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The web site Jihad Watch posted this story today about the Israeli government owned airline El Al modifying its fleet of passenger jets with anti-missile defenses. Great news for El Al passengers that someone had the foresight to deal with the possible threat from the thousands of missing surface-to-air missiles that were looted from the arsenal of Muammar Gaddafi, the late dictator of Libya. Maybe Israel has a longer history than we do so they have learned the hard way that if you ignore a threat you are doomed to suffer from it.
The costs of the Great Libyan Jihadist Garage Sale continue to spread. Just the other day, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb affirmed that it had acquired part of Gaddafi's former arsenal.
"Israel rushes airliner defenses as Libya leaks SAMs," by Dan Williams for Reuters, November 11:
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel has
accelerated the installation of anti-missile defenses on its airliners, a
security official said on Friday, seeing an enhanced risk of attack by
militants using looted Libyan arms.
Jets flown by El Al and two other Israeli carriers are being
equipped with a locally made system known as C-Music that uses a laser
to "blind" heat-seeking missiles, the official said, giving a 2013
target for fitting most of the fleet.
As a stop-gap, Israel is adapting air force counter-measures
for use aboard civilian planes, said the official, who declined to
elaborate on the technologies involved, or to be identified.
"We have long been aware of the threat and were ahead of the
rest of the world in preparing for it. Libya has meant government
orders to step things up even further," the official said, citing
intelligence assessments that chaos during the North African nation's
uprising against Muammar Gaddafi allowed trafficking of Libyan
shoulder-fired missiles to Palestinians and al Qaeda-linked groups in
the Egyptian Sinai.
Too bad the U.S. Army didn't think to guard Saddam Hussein's arms depot
in Baghdad after our successful invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wrote about that here on March 27, 2011. The arms depot belonging to Saddam in Baghdad had thousands of tons of 155mm artillery shells laying around unguarded after Saddam's Revolutionary Guard had vanished when the U.S. arrived. Within a matter of days, those unguarded shells had been carted off and converted into IED's that have killed and maimed thousands of our troops over the years.
Treason is specifically defined in the United States Constitution, the only crime so defined. Article III
Section 3 delineates treason as follows: "Treason against the United
States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering
to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be
convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the
same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
Four decades ago, many people
considered actress Jane Fonda's visit to North Vietnam, posing with
soldiers and aiming an anti-aircraft gun in the direction of U.S. Navy
aircraft was an act of treason for "Giving aid and comfort" to the
enemy. The leftist news media never pursued the story but nevertheless
Fonda's movie career floundered due to the public rejection. Fonda was
never charged with treason though many people, especially veterans,
thought she should have been.
Jump forward to the initial days of
the Bush invasion of Iraq and the capture of Baghdad. The great military
arsenal of Saddam Hussein was pictured briefly in the news. Acres and
acres of unguarded artillery shells stacked on the open ground. Within a
few days almost all of that ordnance simply disappeared and for years
our troops paid a terrible price for it. The web site FAS Strategic Security Blog carried this story on its April 2009 blog.
Iraq’s Looted Arms Depots: What the GAO Didn’t Mention
In a recent report,
the Government Accountability Office (GAO) attributes the looting of
Iraq’s arms depots to the “ovewhelming size and number” of these depots
and “prewar planning priorities and certain assumptions that proved to
be invalid.” The report finds that the US military “did not adequately
secure these [conventional munitions storage] sites during and
immediately after the conclusion of major combat operations” and “did
not plan for or set up a program to centrally manage and destroy enemy
munitions until August 2003…” The munitions looted from Iraqi arsenals,
claims the GAO, have been used extensively in the deadly improvised
explosive device (IED) attacks that have become tragically commonplace
in Iraq. But the IED threat is only part of the story. Iraq’s arsenals
were also brimming with shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles,
thousands of which disappeared during the widespread looting of the
regime’s numerous arms depots in 2003.
Read the full story here:
Get the picture? Those looted
artillery shells have become the substance of the Improvised Explosive
Devices that have maimed and killed thousands of American soldiers. Yet
not one U.S. military officer was ever court marshaled for failing to
secure those weapons in the days following the fall of Baghdad. How
quickly the war in Iraq could have ended had we managed to keep that
arsenal out of the hands of the enemy insurgents will never be known.
Another web site The Warning Signs
has a more recent story on March 11, 2011 about the looting of Muammar
Gaddafi's weapons depot in Libya and how many of these weapons will be
at the disposal of al Qaeda terrorists. This is the more alarming
paragraph in this lengthy piece. This story originally appeared on
another web site Stratfor Global Intelligance.
Will Libya Again Become The Arsenal Of Terrorism?
