A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.

But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.

Government agencies are still having trouble making sense of the flood of data they collect for intelligence purposes, a point underscored by the 9/11 Commission and, more recently, by President Obama after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day.

Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

The demand for the Predator and Reaper drones has surged since the terror attacks in 2001, and they have become among the most critical weapons for hunting insurgent leaders and protecting allied forces.

The military relies on the video feeds to catch insurgents burying roadside bombs and to find their houses or weapons caches. Most commanders are now reluctant to send a convoy down a road without an armed drone watching over it.

The Army, the Marines and the special forces are also deploying hundreds of smaller surveillance drones. And the C.I.A. uses drones to mount missile strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Air Force officials, who take the lead in analyzing the video from Iraq and Afghanistan, say they have managed to keep up with the most urgent assignments. And it was clear, on a visit to the analysis center in an old hangar here, that they were often able to correlate the video data with clues in still images and intercepted phone conversations to build a fuller picture of the biggest threats.

But as the Obama administration sends more troops to Afghanistan, the task of monitoring the video will become more challenging.

Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once. By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for as many as 65 after that. Even the Air Force’s top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, says it could soon be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.”

He said the Air Force would have to funnel many of those feeds directly to ground troops to keep from overwhelming its intelligence centers. He said the Air Force was working more closely with field commanders to identify the most important targets, and it was adding 2,500 analysts to help handle the growing volume of data.

With a new $500 million computer system that is being installed now, the Air Force will be able to start using some of the television techniques and to send out automatic alerts when important information comes in, complete with highlight clips and even text and graphics.

“If automation can provide a cue for our people that would make better use of their time, that would help us significantly,” said Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force’s chief of staff.

Officials acknowledge that in many ways, the military is just catching up to features that have long been familiar to users of YouTube and Google.

John R. Peele, a chief in the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which helps the Air Force analyze videos, said the drones “proliferated so quickly, and we didn’t have very much experience using them.

“So we’re kind of learning as we go along which tools would be helpful,” he said.

But Mark A. Bigham, an executive at Raytheon, which designed the new computer system, said the Air Force had actually moved more quickly than most intelligence agencies to create Weblike networks where data could be shared easily among analysts.

In fact, it has relayed drone video to the United States and Europe for analysis for more than a decade. The operations, which now include 4,000 airmen, are headquartered at the base here, where three analysts watch the live feed from a drone.

One never takes his eyes off the monitor, calling out possible threats to his partners, who immediately pass alerts to the field via computer chat rooms and snap screenshots of the most valuable images.

“It’s mostly through the chat rooms — that’s how we’re fighting these days,” said Col. Daniel R. Johnson, who runs the intelligence centers.

He said other analysts, mostly enlisted men and women in their early 20s, studied the hundreds of still images and phone calls captured each day by U-2s and other planes and sent out follow-up reports melding all the data.

Mr. Bigham, the Raytheon executive, said the new system would help speed that process. He said it would also tag basic data, like the geographic coordinates and the chat room discussions, and alert officials throughout the military who might want to call up the videos for further study.

But while the biggest timesaver would be to automatically scan the video for trucks and armed men, that software is not yet reliable. And the military has run into the same problem that the broadcast industry has in trying to pick out football players swarming on a tackle.

So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

“There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so that Tom Brady is marked,” Commander Smith said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said, “they just type in: ‘Tom Brady, touchdown pass.’ ”

Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron here, said his analysts could do that. He said the Air Force had just installed telestrators on its latest hand-held video receiver, and harried officers in the field would soon be able to simply circle the images of trucks or individuals they wanted the drones to follow.

But Colonel Harris also said that the drones often shot gray-toned video with infrared cameras that was harder to decipher than color shots. And when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what automated systems are allowed to do.

“You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a weapon,” he said. “And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and the human brain.”

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation’s decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring ‘enormous gains’, while countries, including the UK, ’squandered’ their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.
mergency debate on the issue will be held later this month.
Dr Wodarg’s claims come as it emerged the British government is desperately trying to offload up to £1billion of swine flu vaccine, ordered at the height of the scare.

