Tyler on the Volokh conspiracy links to a New York Times story and comments that “Deterrence doesn’t fully reassure me on the basis of this extract:
“”A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers. Mr. Hussein believed that a “casualty averse” White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon’s most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border. “
Lads, lads, we’re not learning the lesson here are we? Testimony from captured military officers, defectors, and anyone else who thinks that they have something to gain by telling interesting stories (which inflate their own importance) is worthless. This is how we got into the whole WMD fiasco. I’ve no idea whether or not this is true as a description about Saddam’s state of mind or military tactics. But after reading this story, given its sourcing, I’ve still got no idea. Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.
Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.
Right - humint is a waste of effort. Snapshots of the roofs of buildings provide all the information anybody could wish for.
And let me add my congratulations to your own: clearly you knew the truth about Iraq’s nukes program before the war! The time you put in poring over the data was well spent. The US government needs more advice from people like you.
mandarin has clearly spent a lot of time practising saying “two plus two equals four” really sarcastically.
You can always tell the character of a man from how he deals with adversity, a test by which the WMD crowd tend to come out pretty badly.
If we have to wait until 2005 to find out how we screwed up in Iraq, why does anyone have ANY faith in George Bush’s “Darn Good Intelegence”
And why does anybody believe that the Pentagon found a 17 page letter written by terrorists, lamenting the effectiveness of the US Military in Iraq
Barry Mc Cafferty says he can think of “No One” who would want to forge this type of letter
Earth to General Mc Cafferty, the Pentagon might want to forge such a letter. Please see the Investigation of the issue known as “the Pentagon Papers” Mr General, and pull your head out of George Bush’s ass
mandarin has clearly spent a lot of time practising saying “two plus two equals four” really sarcastically.
Wrong of me, I know, but it’s hard to stay patient with a student who believes that d + d = d squared.
“humint is a waste of effort”
Well it certainly was in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan (anyone remember that country).
If John Lindh, a 19 year old f**kup from NoCal, can pentrate the Taliban to the point where he gets to meet Osama, then I’m sure the CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI, FBI, DEA, HSA, FDA, OSHA etc would have people even closer to Saddam who could directly finger the WMDS…wouldn’t they?
Cue waiting in elevator muzak.
Maybe it’s important, when dealing with humint, to read the attached label, like: “[…]but this informant should not be trusted because he has a clear interest in our invasion of the country”.
It’s just that those little labels were ignored for political purposes. And they are not included in press leaks either…
it’s hard to stay patient with a student who believes that d + d = d squared
It does, too, you know, if you set the value of d at 2.
Or zero, one might snark if he didn’t admire dsquared’s blogging as much as I do.
Wrong of me, I know, but it’s hard to stay patient with a student who believes that d + d = d squared
If my name was Daniel Plus-sign Davies, you might have a point. As it is, my initials are DD, hence d^2.
What is this? Math class?
I find it amazing how the same information can teach totally different lessons to different people. Anti-war: This information is against what we believe, therefore, we must reiterate the lesson that it is innaccurate and cite evidence of other innaccuracies. Pro-war: This information proves our point, the pansy actions of the previous administration and the anti-war activism convinced the world that we are weak. That is why we were attacked and we must therefore learn from this that we should show our strength and resolve.
Two completely different lessons, same letter. Both sides choosing what to believe and not to believe. The real lesson here is in watching the actions of people with preconceived ideas and/or agendas. Ain’t life fun?
Seeing how sticking to satellite photos was also how we got it spectacularly wrong in pre-1991 (when we totally failed to identify the extent of Saddam’s then-active WMD program), I’m not sure this tells us anything except that intelligence is a most uncertain business.
If my name was Daniel Plus-sign Davies, you might have a point. As it is, my initials are DD, hence d^2.
You should have written “if my name were.” But I doubt whether someone so flummoxed by mathematics is ready to confront the mysteries of the subjunctive.
