The Tools of Mexico's Drug Cartels, From Landmines to Monster Trucks

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It can be a little deceiving to think of Mexico's drug cartels as simply gangsters. Instead, they've blurred boundaries between organized crime and quasi-military insurgents, seized swathes of territory and become some of the world's most dangerous criminal gangs. They've also acquired plenty of firepower to back it up.

The Zetas are one of the most disruptive and aggressive of them all. Formed by ex-military men who became armed enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas split with their former patrons nearly three years ago and have since become one of Mexico's largest and most dangerous cartels. While most of those ex-military founding fathers of the cartel are now dead or in prison, they've retained a culture of military loyalties, if not so much the discipline and hierarchy. Or much in the way of taste. In September, Mexican police arrested Ramiro Pozos, the alleged leader of drug gang "The Resistance" and Zeta ally -- with his gold- and silver-plated AK-47. Meanwhile, coming up on Saturday, incoming president Enrique Pena Nieto takes office, the first change in the presidency since the drug war exploded across the country more than six years ago. Aside from reducing the level of violence, one of his priorities will be wrenching back control of cartel territory, and putting it back under the control of the state.

It won't be easy. To enforce their claims, the Zetas ' and other criminal groups like the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel ' deploy an extensive amount of hardware, nearly rivaling Mexico's own military. Police forces are often corrupted or threatened into compliance, and almost always outgunned. Here's a look at seven examples why.

Photo: AP

Israeli Defense Chief Sounds Ready to Hit Iran, Thanks in Part to Iron Dome

Israel's retiring defense chief thinks Iran needs to be 'coerced' in 2013 from building an atom bomb, despite any U.S. hopes that sanctions will bring Tehran to the negotiating table. And the recent success of his new, U.S.-funded missile defenses seems to have convinced him that Israel is better able than ever to deter its Iran-backed foes.

'Of course, we would love to see some heavenly intervention that will stop them, to wake up some morning and learn that they've given up on their nuclear intentions,' Barak told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday during a joint press conference with Leon Panetta, his American counterpart. 'You cannot build a strategy based on these wishes or prayers. Sanctions are working and they are more hurting than anything I remember from the past vis-a-vis Iran, but I don't believe these kinds of sanctions will bring the ayatollahs to a moment of truth where they sit around a table, look into each other's eyes and decide that the game is over.'

Not exactly what Panetta wanted to hear during what was supposed to be a friendly press conference in which they celebrated how the U.S.-backed Iron Dome rocket defense system stopped Hamas' rocket attacks cold. The U.S. defense chief, who effused over the retiring Barak as 'a man of peace' and praised their long friendship, said the 'unprecedented pressure' on Iran from international sanctions present 'time and space for an effort to try to achieve a diplomatic solution.'

Not likely, thinks the retiring Barak. 'During the coming year and hopefully before they reach what I have called a 'zone of immunity'' ' a point at which Israeli airstrike couldn't meaningfully hinder Iranian nuclear work ' Iran 'will be coerced into putting an end to it this way or another way,' Barak said. 'The physical attack option is an option that should be there, should remain on the table, never be removed.'

That may be short of a pledge to attack Iran next year, but it's hardly a vote of confidence in any alternative. And it reflects a lingering divide in U.S. and Israeli goals on Iran, despite the rhetoric of unity. 'We will prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,' Panetta said, 'and that remains our policy.' Barak's policy is different: to stop Iran from even getting to the point in its technological nuclear work where an airstrike is senseless, before Iran gets the bomb. The Israeli defense chief acknowledged 'sometimes slight differences' with U.S. policy 'that should be better discussed behind closed doors.'

However much Barak seems resigned to Iran's determination 'to go in the footsteps of Pakistan and North Korea,' he also mused out loud about Iron Dome as a security game-changer for Israel. Not because a system that was 'extremely successful' at stopping unguided Qassam rockets can also stop Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles ' it can't. But because of the demonstration effect that Israeli missile-defense technology can have on Iran and its proxies.

'The very knowing of the other side that you have such an effective system, especially when we'll be equipped with many more interceptors, it will change the balance of contemplation on the other side,' Barak said. 'It creates a logical kind of deterrent, not a psychological one, because any enemy that tries against Israel is exposed to the effectiveness of our efforts that we've seen during in this operation.' Especially since, Barak noted, Iron Dome's big brothers ' David's Sling and the Arrow ' are in development to stop more powerful missiles launched by Iran and Hezbollah.

Barak won't be defense minister next year, as he announced this week he's retiring from politics. But if other prominent Israeli decision-makers think that Iron Dome restored Israel's ability to deter adversaries, imagine the value they might place on an Iran attack next year.

For the First Time, Obama Official Sketches Out End to War on Terror

Neither the George W. Bush nor Barack Obama White House ever laid out a vision for what an end to the war on terrorism would actually look like. But as Obama prepares for his second term in office, one of his top defense officials is arguing that there is an end in sight, and laying out conditions for when the U.S. will reach it.

'On the present course, there will come a tipping point,' Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon's top lawyer, told the Oxford Union in the U.K. on Friday, 'a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaida as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.' At that point, 'our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.'

Johnson's description of the endgame raises more questions than answers. But under his formulation, the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which the Obama administration has cited as the foundation of its wartime powers, would expire. That would mean any detainee at Guantanamo Bay who hasn't been charged with a crime would be free to go, although Johnson says that wouldn't necessarily happen immediately. It would also raise questions about whether the U.S. would possess residual legal authorities for its lethal drone program ' which Johnson defended to the BBC on Thursday ' including the legal basis for any 'postwar' drone strike the CIA might perform.

In Johnson's view, once al-Qaida's ability to launch a strategic attack is gone, so too is the war. What will remain is a 'counterterrorism effort' against the 'individuals who are the scattered remnants' of the organization or even unaffiliated terrorists. 'The law enforcement and intelligence resources of our government are principally responsible' for dealing with them, Johnson said, according to the text of his speech, with 'military assets in reserve' for an imminent threat.

