Video: Gadhafi Leaves Landmines Behind for Rebels


Watch this before considering a NATO peacekeeping force in Libya: Moammar Gadhafi’s forces are leaving anti-personnel and anti-vehicular mines and in eastern Libya after vacating rebel-held areas. So much for basic contemporary standards of warfare.

Human Rights Watch employees near Benghazi discovered five dozen mines left along the outskirts of the rebel capitol, and released the above video documenting the find on Wednesday. Once Gadhafi sought compensation from Britain and Italy for World War II-era mines. Now he’s placing mines near the road connecting Benghazi to Ajdabiya, “an area frequented by civilians in vehicles and on foot,” the rights group warns.

Congratulations, Col. Gadhafi: you’re now in the company of the Burmese junta, the only other regime known to lay landmines after the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty was signed in Ottawa. The U.S. isn’t a signatory, and some of its Tomahawk missiles carry cluster munitions, another weapons system that risks leaving unexploded ordnance behind for civilians to discover. But the U.S. doesn’t actively use those weapons against its own people.

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The ‘Mercs for Libyan Rebels’ Drumbeat Begins


We were mostly speculating last week when we mused about a plan for mercenaries to help the Libyan rebels defeat Moammar Gadhafi. But now a professor at the Naval Academy thinks it’s not such a bad idea.

Deane-Peter Baker, a private-security expert and professor at Annapolis, fears the same “stalemate” that Adm. James Stavridis warned about in Senate testimony on Wednesday. And if NATO ground troops are off the table, it’s time to “outsource the problem,” he writes in a new Baltimore Sun op-ed.

The U.S. should “provide the necessary funding for the rebels to secure the services of one or more of the private companies that could supply the necessary expertise and logistical support to turn the rebel rabble into a genuine fighting force,” Baker argues.

Good luck finding them. The president of the International Peace Operations Association, which advocates for private security firms, says companies aren’t looking to do business with the rebels because it’s arguably illegal under the United Nations resolution authorizing the war.

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NATO Is All Over The Place on Arming Libyan Rebels

Updated 6:25 p.m.

The NATO military alliance may have reached consensus on taking over the Libya war. But the members of the transatlantic partnership spent Tuesday sending all types of mixed signals about whether to take the next step in ousting Moammar Gadhafi: giving the opposition guns.

In Brussels, the alliance’s civilian leader firmly backed off that option in an interview with CNN. “We are not in Libya to arm people,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “but to protect people.”

That contradicted the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. “We’ve not, certainly, ruled that out,” Rice told ABC’s George Stephanopolous, who said that the U.S. has “an important interest in seeing Gadhafi step down.”

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Libya’s Got Vlad’s Missiles and Kim’s Guns

The war in Libya is putting an uncomfortable spotlight on some of the country’s arms suppliers. North Korean rockets and guns have turned up in Libya and a Russian weapons manufacturer just copped to selling Gadhafi advanced anti-aircraft missiles.

The Daily NK flagged a report from South Korea’s SBS television channel showing North Korean weapons in Ras Lanuf after Gadhafi’s forces fled the town. SBS broadcast footage of a North Korean anti-aircraft gun apparently used by the Libyan military and (not particularly well) disguised boxes from North Korea, marked “parts of bulldozer,” containing rockets.

The label painted on the gun reads “64 Machinegun” in Korean. However, the weapon depicted in the SBS video bears a strong resemblance to the ZPU-4, a 14.5 millimeter anti-aircraft gun originally made by the Soviets way back in 1949. China makes a versions of the ZPU-4 it calls the “Type 56″ and North Korea produces the gun, as well. Despite its age, it’s a widely-sold anti-aircraft gun that’s been used by a number of countries, including Iraq, Cuba, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Lebanon and others. BBC has reported that both rebel and Gadhafi forces are possession of ZPU-4s and double barrel ZPU-2s. Reporter Mike Elkin also happened upon a ZPU-1, a single-barreled cousin of the ZPU-4, stashed in a secret underground Libyan arsenal.

The rockets and anti-aircraft guns aren’t the only example of North Korea’s weapons turning up in Libya’s war. The New Yorker’s John Lee Anderson, reporting from near Brega in eastern Libya earlier this month, came across an ammunition box marked similarly to the one in the SBS report (“D.P.R. of Korea”).

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What Not to Sell on eBay: Drones


Take detailed notes before your next auction. If you try to put a drone up for sale on eBay, you’d better include your legal expenses in the asking price.

Henson Chua of the Philippines is looking at 20 years in prison for starting an auction on parts for a RQ-11B Raven, which is a no-no under the Arms Control Export Act. As seller celltron8, Chua allegedly asked for $13,000 for the handheld, unarmed spy drone. Unfortunately for him, his bidder was an undercover investigator for the Department of Homeland Security.

According to an indictment issued for Chua and released on Monday, Chua put the Raven up for sale around May of last year. Now, you can’t sell military technology without a specific waiver from the State Department. And eBay took the sale off its site on May 18, since it violated internal policies against selling military items. Perhaps people initially thought it was a really expensive model airplane: the Raven, manufactured by AeroVironment, has a wingspan of under five feet and weighs barely four pounds.

But the legal hurdles associated with selling a drone apparently didn’t stop Chua from emailing his undercover purchaser that “shipping it out should not be a problem here.”

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Did the Anthrax Attacks Kick-Start the Iraq War?

Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, to make the case for war in Iraq. A central plank of his presentation: the anthrax attacks that killed five people and helped send the United States into a panic in the days after 9/11.

“Less than a teaspoonful of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope,” Powell said. “Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters [6,600 gallons]. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons.”

By the end of the following month, the invasion of Iraq was underway.

The debate over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (or lack thereof) has been endlessly rehashed in the eight years since. Less discussed — and less understood — is the role that the largest bioterror attack in American history played in launching the march to Baghdad.

The anthrax attacks “made it possible to manufacture the argument that there was WMD in Iraq and links to Al-Qaeda,” Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), a leading congressional critic on the anthrax investigation, tells Danger Room.

And long after any links between Iraq and the killer spores were disproven, the Bush administration used the mystery surrounding the anthrax mailer to press its case for war.

“I point out the anthrax example just to remind everybody that it is very hard sometimes, especially when we’re dealing with something like a biological weapon [to] know who launches the next attack,” Dick Cheney said in September 2002. “And that’s why it’s so important for us when we do identify the kind of threat that we see emerging now in Iraq… we have to give serious consideration to how we’re going to address it before he can launch an attack, not wait until after he’s launched an attack.”

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New Afghanistan Plan: Hole Up in Fortress Districts

LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — With the first American troops slated to withdraw in July, the Afghanistan surge is nearly over. But even as the overall U.S. force in Afghanistan contracts, portions of a handful of particularly important districts — the rough equivalent of U.S. counties — could actually get more troops and more development cash.

The shift toward these so-called “key terrain districts” is the result of a slowly evolving plan for making the best out of a bad situation. Come summer, the NATO and Afghan coalition won’t have enough forces to even try controlling every one of Afghanistan’s 400 districts. So the alliance is prioritizing, by pulling troops from relatively secure areas and those being handed over to Afghan forces — not to mention areas deemed lost causes — and sending them to districts where they still stand a chance.

If the key-district plan works perfectly, it could create framework for steadily expanding security, development and Kabul-down rule of law, even as the foreign army withdraws. More likely, the focus on a small number of districts will allow the Taliban free reign in some areas, exacerbating existing divisions between Afghanistan’s “have’s” and “have-not’s.”

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NATO Chief Opens The Door to Libya Ground Troops


The mantra, from President Obama on down, is that ground forces are totally ruled out for Libya. After all, the United Nations Security Council Resolution authorizing the war explicitly rules out any “occupation” forces. But leave it to the top military officer of NATO, which takes over the war on Wednesday, to add an asterisk to that ban.

During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island asked Adm. James Stavridis about NATO putting forces into “post-Gadhafi” Libya to make sure the country doesn’t fall apart. Stavridis said he “wouldn’t say NATO’s considering it yet.” But because of NATO’s history of putting peacekeepers in the Balkans — as pictured above — “the possibility of a stabilization regime exists.”

So welcome to a new possible “endgame” for Libya. Western troops patrolling Libya’s cities during a a shaky transition after Moammar Gadhafi’s regime has fallen, however that’s supposed to happen. Thousands of NATO troops patrolled Bosnia and Kosovo’s tense streets for years. And Iraq and Afghanistan taught the U.S. and NATO very dearly that fierce insurgent conflict can follow the end of a brutal regime. In fact, it’s the moments after the regime falls that can be the most dangerous of all — especially if well-intentioned foreign troops become an object of local resentment.

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‘Track Changes’ for Your Genes: Darpa Goal

Check out Darpa’s latest bright idea: to fund “multidisciplinary research proposals in the area of genomic and proteomic technologies that can continuously and persistently record specific natural or human promulgated environmental, physical and genomic events within the genetic or epigenetic systems of microorganisms.”

If you had to read that over about ten times and still didn’t get it, that’s exactly how I feel too. (And I’ve got a master’s in immunology.)

So let’s dial back for a second.

Sounds to me like Darpa wants to create a digital spy technology that is encoded into the genes of a living bug. It will apparently record and report on any modifications being made to the bug itself – kind of like the Track Changes option in your Word document.

Why would Darpa care about changes in this particular bug, you ask? Because it might be patented. Patented genes and microbes are precious bio-commodities in the research world. Essentially, Darpa wants to invent a tech tool to protect their intellectual property – in this case, mutant bacteria and viruses – from other scientists. The program is called Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins, or “CLIO.”

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U.S. Sends Its Gunships to Shoot Up Gadhafi’s Forces

President Obama’s speech on Libya sidestepped the crucial question of coordinating with the opposition. But while the military swears it’s not in communication with the rebels, it sent the Air Force’s best weapons for close air support into the fight.

Vice Adm. Bill Gortney confirmed in a Monday Pentagon briefing that the A-10 Warthog and the AC-130 began operations in Libya “over the weekend.” That was a busy period for the U.S.-led coalition: 286 strike missions, of which 133 were flown by U.S. pilots.

But unlike the attack aircraft used in the war’s first days, these planes fly low to the ground and fire cannons instead of dropping bombs. Experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan, the A-10’s 30 millimeter “Avenger” guns to shoot holes at ground targets; the A-130 loiters over its targets at 15,000 feet before firing its 25 mm, 40mm and 105 mm guns. If you want to take out enemy tanks, trucks and artillery pieces from the sky — with friendly dudes on the ground nearby — these are the planes you fly.

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