It seems to me it’s worth distinguishing between human intelligence gathered on the ground by operatives working in varying degrees of undercoverness and simply chatting with defectors and POWs. The former seems much more valuable. The latter certainly could be valuable on much more specific issues, that could then be investigated and verified. While the testimony offered here sounds plausible to me, the fact that some defector is spinning this yarn doesn’t add much of anything to what we know.
If my name was Daniel Plus-sign Davies, you might have a point. As it is, my initials are DD, hence d^2.
I hasten to add that “Daniel Plus-sign Davies” would indeed be a ridiculous name. How much more sensible of you to be named “Daniel Multiplication-Sign Davies.”
If only we’d had you in ‘95!
(You do remember what happened in ‘95, don’t you? That assurances from Iraq and the IAEA that Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled were proved false?)
George Tenet, hire this guy!
I hasten to add that “Daniel Plus-sign Davies” would indeed be a ridiculous name. How much more sensible of you to be named “Daniel Multiplication-Sign Davies.”
Dude, for the love of god, stop digging.
As far as intelligence is concerned, what we’ve been getting from Iraqis isn’t humint, it’s gossip. I’m no expert, but if you’ve been getting a steady stream of lies from a group of sources, one should maybe cross them off the “reliable humint” list.
It seems as though most of you are missing the point of Daniel’s post. His confidence in Ritter’s and his prognostication prowess is beside the point, and merely a sarcastic jab. The meat of this post is something that only djw and nabakov seem to adequately address: defectors represent the least viable form of humint. To reiterate nabakov’s point: if Lindh could infiltrate the terrorists, why couldn’t any of our well-funded intelligence services?
All stupidity from certain commenters aside, the assertion that “satellite pictures don’t lie” is completely and utterly incorrect. Oh, there are some things that they do very well - hard to hide the construction of a runway, or of a thousand ICBM launch sites, or of expansion at an existing military facility. But they’ll tell you nothing about what’s going on inside a building; their overflight times are known and predictable (with a few exceptions) which lets you hide some activities - Indian nuclear testing comes to mind. For telling if the research going on inside a lab is making progress on developing chemical or biological weapons, they are so close to useless as makes no difference.
I think that the bigger problem is that you cannot get perfect intelligence, but when you have people (either in the White House, on the Hill, or in the streets) demanding it, intelligence agencies calculate that they’ll get in less trouble for providing confident assesments that are wrong than for hemming and hawing and saying “we don’t know, but this is what we think.”
The agencies need to be more honest and the government needs to not treat sketchy intelligence as solid fact, and I think that the political sniping is wholly dependent on which side of the issue du jour the sniper is on.
“Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie.”
That is an interesting lesson to have learned. I thought the lesson was double-check the stories of defectors. Satellite photos don’t get everything. The over-reliance on technology and the drift away from human intelligence on the ground is a big part of why we don’t have reliable intelligence. Trusting defectors and having your own agents on the ground are two separate issues, you really need to keep them straight. If we had agents in Iraq we could have collected information independently AND confirmed or denied defectors’ reports. The fact that otherwise intelligent people could think the lesson was ‘stick to satellites’ is really scary. Also the worthlessness of defectors’ stories is only a proper supposition if the stories of unconnected people don’t match up with each other.
Of course, it looks like even Saddam and other Iraqis didn’t know what the hell was going on in the country, so perhaps nothing would have helped.
Sooo…exactly when did you manage to get clearance to look at classified satellite images Daniel?
Please, HUMINT is an imporatant part of intelligence work. Even cops interrogate and rely on informatino from the “bad guys”. Not using or looking at this information is stupid.
You overstate your case then back off of it. Make up your mind.
Well it certainly was in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan (anyone remember that country).If John Lindh, a 19 year old f**kup from NoCal, can pentrate the Taliban to the point where he gets to meet Osama, then I’m sure the CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI, FBI, DEA, HSA, FDA, OSHA etc would have people even closer to Saddam who could directly finger the WMDS…wouldn’t they?