Johnson, considered one of the more liberal voices on Obama's senior national security team, notably did not say when the U.S. will reach his tipping point. And his vague argument is more likely to provoke debate than settle any legal or strategic questions about the war. But it comes at an auspicious time: just before Obama's second term, when there are visible stirrings in Congress to finally close Guantanamo Bay and accelerate an end to the Afghanistan war. Johnson, according to Foreign Policy's Kevin Baron, is also under consideration to become attorney general, a post from which he'd have greater influence to conclude the war. It's also notable that Johnson's current boss, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, recently backed away from his earlier rhetoric that the war is abating and heralded its spread to new battlefields in Africa.

Johnson's not a commander. He's the Pentagon's general counsel, meaning his most direct involvement in the war on terrorism surrounds the military's ability to detain suspected terrorists during the conflict. In his view, once the conflict ends, Guantanamo Bays doors have to swing open. Just maybe not immediately.

'In general, the military's authority to detain ends with the 'cessation of active hostilities',' Johnson said. But he pointedly noted that both the U.S. and U.K. governments 'delayed the release of some Nazi German prisoners of war' after World War II ended. Still, that would mean the vast majority of Guantanamo's 166 detainees, those who haven't been charged with any crime, would be ultimately free to go ' a position almost guaranteed to spark controversy.

Murkier still is what it would mean for intelligence and law enforcement to target the 'scattered remnants' of al-Qaida. Most significantly, once the AUMF expires, big questions would immediately arise about the legal framework for the apparatus of drone strikes and commando raids that President Obama has expanded and institutionalized for the long haul. The CIA in particular is a question mark: since the legal rationale for its drone program has never been disclosed, its dependency on the AUMF or its typical 'Title 50' authorities is unclear.

Either way, it sets up a broader Constitutional question for targeting Johnson's 'scattered remnants' of al-Qaida. 'You would then have to consider the scope of the president's Constitutional authority if you didn't have statutory authorization to use force against hostile parties,' says Benjamin Powell, a former attorney for the U.S. director of national intelligence. (Who, to be clear, was speaking generically and not about any particular program.) 'Some in the administration have taken the position prior to joining the administration that such authority is fairly narrow.'

Most provocatively, even though Johnson doesn't offer an opinion about when the U.S. will reach his tipping point for ending the war, an argument can be made that it already has, or at least come close.

al-Qaida's senior leadership has not succeeded in launching a major attack against the U.S. since 9/11. The U.S. drone attacks against its tribal Pakistani havens has abated: a strike on Friday that killed three was the first in over a month. al-Qaida's most active affiliate, based in Yemen, has failed in its major 2009 and 2010 attempts to strike the U.S., and appears not to have launched follow-ups as U.S. commandos and Yemeni forces have intensified their campaign against the group. It's not clear what sort of involvement al-Qaida's northern African affiliate had to the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, nor if the assault would constitute the 'strategic attack' Johnson defined as al-Qaida's hallmark.

Johnson and his staff didn't respond to questions about the speech. But if he stays on in a second Obama term, it might herald an effort to finally bring more than a decade of war to a close.

Here Are The 104 Places in America to Put Gitmo Detainees

Think it's too dangerous to house the 166 suspected terrorists locked up in Guantanamo Bay within the continental United States? A powerful senator asked a congressional research office to run the numbers. It found that there are no fewer than 104 places inside the U.S. to safely lock them up ' provided they make serious modifications.

President Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo Bay looks deader than Osama bin Laden, thanks to a buzzsaw of bipartisan congressional opposition for the past four years. The reasoning behind that opposition takes a variety of forms, but the thread that unites them is: not in my backyard. 'It's hard to find anyone anywhere who wants his or her state to house the next Guantanamo,' noted Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in 2009, objecting to an administration proposal to relocate the detainees to U.S. prisons, where he presumed they'd be an escape risk: 'Guantanamo Bay is, above all else, secure and safely distant from civilian populations.'

Nonsense, says Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee and a longtime proponent of shuttering the detention facility. As Danger Room first reported last month, Feinstein asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into the practicalities of where to house Guantanamo's detainee population. Its findings, released late Wednesday: The Justice Department operates 98 prisons suitable for holding individuals convicted on terrorism charges; and the military runs six more. But the report also makes clear that it's not as simple as moving the detainees from one holding facility to another: Not only would the law have to change, but non-terrorism prisoners would likely have to be moved, and the federal prisons are already seriously overcrowded.

'This report demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security,' Feinstein said in a prepared statement. 'The United States already holds 373 individuals convicted of terrorism in 98 facilitates across the country. As far as I know, there hasn't been a single security problem reported in any of these cases.'

The GAO study Feinstein requested is rigorously agnostic on whether Guantanamo ought to be closed. Accordingly, it doesn't make any recommendations. And the numerous operational difficulties it highlights for imprisoning the remaining 166 Guantanamo detainees in federal or military prisons show it's not just a matter of pure political will.

Still, the study points to the inherent physical similarities between Guantanamo and federal prisons. Camp Six, for instance, the newest detention center and the one holding some two-thirds of the remaining Gitmo population, is 'designed after the layout of a U.S. county jail, and it consists of eight indoor climate-controlled, two-story housing units that each contain 22 individual cells and one large common area.' Nor is Guantanamo a hub for intelligence anymore: Since the facility hasn't admitted a new detainee since 2006, whatever residual intelligence operations happen at Guantanamo are to 'help ensure the safety and security of the detention facilities and personnel.'

Should the Obama administration opt to charge the detainees with war crimes before a military commission, as it's doing with 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the military has six facilities inside the U.S. built to hold prisoners for longer than a year: three Naval brigs at Charleston, South Carolina; Chesapeake, Virginia; and Miramar, California; the correction facilities at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Lewis-McChord in Washington; and Leavenworth's Disciplinary Barracks. Those facilities, combined, are only 48 percent full. And since the Obama administration has opted to hold 48 detainees indefinitely without any charges, continued military detention might be the easiest path to shutting Guantanamo ' if not shutting down what it represents.

