holden said he was aware that such pictures existed but that the media had acted responsibly in self-censoring them. ‘One has heard about British journalists looking at them and not only refusing to publish them but wiping them from the system so people in the office could not be voyeuristic. I didn’t think anyone would sink so low as to broadcast or publish them,’ he said.

My guess is that there’s something seriously wrong with the top management in Channel 4. Luke Johnston Johnson, the Chairman, is a restaurant entrepreneur, not a broadcaster. Andy Duncan, the Chief Executive, is a cheeky chappie who goes around dressed like a financially-challenged undergraduate. Both seem to have tin ears for public disquiet. Both probably believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. They’re wrong.

Why would anyone want to buy EMI?

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Apparently, people do. Richard Wachman has a good piece explaining both the problems and the opportunities of the music business.

It has taken this long for the record companies to fight back by collaborating with legal downloading sites such as iTunes in a bid to offset lost revenue from plummeting CD sales. But internet piracy is still costing them billions a year and the recorded-music arms of the majors look to be in terminal decline.

According to the IFPI, the international music industry lobby group, 40 songs are being downloaded illegally for every legal download. Put another way, they say 20 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2006 and the situation is set to worsen following the spread of broadband to eastern Europe and other emerging markets.

The effect of piracy on the industry has been to spur consolidation as the big players scramble to cut costs by merging with each other. There are now only four major music groups: Universal, Sony/BMG, EMI and Warner Music.

Last week, British-based EMI, which has been struggling with falling profitability for years, said it was recommending to shareholders a takeover approach from Terra Firma, the private equity group headed by Guy Hands, which only last month tried unsuccessfully to bid for Alliance Boots…