By Scott Stewart
The
arms depots in Libya have been looted by a number of different actors
ranging in motivation from anti-Gadhafi freedom fighters to jihadists
to outright thieves and thugs. While the weapons are now being used
mostly to fight Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s remaining forces, they could
later be diverted to other uses. Arms, ammunition and explosives looted
from Libyan arms depots today will likely be serviceable for decades,
and the thriving transnational black arms market will provide a
mechanism for groups and individuals to sell looted weapons or those
received from foreign governments. The bottom line is that weapons from
Libya will be available on the black arms market for many years to
come.
But the most alarming news about the looting of the weapons depots in Libya comes from Pamela Geller's web site Atlas Shrugs, today in a story she picked up from the Australian web site News.com.au.
Among the looted weapons taken from Libya it was confirmed that a
number of Russian made SAM 7 surface -to-air guided missles were also
stolen.
'Al-Qaeda snatched missiles' in Libya
* From correspondents in Paris
* From: AFP
* March 26, 2011 1:03PM
AL-QAEDA'S offshoot in North Africa has snatched surface-to-air missiles
from an arsenal in Libya during the civil strife there, Chad's
President says.
Idriss Deby Itno did not say how many surface-to-air missiles were
stolen, but told the African weekly Jeune Afrique that he was "100 per
cent sure" of his assertion.
"The Islamists of al-Qaeda took advantage of the pillaging of arsenals
in the rebel zone to acquire arms, including surface-to-air missiles,
which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries in Tenere," a desert
region of the Sahara that stretches from northeast Niger to western
Chad, Deby said in the interview.
"This is very serious. AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region," he said.
His claim was echoed by officials in other countries in the region who
said that they were worried that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)
might have acquired "heavy weapons", thanks to the insurrection.
"We have sure information. We are very worried for the sub-region," a Malian security source who did not want to be named said.
AQIM originated as an armed Islamist resistance movement to the secular Algerian government.
It now operates mainly in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where it
has attacked military targets and taken civilian hostages, particularly
Europeans, some of whom it has killed.
"We have the same information," about heavy weapons, including SAM 7 missiles, a military source from Niger said.
"It is very worrying. This overarming is a real danger for the whole zone," he added
"AQIM gets the weapons in two ways; people go and look for the arms in
Libya to deliver them to AQIM in the Sahel, or AQIM elements go there
themselves."
Elsewhere in the interview, Chad's president backed the assertion by his
neighbour and erstwhile enemy Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that the
protests in Libya have been driven in part by al-Qaeda.
"There is a partial truth in what he says," Deby said.
"Up to what point? I don't know. But I am certain that AQIM took an active part in the uprising."
Read more
here:
So
Treason comes in many forms but it ends up as giving aid to the enemy.
One-time Muslim Barack Hussein Obama can visit Egypt and provide
encouragement to oppressed Muslims and then we watch the beginning of an
uprising that quickly spreads across Northern Africa and the Middle
East. Out of the chaos comes the change but the news media has blurred
the lines of who is good and who is bad. Countries that were ruled by
dictators now appear to going under the rule of the Islamic terrorist
Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of al Qaeda. And these
looted weapons will all be used by the Religion of Peace for
humanitarian goals. You can bet on it.
Now comes a story from The Christian Science Monitor published two months ago about the Libyan weapons also being looted and carted off. The arsenal in Iraq provided the means to create IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) to attack American ground soldiers, but the thousands of hand-held SAM surface-to-air missiles from Libya will enable Islamic terrorists to attack in-flight aircraft, both military and civilian - anywhere and everywhere.
The Christian Science Monitor
The deadly dilemma of Libya's missing weapons
Human Rights Watch discovered several weapons-storage sites in Libya where surface-to-air missiles are missing, raising concerns that the weapons could arm an Iraq-style insurgency.
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / September 7, 2011
Photo Libya arms depot
Caption: Large mortar shells sit unguarded, and boxes that once held anti-aircraft missiles and other heavy weapons are strewn about arms depots around Tripoli on Sept. 7.
Ben Hubbard/AP
Tripoli, Libya
As Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) hunt for and collect the weapons that fueled Muammar Qaddafi's war machine, they are quickly learning that some choice pieces of his vast stockpile of mines, mortars, and explosives are missing.
At newly discovered weapons-storage sites, thousands of shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) are unaccounted for. At one unguarded facility, empty packing crates and documents reveal that 482 sophisticated Russian SA-24 missiles were shipped to Libya in 2004, and now are gone. With a range of 11,000 feet, the SA-24 is Moscow’s modern version of the American “stinger,” which in the 1980s helped the US-backed Afghan mujahideen turn their war against the Soviet Union.
George Santayana, who, in his Reason in Common Sense, The Life of
Reason, Vol.1, wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it." He was right and there is no compromise.
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