There would be challenges, though. Servicemembers convicted of crimes would have to be relocated to different prisons to comply with a section of the military law that bars 'immediate association' with foreign nationals. And the military's policies for segregating regular military criminals from those detained under the laws of war will present 'capacity limitations' among the six U.S. facilities theoretically capable of taking on the Gitmo population, meaning the military can't 'easily accommodate' its prospective new domestic wards.

The other, more politically controversial option, is to charge the detainees in federal courts and hold them in federal prisons. There, the GAO found 98 prisons operated by the Justice Department that house among them 373 people convicted of terrorism charges. The Department, while swearing it has no plans to move Gitmo detainees to any of them, insists its personnel 'have the correctional expertise to safely and securely house detainees with a history of or nexus to terrorism.' Not a single person convicted of terrorism in federal courts has escaped ' particularly not from the federal Supermax prison in Colorado.

But that's not the whole story. For one thing, Congress would have to repeal laws preventing the Justice Department from taking custody of the Gitmo population. Then come the operational challenges. '[A]dditional procedures and infrastructure would be required governing where and how each category of detainee would be held, including their accommodations,' the study finds. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) personnel have no training for the 'holding of detainees who have not been charged with or convicted of violating U.S. law.' And even for those who are charged with criminal violations, the prisons are already facing a 38 percent overcrowding challenge. 'If BOP needed to confine detainees to single cells, existing inmates would have to be moved to create space for the detainees, which could require that BOP triple bunk some of the current inmate population,' the GAO found. All of that will cost money.

Feinstein's a longtime advocate of closing Guantanamo: In 2007, she sponsored the first Senate bill to do so. But it's hard to tell how this report can generate the 'political will' she identifies as the linchpin for finishing the job. The Obama administration doesn't 'want to spend the political capital' to do so, says Benjamin Wittes, who studies terrorism detentions at the Brookings Institution, and scores of congressional Republicans 'won't say there's anything appropriate to do with capturing detainees except bringing them to Guantanamo.' (Wittes might also have added that congressional Democrats are happy to leave the issue alone out of fear of being called weak on terror.) Unless Obama and Congress can unlock that dynamic, Guantanamo will stay open, GAO study or no study.

But it's also worth noting that Feinstein released the GAO as the Senate debates next year's defense authorization bill, which in recent years has earned controversy for its provisions restricting Obama from closing Guantanamo. Her staff says it's just a coincidence.

Pentagon Cries Poor, Starts $10 Billion Nuclear Weapon Upgrade

The Pentagon is facing its worst cash crunch in more than a decade, with potential cuts of up to a half-trillion dollars over the next decade if Congress doesn't act soon. Yet the U.S. military still somehow found the money on Tuesday to put a down payment on a $10 billion upgrade of its nuclear weapons in Europe ' y'know, just in case there's another Cold War.

The $178 million, three-year contract with Boeing is for a prototype 'tail kit' for the B61 nuclear weapon. The fins and control systems will be similar to the ones on today's conventional, GPS-guided bombs, potentially making this enhanced version of the B61 the most accurate weapon of mass destruction ever. It's one part of a bigger package of improvements to the B61 that the Pentagon insists it needs in order to keep this slice of its nuclear arsenal ready for war, if needed. Everything from the spin rocket motors to the electronic neutron generators will be refreshed. Total cost: an estimated $10 billion.

Just about the only thing that won't change is the weapon's nuclear 'pit,' and who the U.S. military plans on dropping the thing on. 'Who's the target? The Red Army. The Red Army that's sitting in East Germany, ready to plunge into Europe,' explains. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. 'No, I'm serious.'

The U.S. has other, bunker-busting nuclear weapons that might be employed if, God forbid, there was ever an atomic showdown with North Korea or Iran. These so-called 'B61 mod 12s' are meant to replace the 180 or so earlier models that are currently deployed in Western Europe. And those weapons are meant to assure our allies that if Russia is ever in the mood to invade, America will be there with a capital-B Bomb. 'Continued funding support is essential to the long-term safety, security, and effectiveness of our nation's nuclear deterrent force,' Gen. Robert Kehler, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, told Congress last year.

The B61 was first fielded in 1968. Unless critical components of the weapons are replaced ' especially the radioactive tritium gas that makes the nuclear blast more efficient ' the B61s might have to be withdrawn from the Continent by the end of the decade. 'Old parts mean less-safe nukes. 60 years without an accidental detonation. We have a keen interest in keeping that record going,' says John Noonan, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile officer and a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

A 2008 Secretary of Defense task force report (.pdf) cautions against underestimating the 'political value our friends and allies place on these weapons, the political costs of withdrawal, and the psychological impact of their visible presence.' But the same report notes that U.S. European Command ' the Pentagon's top generals in the region ' 'believ[e] there is no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.' After all, America has thousands of additional warheads that could be delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines.

All of which would make the push for the mod 12 upgrades tough to fathom under almost any conditions. But it's particularly odd now, when the Pentagon is under more fiscal pressure than it's felt since the 1990s. Just Tuesday, for example, the Chief of Staff of the Army announced plans to pare back the ground force's spending by likely cutting the number of troops to their lowest levels since before World War II. On January 3, 2013, the Defense Department will automatically lose another 9.4 percent of its budget ' more than $500 billion over 10 years ' unless Congress reverses the automatic, across-the-board cuts it previously put in place.

In other words: every billion counts. But while the rest of the Defense Department is looking to save money, the costs for the mod 12 program keep going up. In May, the project ' which entails upgrading an estimated 400 weapons ' had a price tag of $6 billion. By July, that number had grown to $10 billion. That's not only the equivalent of two-thirds of what the federal government plans to spend on all nuclear weapon enhancements over the next twenty years. 'It would be less expensive to build solid-gold replicas of each of the 700-pound B61s, even at near-record gold prices,' as Lewis recently noted in Foreign Policy.

One reason why: the mod 12 project ' even though it's billed as a 'life extension program' ' isn't just about replacing the components of the weapons that are decaying or corroding. (Independent experts say that would take a mere billion or two.) When you swap out the B61's parachute for satellite-guided tail fin assembly, it introduces a new complication, Lewis adds. 'An atomic bomb dropped without a parachute will explode before the airplane is safely away. That means [the federal government] must also redesign much of the packaging and components to survive 'laydown' ' i.e., thudding into the ground and then exploding a few moments later.' An internal Pentagon audit showed 15 of the 29 planned changes for mod 12 are still technologically immature.

