Arming the terrorists: What no one has learned from history dooms everyone to repeat it.

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.

Israel rushes new airliner defenses into place after jihadist groups obtain Libyan surface-to-air missiles

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.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Arming the terrorists is no different from giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

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.