Artists could travel freely and had some exposure to what their Western peers were doing; renegade movements were tolerated, if not widely promoted.
Gen. Mark Hertling, an assistant commander of the First Armored Division, said military intelligence indicated that there might be some loose coordination between the renegade Shia movement of Moktada al-Sadr and a Sunni extremist group called Mohammed's Army in the western portions of Baghdad.
Napster was less a company than an all-hours circus, a strange tangle of people who thought they joined a renegade social movement rather than a startup.
Politically, he was coming to be known to the Chinese authorities as a loose cannon with a suspect history: a late-1970s free-speech agitator, later a member of renegade art movements, and a full-time resident of New York from 1981 to 1993.
The surprise was that the biggest opposition has come from Tea Party members themselves, who say their renegade, grass-roots movement was built on suspicion of government, and they are not too keen to start playing financial footsie with the enemy.
The party of President Jalal Talabani, one of the two most prominent Kurdish leaders and a veteran of Iraqi politics, was outpolled in his home province by the combined votes of an Islamist party and a third Kurdish group, Gorran, or Change, a renegade faction of his own movement.
All of these stories might have been lost without the renegades within the black-consciousness movement in Brazil in the 1980's.
No one is in charge of the country, which has divided into fiefdoms run by a motley assortment of ragtag militias, renegade army units and Islamist movements.
And neither movement is a marginal, renegade phenomenon.