But if the improvements aren't made soon, advocates say, they'll only get more expensive. 'Modernization is expensive because we keep delaying it. Now we're at a point where, instead of making pragmatic annual investments in lab, stockpile, and delivery modernization ' we have to do it all at once,' says Noonan, the former missileer.

Pretty soon, there will be a choice: upgrade these nuclear weapons, or put them out to pasture. What would you do, if you were a cash-strapped Pentagon chief?

Senate Votes to Save the Navy's 'Great Green Fleet'

The Senate on Wednesday threw a life raft to the Navy's beleaguered plan to power its ships and jets with biofuel.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus trumpeted the program as key to service's long-term stability, pledging $170 million to kickstart the wobbly biofuel industry, promising to get half the Navy's fuel from alternative sources by 2020, and making plans to dispatch an eco-friendly 'Great Green Fleet' in 2016.

But the ambitious plan appeared to be all but dead in May. Some Congressmen were ticked off by the $15 per-gallon price ' four times the going rate for old-school fuel ' and wary of the White House's interest in green technologies after the meltdown of Solyndra, the administration-friendly solar firm. Nor did key lawmakers much care for Mabus' push for the alternative fuels at a time when the budgets for ships and sailors were rapidly shrinking. A little-noticed Defense Department report surfaced showing that the Navy could spend as much as an extra $1.76 billion per year on biofuel.

Both the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee and the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee passed amendments to the Pentagon's budget that forbade the Defense Department from paying any more for green fuels than for fossil ones. That kind of restriction, if codified into law, would effectively kill any more biofuel buys. Observers ' including this one ' said the chances were 'growing dim' that the Navy would ever get the chance to make those purchases.

But several things changed after the legislative defeats. The Navy ran a successful, if limited, test of their biofuels during a brief demonstration sail of the 'Great Green Fleet,' an alternatively powered carrier strike group. They pledged never to overpay for biofuels, ever, while the Solyndra scandal slid off the front pages. Behind the scenes, groups like the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate lobbied lawmakers. Then, of course, President Obama won re-election. That left Republicans a little less eager for budget-cutting measures, and Democrats a little more inclined to back the president, who had strongly and vocally supported the biofuel push.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to strip away the anti-biofuel amendment, 62-37. Republicans John Barrasso, John Thune, Roy Blunt and Jerry Moran. So did Susan Collins, who missed the May vote on biofuels in the Armed Services Committee ' allowing the amendment to pass by a single 'yea.'

'DOD is the largest single user of oil in the world, consuming more than 355,000 barrels of oil per day in Fiscal Year 2011. Despite increased domestic production of traditional fossil fuels, rising global oil prices and market volatility caused DOD's fuel bill to rise more than $19 billion in Fiscal Year 2011,' Collins and 37 of her colleagues wrote in a letter to the Senate's leadership (.pdf), urging for the amendment to be taken out. 'Alternative fuels will not supplant fossil fuels entirely; however, replacing even a fraction of the fuel consumed by DOD with domestic alternative fuels has the potential to advance U.S. national security, strategic flexibility, and insulate the defense budget against future spikes in the cost of fossil fuels.'

The alternative-fuel effort still faces major hurdles. A second amendment remains in place that bars the Navy from spending that $170 million to promote the biofuel industry. The House of Representatives is not only controlled by Republicans, but Republicans far more conservative than Collins. They're far less less likely to change direction on the biofuel push.

Bank Hackers Deny They're Agents of Iran

A slew of American officials have blamed Iran for attacks on the servers of Bank of America, Well Fargo, HSBC, and other western banks. But the hackers taking credit for the sophisticated distributed denial-of-service strikes say that's all wrong; they claim they hit the financial institutions because they were pissed off about 'The Innocence of Muslims,' the infamous viral video making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. Tehran didn't have a thing to do with it.

'We are not dependent on any government. We merely wanted to protest against the insulting movie,'
people claiming to be part of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters tell the Flashpoint Partners research group in an interview (.pdf).

There's no telling if the denial is legitimate ' or if the people being interviewed are behind the bank attacks at all. But the interviewees are dead on when they say that 'there are some ones who want to portray this action [the bank hacks] as political.' Shortly after the U.S. Defense Secretary talked about the bank jobs, unnamed American officials began whispering that they were the work of Iran.

The bank attacks this fall weren't typical DDOS operations, which merely seek to overload servers with junk traffic. For one, they generated up to 100 gigabits per second of data ' 10 to 20 times more than what it usually takes to knock a site offline. The attackers overwhelmed routers, servers, and server applications all at once; typical DDOSers target just one. They specifically targeted the banks' Domain Name Server architecture, which translates website names ('cash.com') into numerical internet-protocol addresses. And their traffic largely came from legitimate IP address, making it tough for the banks to filter. The websites for PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other institutions buckled in quick succession; customers had trouble transferring funds and paying bills online.

Prolexic, a company that specializes in stopping these sorts of attacks, blamed a toolkit called 'itsoknoproblembro' for the DDOS assaults. The Cyber Fighters took responsibility as each site went down. But some security researchers believed the attacks to be so sophisticated, they could've only been pulled off with government help. 'This isn't consistent with what hacktivists are capable of,' Michael Smith, a security specialist at Akamai, said in September.

Pretty soon, American politicians starting blaming one government in particular: the one in Tehran. 'I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has its own developing cyber-attack capacity,' Sen. Joe Lieberman told C-Span around the same time. 'And I believe it was in response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.' The press began to speculate that the bank attacks were in some way a payback for the U.S.-led campaign of online sabotage against Iran's nuclear program.

In October, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta raised the stakes further, warning of a cyber strike 'as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11.' He then presented as harbingers of the coming catastrophe an attack on the Saudi energy company ARAMCO ' as well as the DDOSes on the banks. 'While this kind of tactic isn't new, the scale and speed was unprecedented,' he added.

