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Five years after the war in Iraq began, the insurgency remains a lethal force. The steady flow of cash is one reason, even as the American troop buildup and the recruitment of former insurgents to American-backed militias have helped push the number of attacks down to 2005 levels.

In fact, money, far more than jihadist ideology, is a crucial motivation for a majority of Sunni insurgents, according to American officers in some Sunni provinces and other military officials in Iraq who have reviewed detainee surveys and other intelligence on the insurgency.

[..]

“It has a great deal more to do with the economy than with ideology,” said one senior American military official, who said that studies of detainees in American custody found that about three-quarters were not committed to the jihadist ideology. “The vast majority have nothing to do with the caliphate and the central ideology of Al Qaeda.”

The corruption that drives money to the insurgency is hardly limited to the Baiji refinery, which a reporter visited last month. In Mosul, for example, insurgents have skimmed profits from soda and cement factories, American officers said.

[..]

Most theft occurs outside the refinery, but fraud still abounds inside, too. At one refinery office, a broken control-room machine has a hole where an object has been jammed through the glass to stop a dial from turning. Most everything is recorded using paper, and tubes of correction fluid sit on the desks of clerks overseeing the flow of fuel. It is regularly used to cover up huge discrepancies in production and distribution tallies that soldiers say can only be explained by theft.

“We’d all be hanged” if the refinery had operated this way under Mr. Hussein’s government, one senior refinery official confided to American soldiers.

[..]

Last year, a new Iraqi Army brigade commander, Col. Yaseen Taha Rajeeb, was assigned to the refinery. He helped stop some of the most blatant theft. But the colonel’s paychecks were stopped soon after he began cracking down, and he was fired this year.

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Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as ‘extraordinary’, forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people’s private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

[..]

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets - like the journeys an individual makes around the capital - could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual’s movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Or, in other words, they want to spy on you, but they aren’t sure why, yet. However, they’re sure that if they watch you long enough, they’ll find something.

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BT staffer Adam Liversage has quietly confirmed that the operator conducted a “very small scale technical test” (secret trial) of Phorm’s data pimping system during 2007 (original news). Liversage issued the following statement to the operator’s community forums:

BT can confirm that we conducted a very small scale technical test of a prototype advertising platform on one exchange in June 2007. The test was specifically conducted to evaluate the functional and technical performance of the platform. Absolutely no personally identifiable information was processed, stored or disclosed during this trial. As with all Service Providers, it is important for BT to ensure that, before any potential new technologies are employed, they are robust and fit for purpose.

It’s understood that the trial was tried on a live exchange first with no prior customer consultation because those that witnessed the activity on their connection and enquired were mislead by BT into thinking, ironically, that it was a DNS hijacker.

Indeed we’d question how successful such a trial could be without any information being “processed [AND OR] stored“. That would be a bit like developing an operating system and never running it, although sometimes we think Microsoft probably do that too.

[More pictures here:]

You think that you have seen a lot of snow in winter? How about this “lotsa snow” - during Russian winter?

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The story of Alt-A and Thornburg also illustrates why the current credit crisis is different from past panics, like the market crash of 1987 or the crisis a decade ago when Long-Term Capital imploded. Those were rapid-paced events, which erupted and then faded from view. This is more akin to a slow-motion, chain-reaction car crash.

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By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us

nice iPod!

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The defense industry this year abandoned its decade-long commitment to the Republican Party, funneling the lion share of its contributions to Democratic presidential candidates, especially to Hillary Clinton who far out-paced all her competitors.

An examination of contributions of $500 or more, using the Huffington Post’s Fundrace website, shows that employees of the top five arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics — gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to Republicans.

Senator Clinton took in $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R.), who raised $32,000.

[..]

Former Senator John Edwards (D-N. Car.) raised $12,200 and Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) took in $10,000.

Clinton’s major industry benefactors - donors who gave the $4,600 maximum allowed by law — include Roger A. Crone, Boeing’s president of Network and Space Systems; Stanley Roth, Boeing’s Vice President for Asia, International Relations, $4,600; Anne Sullivan, a Raytheon attorney; William Lynn, Raytheon’s Senior Vice President for Government Relations; and Michele Kang, Northrop Grumman Vice President for health science solutions.

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A 15-year-old girl who stopped her out-of-control school bus was hit with a Saturday detention because she was supposed to be in class when the accident happened.

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Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA has decided to sign some oil contracts in euros in the face of a plummeting dollar, local media reported, citing officials.

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Suddenly, I recalled a day long ago when my husband worked for a struggling paper full of worried employees and the publisher walked into the newsroom wearing a gorilla suit.

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40 years ago today, more than 500 villagers were raped, tortured, and slaughtered (disturbing images) by American soldiers in a hamlet nicknamed Pinkville. Four Hours in My Lai tells the story. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Amidst the carnage, a few courageous souls distinguished themselves. Hugh Thompson, Jr. tried to stop events and rescued some children. (Prior mefi thread). Events were covered up for a year until whistle blower Ron Ridenhour wrote a letter that triggered an investigation leading to Seymour Hersh’s reporting, the first wide public airing of the atrocities.

The My Lai Courts-Martial 1970 found Lt. Calley guilty and sentenced him to life, but he was pardoned by Nixon and today, is a jeweler in Georgia. No one else was held publicly accountable. Varnado Simpson, the soldier whose story opens and closes the video clips in the post, killed himself in 1997.

Three very quick links that need to be remembered, especially in this election year:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/colin3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai#Aftermath

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell

[It all sounds familiar:]

The VFW’s national commander Herbert Rainwater led the way: “There have been My Lais in every war. Now for the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty.” A little Mormon boy in Utah, Timmy Poppleton, wrote his senator begging him to intervene: “I’m only eight years old, but I know that Lieut. Calley was defending our freedoms against Communism.”

[..]

The American Legion post at Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning, pitched in a promise they would raise $100,000 to help fund Calley’s appeal “or die trying”: “The real murderers are the demonstrators in Washington who disrupt traffic, tear up public property, who deface the American flag. Lieut. Calley is a hero. He’s an all-American. He fought for us in a country where Communism is still trying to take over. We should be proud of him. We should elevate him to saint rather than jail him like a common criminal.”

[..]

The White House had done its polling. 78 percent disagreed with Calley’s conviction and sentence; 51 percent wanted him exonerated outright. Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls, and letters. They were 100 to one for Calley’s release. Meanwhile the President’s handling of Vietnam in general he was heading into Lyndon Johnson territory: 41 percent approval, 47 percent disapproval. On March 30 the White House alerted the media that on March 7 the President would go on TV to announce more troop cuts. Then they got to work exploiting Calley.

So now some shady marketeers have found a new group of gullibles to exploit, or so they think. How typical of marketing people - Bill Hicks was right.

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Two top TSA officials — both decorated by the administration for excellence — have been in alleged violation of the TSA’s rules, operating a private security consultancy while drawing a government salary and holding top secret clearance. The TSA has stonewalled on the issue, refusing to issue a statement or talk to the press. One of the men, Michael Restovich, never showed up at a Congressional hearing into why he seemed to be encouraging TSA checkpoints to cheat on spot-tests of their efficacy at catching bombs — instead, Restovich was hastily dispatched overseas to be the DHS attaché to the United Kingdom.