The Department of Health warned of 65,000 deaths, set up a special advice line and website, suspended normal rules so anti-flu drugs could be given out without prescription and told health and local authorities to prepare for a major pandemic.
Planners were told to get morgues ready for the sheer scale of deaths and there were warnings that the Army could be called in to prevent riots as people fought to obtain drugs.
But with fewer than 5,000 in England catching the disease last week and just 251 deaths overall, Dr Wodarg has branded the H1N1 outbreak as ‘one of the greatest medical scandals of the century’.
He said: ‘We have had a mild flu – and a false pandemic.’
He added the seeds of the scare were sown five years ago, when it was feared the much more lethal bird flu virus would mutate into a human form.
The ‘atmosphere of panic’ led to governments stockpiling the anti-flu drug Tamiflu and putting in place ’sleeping contracts’ for millions of doses of vaccine
Dr Wodarg said: ‘The governments have sealed contracts with vaccine producers where they secure orders in advance and take upon themselves almost all the responsibility.
‘In this way the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks.
‘So they just wait, until WHO says “pandemic” and activate the contracts.’
He also claims that to further push their interests, leading drug companies placed ‘their people’ in the ‘cogs’ of the WHO and other influential organizations.
He added that their influence could have led the WHO to soften its definition of a pandemic – leading to the declaration of a worldwide outbreak last June.
Dr Wodarg said: ‘In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide.
‘They have made them squander tight healthcare resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.’
He does not name any Britons with conflicts of interest.
But last year, the Daily Mail revealed that Sir Roy Anderson, a scientist who advises the Government on swine flu, also holds a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline.
GSK makes anti-flu drugs and vaccines and is predicted to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic.

The Department of Health says that although the disease appears to be on the wane, it cannot rule out a third surge and urges all those entitled to the jab to have it.
Professor David Salisbury, the Government’s head of immunisation said there were ‘no grounds whatsoever’ for Dr Wodarg’s claims, saying people with conflicts of interest were kept out of the decision-making process.
A GSK spokesman said: ‘Allegations of undue influence are misguided and unfounded. The WHO declared that H1N1 swine flu met the criteria for a pandemic.
‘As WHO have stated, legal regulations and numerous safeguards are in place to manage possible conflicts of interest.’
The company, which still employs Sir Roy, said he had declared his commercial interests and had not attended any meetings related to the purchase of drugs or vaccine for either the Government or GSK.

Trading places

Members of the government’s armed forces formerly aiming to recapture Bouake now profit from the duty-free shopping.
“Yes, they’ve become friends. It’s their colleagues who are in charge of controlling the dividing line between the two zones so they can get through quite easily,” Mr Doumbia says.
No-one in the rebellion envisaged this outcome when they staged their coup on 19 September 2002.
“For the rebellion it was a question of getting to [the main city in the south] Abidjan and certainly to get our hands on power there,” says Andre Ouattara, Mr Soro’s senior civil servant.
“It didn’t work out, so, it was necessary to retreat a little bit and we found ourselves in Bouake,” he says.
“For practically a year, the rebellion operated without really an exact plan – that, we need to admit.”
It was at that moment that the rebels decided their survival depended on providing some degree of governance to stop the zone collapsing.
From independence from France in 1960 until the late 1990s, Ivory Coast had been one of West Africa’s most peaceful and prosperous countries.
It was perhaps that legacy and a relatively high education that gave people the courage to try to make the best of difficult situation.
When civil servants fled south, volunteer teachers, like Ali Ouattara, stepped forward to try to keep things going.
“We didn’t want the kids to become child soldiers, so we tried to give them something. This is how we became teachers,” says Mr Ouattara, who lost his job at the university at the start of the crisis.
Most of the volunteer teachers had limited qualifications and no experience of teaching.
At first they had almost no resources as the schools had been ransacked and the lawlessness meant they were scared to discipline their pupils, who were sometimes armed.
Gradually with contributions from parents, the ad-hoc schools helped save a generation of children, and in some years the rebel zone got better results in national exams than the government zone.
Other volunteers helped cover for the absence of the state in other ways: setting up an ad-hoc postal service; their own television stations and some basic policing.
The New Forces do collect taxes in some areas – like from cocoa and cotton producers but most areas of business are unregulated in the city.

Banned boom

For example, Bouake now has a booming business in motorbike taxis – illegal under Ivorian law.
But here it is a sector that has kept hundreds of young men off the streets.
The problem is they will not have a place in a reunified Ivory Coast, what with their untaxed scooters, unlicensed businesses and lack of driving licences.
“We created our union so that if the state comes back, we can continue,” says Kone N’ze Siaka from the Union of Moto Taxi Drivers and owner of three scooters.
“There are some of us who used to be civil servants but who lost their jobs with the crisis,” he says. “They took their motorbike to make a living and at least feed their family.”
UN observation points along the former ceasefire line have already been dismantled but the most delicate part of reunification – handing over guns and control of taxes – still seems a long way off.
And, seven years without traffic lights, taxes or utility bills develops habits that are hard to budge.