In the following day, anonymous U.S. officials told reporters that Iran was behind both attacks, without sharing details about why they thought this was so.

The al-Qassam group says that's baloney, claiming that they're merely 'volunteer hackers which share the beliefs about [the] insulting video and [the] protest against it.'

When Flashpoint asked if the organization was 'supported or funded by any government,' the group's representatives simple answered: 'Nope.'

There's no guaranteeing the group is telling the truth, of course. Nor is there any assurance that the people who spoke with Flashpoint are really from the al-Qassam organization. The interviewees even claim that some statements previously attributed to the group are false. That's one of the tricky things about cyber security. While the systems for tracing an attack back to a particular computer are much improved, there are often lingering questions about who's really behind the hack.

China Unveils New Killer Drones, Aims Them At Russia

Watch out, Vladimir Putin: China's drone fleet is getting real. And judging from how Beijing is promoting its robots to the outside world, they're aimed straight at Russia.

That's all from a glimpse of the biennial China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, held earlier his month in Zhuhai, which has become the main event for the latest in all things Chinese aircraft. It's China's largest aircraft expo, while also presenting an opportunity for Beijing to show off its growing robotic muscle ' and potential buyers in the developing world. But until recently, the drones on display were usually mock-ups or drawings, not the real thing.

This year, Beijing's most prominent new drone is the dinosaur-named Wing Loong, or Pterodactyl, according to a round-up at Defense News. The drone is reportedly operational ' China has previously shown only models of the drone ' and closely resembles the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper, which the Pentagon uses to bomb insurgent hideouts in Pakistan. Few foreign journalists were reportedly allowed to see it, but photos and videos that appeared online prompted ace aviation journalist David Cenciotti to remark that the Wing Loong appeared 'largely copied from the U.S. version.'

But a lot cheaper. The Wing Loong reportedly comes at a rather incredible bargain price of one million dollars, compared to the Reaper's varying price tags in the $30 million range. Now, a word of caution to potential buyers: what you're getting for that price might not be very capable. But aside from price, the Wing Loong can also reportedly fly for about 20 hours, up to a range of 2,500 miles. It also packs four 'hard points' for mounting a variety of laser- and precision-guided bombs. Also pictured on Chinese television was the Wing Loong's ground control room, similar to the ones used by U.S. drones, but with only three screen-equipped workstations compared to the Reaper's five.

Another drone spotted with a clear resemblance to the Reaper is the CH-4. This drone was only a scale model, but reportedly has largely similar features to the Wing Loong. Its reported maximum range is shorter: a little over 2000 miles, but has 10 hours more endurance time. Chinese companies also showed off a number of small mini-drones, and concept photos of a number of futuristic concepts; including a robotic shark, missile-spewing drone helicopters and unmanned bombers. The tech also included plenty of non-robotic items. There was new anti-missile missile called the FD-2000. There was a Chinese copy of the U.S. military's line of bomb-resistant MRAP trucks, a wearable computer system for ground troops; aircraft radars and a whole mess of various machine guns, anti-aircraft cannons and bombs.

There was also a curious shift in how China was promoting its drones at Zhuhai. In recent years, a selling point for convention goers involved drones presented as U.S. warship killers. Exaggerated, yes, but a glimpse inside Chinese military thinking. In 2010, Chinese defense industries not-so-subtly advertised 'bizarre renderings' that illustrated drones 'swarming over aircraft carrier battle groups like angry bees,' Defense News reported. China Aerospace and Science Corporation (CASC) also displayed a mural of its WJ-600 drone firing a missile at a U.S. Arleigh Burke class destroyer.

This year, that was out. Illustrations of U.S. warships were likewise replaced by generic, stateless ships. And Russian ships. In one video seen this month, a sleek computer-animated combat drone called the Blue Shark flexed its muscles in an attack on a digitized Russian Admiral Kuznetsov class aircraft carrier.

Perhaps images of bombing the U.S. Navy was a little too politically sensitive, in a kind of reverse backtrack like what plagued the atrocious Red Dawn remake. But the boosterism about blasting American ships to the bottom has also receded as Beijing has grown more confident in showing off its working drones. In recent years, the drones on display at Zhuhai largely ' and once exclusively ' came in the form of models or concept art. While interesting, the mock-ups presented an optimistic picture about China's future drone fleet like the aforementioned illustrations of drones swooping down on American warships. And as sensational as that might look, it's a long way from a battle-ready drone fleet. But neither are operational drones sitting on the tarmac, for that matter.

But they made not necessarily need to be, if they're for export. 'We've been contacting many countries, especially from Africa and Asia,' Guo Qian, a director for CASC, told GlobalPost. 'They are quite interested in the intermediate and short-range UAVs because they are portable and low-cost.'

Which makes sense. If you're the leader of a small or mid-sized Latin American, African or Asian country, a relatively cheap Chinese drone (that packs a punch) might not be a bad deal ' think bargain shopping for flying death robots ' compared to the more pricey American or Israeli drones, which happen to lead the world market. That means even if China's drones won't match the U.S. anytime soon, it may still spread them far and wide. And then what happens when the drones do match the Pentagon's 'bots, or come close? Who knows. Though we'll probably see it first at Zhuhai.

Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You

The Pentagon wants to make perfectly clear that every time one of its flying robots releases its lethal payload, it's the result of a decision made by an accountable human being in a lawful chain of command. Human rights groups and nervous citizens fear that technological advances in autonomy will slowly lead to the day when robots make that critical decision for themselves. But according to a new policy directive issued by a top Pentagon official, there shall be no SkyNet, thank you very much.

Here's what happened while you were preparing for Thanksgiving: Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed, on November 21, a series of instructions to 'minimize the probability and consequences of failures' in autonomous or semi-autonomous armed robots 'that could lead to unintended engagements,' starting at the design stage (.pdf, thanks to Cryptome.org). Translated from the bureaucrat, the Pentagon wants to make sure that there isn't a circumstance when one of the military's many Predators, Reapers, drone-like missiles or other deadly robots effectively automatizes the decision to harm a human being.