Cue waiting in elevator muzak.
Actually if you paid attention you’ll note that HUMINT is one place the CIA is very, very weak in. It does rely mostly on ELINT and SIGINT. And look at the fuck ups. So for Daniel to say, stick with what has failed is what makes his claims laughable. We didn’t have people close to Saddam, that was one of the problems.
Let me also point out that the intelligence that was indicating a plot was afoot in 2001 (which culminated on 9/11) was HUMINT for the most part, not satellite photos.
Let the government twist and turn their dubious data as they will. When the smoke screen clears we’re once again left with a situation where the U.S. government launched a pre-emptive strike against an “enemy” which was not engaged in a war with us, not engaged in a war with an ally of ours, and not engaged in a war of any kind until we engaged it in a war.
There was no reason, no excuse, and no rationalization for that war. Not within the bounds or either security or morality. Not while many nations of the world are lead by vicious tyrants who are at least as bad as Hussain. Not while, even as we prepared to attack Iraq regardless of any U.N. “findings”, we were actually being threatened with (strongly implied) use of nuclear force against us by a nation which we knew for a fact not only has the weapons, but has a delivery system that can get those weapons within our boarders. You’ll notice that we didn’t attack them, as we didn’t attack the former U.S.S.R., and don’t attack China
You want proof that we knew Iraq did not have weapons with mass destructive abilities? Here it is: We did attack them.
If, as with Korea, we knew Iraq had nuclear weapons, or any ABC devices which could damage us or our allies, we would, as with Korea, still be pursuing diplomatic channels while trying our best to not get them too pissed off at us. We’d probably be asking Iran to talk sense into them, while secretly funding their own nuclear program.
We don’t “speak softly and carry a big stick”. We speak loudly as we run away from big sticks.
Funny that we are all postulating an intel failure, when all signs seem to point to an administration that either ignored (pre- 9/11) or willfully misread (pre-invasion) what intel they did have.
mandarin:
It is common practice in mathematical notation (esp. in applied mathematics) to represent d*d as dd .
“I’m not sure this tells us anything except that intelligence is a most uncertain business.”
Posted by Jane Galt
I dunno. Perhaps a perceptive person, a smart person, trained in business and with Wall Street experience, might have learned that the present US administration can’t be trusted. Such a person should really be able of seeing that smoke and mirrors are that, even if they aren’t able to figure out what the truth is.
And when the same trick (selected unconfirmed leaks of interrogations of people who would be quite willing to say what their interrogators wanted to hear) is used a second time, anybody who can’t figure that out should really have their MBA recalled.
I’d add that a journalist should also have figured that out, or anybody in the US foreign service.
Of course, when alleged law professors find criminal investigations ‘too complicated’ to understand, why should we expect alleged MBA’s to do better?
If mandarin had progressed past algebra in his mathematical studies, he might have learned that in the mathematics of strings, exponentiation indicates concatenation, so that D^2 = DD. And doesn’t it make more sense to consider it a string than an indeterminate numeric value?
To you, me and Daniel. Along with about 99% of the human population. I guess trolls use different notation.
Mandarin, thanks for the comments:
You should have written “if my name were.”
Thanks for the correction. In the same spirit, could I point out that you should have said “Yes, DD, you were right about Iraqi WMD” and “Yes, DD, you were right about consecutive symbols indicating multiplication”.
Everyone else: Thank God somebody spotted the joke. My actual point was very specific to nukes (rather than chemical or biological weapons) and consists of the fact that it’s not possible to extract uranium without large amounts of electrical power, and not possible to conceal large amounts of electrical power, however delivered, from the most cursory of satellite surveillance.
Of course the Iraqis could have bought their uranium on the open market, but I (I can’t speak for Wilkie and Ritter) took the educated guess that the CIA et al actually have very good tabs on the black market in weapons-grade fissile material, a conclusion I infer from the fact that most of the developed world is still standing after all those years. It isn’t rocket science, apart from the question of missiles with too long a range, and that was only fairly basic rocket science.