The hardware and software controlling a deadly robot needs to come equipped with 'safeties, anti-tamper mechanisms, and information assurance.' The design has got to have proper 'human-machine interfaces and controls.' And, above all, it has to operate 'consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.' If not, the Pentagon isn't going to buy it or use it.

It's reasonable to worry that advancements in robot autonomy are going to slowly push flesh-and-blood troops out of the role of deciding who to kill. To be sure, military autonomous systems aren't nearly there yet. No Predator, for instance, can fire its Hellfire missile without a human directing it. But the military is wading its toe into murkier ethical and operational waters: The Navy's experimental X-47B prototype will soon be able to land on an aircraft carrier with the barest of human directions. (The video below is of the X-47B being loaded on a ship.) That's still a long way from deciding on its own to release its weapons. But this is how a very deadly slope can slip.

It's that sort of thing that worries Human Rights Watch, for instance. Last week, the organization, among the most influential non-governmental institutions in the world, issued a report warning that new developments in drone autonomy represented the demise of established 'legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians.' Its solution: 'prohibit the 'development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.'

Laudable impulse, wrong solution, writes Matthew Waxman. A former Defense Department official for detainee policy, Waxman and co-author Kenneth Anderson observe that technological advancements in robotic weapons autonomy is far from predictable, and the definition of 'autonomy' is murky enough to make it unwise to tell the world that it has to curtail those advancements at an arbitrary point. Better, they write, for the U.S. to start an international conversation about how much autonomy on a killer robot is appropriate, so as to 'embed evolving internal state standards into incrementally advancing automation.'

Waxman and Anderson should be pleased with Carter's memo, since those standards are exactly what Carter wants the Pentagon to bake into its next drone arsenal. Before the Pentagon agrees to develop or buy new autonomous or somewhat autonomous weapons, a team of senior Pentagon officials and military officers will have to certify that the design itself 'incorporates the necessary capabilities to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment in the use of force.' The machines and their software need to provide reliability assurances and failsafes to make sure that's how they work in practice, too. And anyone operating any such deadly robot needs sufficient certification in both the system they're using and the rule of law. The phrase 'appropriate levels of human judgment' is frequently repeated, to make sure everyone gets the idea. (Now for the lawyers to argue about the meaning of 'appropriate.')

So much for SkyNet. But Carter's directive blesses the forward march of autonomy in most everything military robots do that can't kill you. It '[d]oes not apply to autonomous or semi-autonomous cyberspace systems for cyberspace operations; unarmed, unmanned platforms; unguided munitions; munitions manually guided by the operator (e.g., laser- or wire-guided munitions); mines; or unexploded explosive ordnance,' Carter writes.

So in other words, the Pentagon doesn't have to build similar safeguards when developing, perhaps, a worm released into the wild that disrupts the industrial controls on a centrifuge system is fine. (SkyNet no; Stuxnet yes?) Nor when the Navy's carrier drones one day decide to snoop on vast swaths of ocean, with cameras even more powerful than the existing ones that can spy on 36 square miles in the blink of an eye and recording the equivalent of 80 years' worth of video in a single day. Nor when a piece of code starts collecting the computer usage history of a Defense Department employee suspected of being the next Bradley Manning. While everyone's worried about preventing the Rise of the Machines, the machines are getting a pass to spy on you, under their own power.

U.S. Buys Yemen a Fleet of Spy Planes For Growing Shadow War

It's not enough for Yemen's skies to fill up with armed U.S. drones. Now the Pentagon wants to buy its Yemeni ally small, piloted spy planes. It's a sign that the U.S. is upgrading the hardware it gives the Yemeni military, and digging in for a long shadow war.

That's the upshot of a recent U.S. military message to the aviation industry. The Navy asked earlier this month for 25 'Light Observation Aircraft' ' small, two-seater Cessna-style planes, good for short-range reconnaissance over, say, a patch of land that an  al-Qaida affiliate is trying to overrun. That's in addition to all of the American remotely-piloted aircraft that already fly over Yemen, which has become the hottest undeclared battlefield in the global U.S. drone campaign.

The planes have to be configured so the U.S. can teach Yemenis how to be their own eyes in the sky, and they need to be in Yemen in under 24 months. 'Austere environment landing/takeoff capable' is a must. The push for the aircraft is somewhat reminiscent of the Pentagon's 'Project Liberty' crash program to rush small, relatively cheap Beechcraft planes to the Iraq and Afghan warzones so troops could trick them out with advanced sensors and cameras. It remains to be seen if that's in the works for Yemeni pilots.

After a brief pause prompted by Arab Spring instability, U.S. defense assistance returned to Yemen this summer in a major way. But while the U.S. has been generous ' $112 million this year, or about as much as the U.S.' post-9/11 military assistance totaled by 2010 ' it's not bought Yemen many high-end systems. Small Raven drones, radioes night-vision goggles, rifles and ammo, ruggedized 'raiding' boats and other hallmarks of unconventional, commando-style tactics have been the norm. Manned spy planes are certainly good for unconventional wars, and they also represent something of an upgrade.

The U.S.' shadow war in Yemen is showing other traces of entrenchment and durability. In September, the Army put out a call for armored SUVs, the signature vehicle of the post-9/11 era for transporting security contractors and operatives who'd prefer not to be seen taking military transport. Starting in January, transiting diplomats once lodged in a Sanaa hotel run by the Kuwaiti government will now stay in a secured 'hotel-like' domicile constructed by the State Department, separate from the U.S. embassy and complete with '30 plus channel hotel cable system' and room for 'for up to 240 guests.' (Hmm.)

All this gives substance to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's warning last week that the U.S. should disabuse itself of any notion that the war against al-Qaida was wrapping up. (Never mind that such notions were once spread by Leon Panetta.) Panetta wants to wage those wars whenever possible through foreign governments like Yemen's, bolstering their capability to fight so that U.S. troop presences can be minimal. Now Yemeni pilots will be able to see just how long that war stretches over their horizon.

Army Sticks 'War on Islam' Teacher in Bureaucratic Depths

Once, Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley's superiors wrote that he was a 'must-select' for command and promotion to full colonel. Then Dooley taught a class to senior U.S. officers musing about a 'total war' on Islam, which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs shut down. Now, Dooley has his next assignment ' deep in the bowels of the Army bureaucracy, far from command.

Dooley's Army career has been in jeopardy after he received an administrative reprimand for his elective course at the Joint Forces Staff College, which discussed using 'Hiroshima'-style tactics against Islam's holiest cities as part of a 'total war.' But the Army didn't fire Dooley. It sent him to bureaucratic limbo instead.

On Nov. 1, Dooley was assigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia at the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC), Danger Room has confirmed, one of the warren of offices where the Army thinks about the future of land warfare. Specifically, Dooley works in the Lethality Branch of the Maneuver, Aviation & Soldier Division. Dooley doesn't actually use any experimental weaponry: He pushes paper on the development of ground robots, new sensors and other stuff to other Army offices. It took several ARCIC public-affairs officers three days to substantively describe what it is Dooley does.

Dooley's supporters feared the Army would stick him in precisely such a bureaucratic backwater. In October, Rep. Duncan Hunter and Rep. Thomas Rooney warned that the Army's reprimand endangered Dooley's 'reputation and his future in the service.'

In April, Dempsey's aides who oversee military education shut down Dooley's elective. The course taught senior officers that 'there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam'' and considered the 'historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, [and] Nagasaki' as applicable in such 'total war' against the religion Dempsey called Dooley's course 'totally objectionable.'

Dooley's response was to go after Dempsey. He hired a law firm that portrayed him as a free-speech martyr and threatened to sue the Chairman. (It hasn't.) It also published Dooley's earlier performance reviews, ones that called him a 'professional, innovative and enthusiastic officer.'

Dooley's lawyer, Richard Thompson, declined comment for this story. Now it's on Dooley to figure out if he can resurrect his Army career or let it die a bureaucratic death.

New Naval Era Dawns as China's Carrier Launches First Jet

Suicide Drones, Mini Blimps and 3D Printers: Inside the New Army Arsenal

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Flying grenades. Mini spy blimps. Robotic bomb-busters. Suicide-vest spotters. Battlefield 3D printers. The Army is retooling for a very austere, very remote way of war. And the gear that's required is very different from the hardware that came before.

Most American soldiers used to live and fight from massive bases, complete with all sorts of creature comforts and heavy defenses. Today's troops don't have it so good. They're increasingly operating from small, isolated outposts, where they need to spot and ward off attacks without all the gun turrets and heavy armor and surveillance towers found on the old super-bases.

Coming up with that new gear has become a top mission for the Rapid Equipping Force, the Army office charged with getting tools and gadgets out to troops in a hurry. They showed off their latest kit at Ft. Belvoir, Va. just before Thanksgiving. Here's a sample.

Battle Lab in a Box

At Camp Nathan Smith outside of Kandahar, there's a 20-foot cargo container loaded with a 3D printer, a computer-controlled machine for cutting metal, and a couple of Ph.D.s. It's one of three REF "expeditionary labs" placed around Afghanistan that can quickly design and prototype tools for troops on the ground right now.

The Nathan Smith team, on the screen above, printed up new bolt links for the M240 machine gun on their remote weapons system when the old ones broke. They coded a program that plots enemy attacks on Google Earth. And over the course of three weeks, they built in the lab new adapters that extended the battery life of their metal detectors from 45 minutes to 30 hours. The Army liked the adapters so much, they ordered up another 2,000, which will be distributed all over Afghanistan.

Photo: Lexey Swall / Wired

How Israeli Drone Pilots Made Their Life-and-Death Choices Over Gaza

The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas has settled into an uneasy ceasefire. But that won't stop Israel's drones from filling the skies over Gaza. In this 2009 story, written during the final days of the last Israel-Hamas  conflict, we took a look at how one drone pilot grappled with the moral choices that came with remotely spying, and ordering death, from above.

JERUSALEM ' The man was a few seconds from an all-but-certain death, when Gil told everyone to call off the airstrike.

This was Sunday. Gil, a captain in the Israeli Air Force, was sitting in a green-painted metal box on the Palmahim Air Base, south of Tel Aviv. In front of him was a joystick and a set of screens. They showed footage of a Gaza slum, taken by an unarmed Israeli spy drone with an infrared sensor. Gil had the sensor display a dark shade for heat. Which gave the images on Gil's screen an inverted feel; white was black, and black was white.

The man, Gil's superior officers told him, was a known Hamas terrorist. The neighborhood, a militant haven. So when the black blotch of a man stepped out into the alley, and began to fiddle with dark strings that looked suspiciously like wires, Gil's Colonel gave the order to a second aircraft, flying nearby: Take this man out. He's setting up a booby trap for our soldiers.

The double-tailed, 40 foot-long Heron spy drone banked over the Gaza rooftops, and zoomed in on the man, to get a better look at the now-designated target. The man was tying the wire at about eye-level, from one home to another. It was an odd location for a booby trap. But a perfect place to hang clothes. Gil, his voice rising, told everyone to stop. 'Don't attack! Don't attack!' he yelled. 'The man, he's doing laundry.'

Looking back, Gil is pretty sure he made the right decision. But he can't be certain. 'I prefer this kind of mistake,' he says in a voice, soft as tissue, 'than to have the innocent on my conscience.'

Israel's war against Hamas was launched, in large part, to send a message to its adversaries: Be afraid. Any attacks on the Jewish state will be met with overwhelming, even brutal, force. Traditionally off-limits sites, like Mosques and hospitals, won't serve as hiding places. Enemy leaders will be hunted down and killed ' even if they're surrounded by their children and wives.

Israeli leaders believe they've accomplished that task. 'The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time,' a senior Foreign Ministry official tells Danger Room, approvingly. 'Now, it's the responsibility of the Arab leadership to keep the animal in the cage, by not provoking it.'

At the same time, these leaders insist that each one of the strikes in this massive, even-reckless-seeming retaliation against Hamas was taken with the utmost care; thousands of pinpoint attacks, in response to the thousands of Hamas rockets that indiscriminately rained down on Israel.