In the same spirit, could I point out that you should have said “Yes, DD, you were right about Iraqi WMD” and “Yes, DD, you were right about consecutive symbols indicating multiplication”.
Yes, you could point this out. What’s going to stop you? The rhetorical construction you’re groping for requires the use of may (although the use of might might also be justified).
It would take a primitive mathematical education indeed (mine ended with the calculus) not to recognize the attempt to be clever represented by your Web handle. If you don’t mind, though, I will continue to think of you as “DD,” which emphasizes what a really enormous tit we’re dealing with here.
Yes mandarin, objectionable grammatical constructs obviously negate Dsquared’s whole argument. Odd you don’t feel that way about Bush the Younger and his arguments. In fact, if you sneer really hard, I’ll bet you can even make WMD’s appear in Tikrit. Then you and Christopher Hitchens can go live in Disneyland.
I’m baffled by Daniel’s comment. I wasn’t defending human intelligence or the invasion of Iraq for that matter. I agree with Daniel, we don’t know what was going on. That is my whole point. Deterrence works best when there is common knowledge. Bush made plenty of threats to Saddam and it appears that they were misinterpreted in very significant ways. American military might failed to deter him in critical regards. If evil dictators will be both crazy and stupid, we cannot expect them to always be deterred.
” it’s hard to stay patient with a student who believes that d + d = d squared.”
What?? It’s not!!??
No one told me.
Media reporting of Iraq and the “war on terror” where the source is the military or the ruling elite of the day are like a double-blind.
How do you detect exactly where the fake-out is?
Who’s zoomin who has become an art form..
Is it possible that T. Cowan, above, really doesn’t get DD’s point? Or am I missing the sarcasm?
But I had the same thought upon reading the NYT’s piece as Daniel. Why do major media outlets continue to publish talking points straight out of our admin’s PR office?
“Oh, so that’s why there were no WMD’s…Saddam was lied to by his subordinates”
“Oh, so that’s why Saddam acted so irrationally, he’s crazy and therefore can’t be deterred. That must be why he didn’t let the inspectors in”
“He must have grossly miscalculated US intentions. It was truly a big misunderstanding, intelligence failures all around”
This stuff deserves a bigger “WTF!” than this font can deliver.
Questions: Why doesn’t the Bush admin just go whole hog and get some defectors who will say that the WMD’s are in Syria or Iran or Haiti or the Democrat Party Headquarters?
And do people in the media, like the NYT’s, realize what they are doing, or are they under the same mass-delusion as the war apologists? (The truly deceived war apologists, not the garden variety dishonest ones we are used to seeing?)
OK…I’m going to be a pain in the ass here.
The Iraqis actually did conceal a large enrichment facility from satillite photos: the EMIS plant at Al Tarmiyah. From the good old Federation of American Scientists website:
The Tarmiya site had no security fence and no visible electrical capacity; only later did inspectors discover that it was powered by a 30-kV underground electrical feed from a 150 MWe substation several kilometers away. Tarmiya was also situated within a large military security zone, thereby needing no additional perimeter security or military defenses at the site. At this same site, the Iraqis built a multimillion-dollar “chemical wash” facility for recovering uranium from refurbished calutron components. This facility was reportedly as sophisticated and clean as any in the West, and triple-filtered so as not to release any trace effluents into the atmosphere that might have led to its detection once it began operation.
Prior to the first IAEA inspection after the Gulf War, the only known nuclear facilities in Iraq were those at the Al Tuwaitha nuclear center, where nuclear material was being safeguarded. No other facilities were declared in the initial Iraqi statements. That the Tarmiya facility housed a substantial piece of the Iraqi nuclear program was only confirmed after the Gulf War in the early summer of 1991, when the movement there of large saucer-like objects (just prior to the first IAEA inspection of the site) led to the positive identification of the Iraqi calutron program. Much of the equipment at this site was disassembled unilaterally by Iraq, and the components hidden from IAEA inspector teams. These pasts were eventually turned over to IAEA personnel and destroyed in place.
However, the IAEA did find and destroy it under the first inspection regime in ‘92. So unfortunately, in some cases satillite photos aren’t enough.
BUT the al Tarmiya plant was built back in the good old days before Gulf War version 1.0 and UNSCOM inspections and sanctions and no-fly zones and…well, you get the idea. How likely was it that Iraq could have built another facility like that under those conditions? Not very fucking likely (and I figured as much myself, if I may blow my horn here.)
Despite that, d-squared’s position on human intelligence from questionable sources holds. Just as satillite photos require interpretation, so human intelligence must be evaluated and verified. Specifically, how much should you trust refugees whose information would lead you to do something that’s to their benefit? Answer: not very much. Some people figured this out a long time ago, too.
An interesting point that seems to emerge from this thread (aside from the fact that algebra and grammer appear to be inexact sciences for some) is that, as Curtiss in particular illustrates, the containment and inspection regime seemed to work in the case of Iraq.
But if some claim it wasn’t, then show us the bloody things.
For that last 14 or so years, Iraq (about the size of Texas) has pretty certainly had more beady little airborne and satellite eyes trained on it than anywhere else.
Not mention that for nearly a year now, hundreds of thousands of Coalition personnel -troops, spooks, inspectors, officials, oil and construction bods - have been prowling around the place, poking sticks in holes, peering underneath beds and opening fridges.
And besides, since most of the deck of cards, including the big bastard himself (and, if memory serves, the head of Iraq’s biowar program) are in the nick, surely we’d be hearing something a bit more concrete about WMDs by now beyond verballed defectors and refugees.
So just a wild thought here. Perhaps containment, and inspection combined with a lotta wheeling, dealing and bribes and threats behind the scene is actally more cost-effective than pre-emptive invasion in getting a tinpot nation to dump its nasties.
But if that is not the case, then hey, rev up the hummers of war again and hit the road to Tehran and Pyongyang.
As an aside: ‘humint’ does sound like a good word to describe the bits of fluff and hair you find in your mouth after oral sex.
Nabokov writes:
Perhaps containment, and inspection combined with a lotta wheeling, dealing and bribes and threats behind the scene is actally more cost-effective than pre-emptive invasion in getting a tinpot nation to dump its nasties.
Agreed. As the great Dr. Benway said, “I deplore brutality—it’s inefficient.”
In many cases of humanitarian catastrophe (Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda to name a few), reports by refugees, that were initially discounted, have turned out to be the most accurate descriptions of events. Assessing the credibility of reports, as any journalist, historian or intelligence officer is taught to do, is indespensible. Rumsfeld et al were taken for a ride by Chalabi and his defectors because it was a ride they wanted to take. As the above post about photographic intelligence demonstrates, all sources are fraught with potential deceptions. In my view Dsquared’s initial post is overstated.
In many cases of humanitarian catastrophe (Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda to name a few), reports by refugees, that were initially discounted, have turned out to be the most accurate descriptions of events. Assessing the credibility of reports, as any journalist, historian or intelligence officer is taught to do, is indespensible. Rumsfeld et al were taken for a ride by Chalabi and his defectors because it was a ride they wanted to take. As the above post about photographic intelligence demonstrates, all sources are fraught with potential deceptions. In my view Dsquared’s initial post is overstated.
“Seeing how sticking to satellite photos was also how we got it spectacularly wrong in pre-1991 (when we totally failed to identify the extent of Saddam’s then-active WMD program), I’m not sure this tells us anything except that intelligence is a most uncertain business.”
Nice try, but we weren’t exactly relying on satellite photos this time were we.
Or perhaps your stuck in the bizarre alternate universe in which Saddam did not let the inspectors back in.
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