Balancing these seemingly-contradictory desires ' sending a frightful message, while keeping bystanders out of the cross-fire ' is often left to young men like Gil, a mission commander with Israel's 200th Squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles. His Heron spy drone doesn't have any weapons. But the view from it is often the decisive evidence, for a fighter jet or an armed helicopter to go through with an air strike, or not. 'If I say this man is armed, they'll bomb. If I say stop the attacks, they stop,' Gil says.

That's different from the American system, where decisions are often made by the commander on the ground, or by a network of legal and intelligence analysts. It means means 'a lot of moral dilemmas' for the pale father of two. 'You see a Qassam [rocket] launcher with children around it. Now, what do you prefer: Let them fire the rocket, and have it fall on a kid in [the Israeli town of] Sderot? Or drop the bomb, and risk Palestinian children?' he asks.

Gil has a smooth face and red-brown hair that's just showing the first wisps of gray. He wears a green flight suit. A pair of tinted shades sit on top of a custom-made yellow and white yamulke, bearing the insignia of his spy drone unit. (The Israeli military asked that I only use his first name, and photograph him from the back, in exchange for this rare visit to the secretive unit.) A collection of a half-dozen coffee cups sits on his desk. He apologies for the mess, for the half-eaten food in the break room, for the stink coming from the toilet. It's been a long month. Gil's squadron has been flying since 1971 ' but this war was the most taxing yet. During the conflict's peak, the Israelis had six to ten of the 200th's surviellance drones flying over Gaza at all times.

The Heron UAVs, flying on a Rotax 914 turbo-charged engine, have been modified to stay in the sky for more than 40 hours at a clip. Model airplane enthusiasts are recruited to handle the drone's takeoffs and landings. Then the UAV flies on its own, guided by from place to place by a series of waypoints. That clears a pair of troops to handle the Heron's sensors ' and make the hard choices.

Finally, on Tuesday, the 200th was able to relax, just a bit. The reservists were sent home. And the rest of the team sat on a pool table and a pleather couch, and talked about the awful decisions they had to make. The arguments with the ground troops under fire, yelling, 'C'mon!
Bomb bomb bomb!' The sedan filled with Hamas chieftains, weaving in and out of traffic. The jihadists who walk around unarmed, because they know the drones at watching. The militants that were let go. The innocents that weren't.

'When you see a target, all you want to do is attack,' Gil says. 'But it's not that simple.'

ALSO:

• Israel Launches Phosphorus Weapons Probe Amid Cries of 'War Crimes'
• U.N. Presses White Phosphorus Allegation in Gaza
• Israeli Shells Strike U.N. Compound in Gaza
• Israel Accused of 'War Crimes' for Phosphorus Shells
• Israeli 'Cluster Bombing' In Gaza? Unlikely
• Israel Preps for 'War Crimes' Lawsuits, with Cameras
• Independent Journos Supply Live Feed from Gaza
• Gaza Fight Delays U.S. Ammo Shipment to Israel
• Israelis Use Combat Cameramen to Justify Strikes on Schools, Mosques
• 'A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery'
• Gaza War's New Front: Facebook
• Wage Cyberwar against Hamas, Surrender Your PC
• U.S. Looking for Ammo Ships for Israel?
• Israeli Army Now Less Careful about Civilian Deaths?
• Gaza Ground Campaign Mirrors Battle of Sadr City?
• Israeli Chemical 'Atrocities' in Gaza? Not So Fast
• Fallout from Gaza Assault Reaches Afghanistan
• New Gaza War Reports Combine Tweets, Maps, SMS
• Israelis Take Over Hamas' TV Station
• Gaza Ground War Begins
• Bad Katyusha Poetry
• Israel Calls Gazans Before Bombing
• Has Israel Learned From the Hezbollah War?
• YouTube, Twitter: Weapons in Israel's Info War
• Israeli Jets Drop 'Small Smart Bomb' in Gaza Strikes
• Israel Targets 'Terror Tunnels' (and Viagra Highway)
• Paper: Gaza Campaign Planned Months in Advance
• Israel's Anti-Rocket Defenses Still Taking Shape
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• Israel Unleashes Retaliatory Air Armada

Army Wants to Stop Bombs Using Halo-Style Electric Pulses

Electromagnetic pulse grenades are a favorite of sci-fi storytellers and videogame designers, a la Halo and Call of Duty. The Army evidently doesn't want to be left out: It's seeking a real-life version that can blast electromagnetic signals and fry insurgent bombs.

To be specific, the Army wants 'High Power Microwave (HPM) grenades' to 'generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used to defeat the electronics used to activate [homemade bombs] or that could be used to attack blasting caps,' according to its latest round of research contracts with small businesses. In theory, the electrical components on improvised explosive devices, like radio transmitters, could be overwhelmed by surging electromagnetic radiation emitted by such a weapon.

If the Army can actually develop this kind of Halo weapon, it'll take a step toward making each of its soldiers a kind of one-man bomb squad.

While the improvised bomb is the primary weapon used against U.S. troops fighting overseas, not every soldier or marine can destroy a bomb like he or she can shoot an insurgent. To defuse bombs, troops rely on explosive ordnance demolition specialists, bomb-disposing robots and vehicle-mounted jammers. The Pentagon has also desperately struggled to stay a step ahead of the bombs' technical adaptations. But if the Army has working EMP grenades, any soldier could conceivably lob one into a room, around a corner or into a ditch to fry an awaiting booby-trap's circuits. As the Army puts it, it could mean 'defeating IEDs by the individual soldier, while minimizing the collateral damage to humans.' Easier said than done.

For instance: An EMP grenade has to be small and lightweight enough to carry. The Army is requiring companies participating in the project to design their prototypes to fit the size of 'hand or robot delivered munitions, 40 mm grenades, Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), and Stinger, Hydra, and Javelin missiles.' The next step is figuring out a working design itself.

The first thing to know is that an EMP grenade could be either explosive or non-explosive, with trade-offs for each. According to the 2011 textbook Explosive Pulse Power by Army engineer Larry Altgilbers, who is overseeing the project, a non-explosive device could use 'pulse compression,' or blasting brief but fierce electrical pulses while compressing the electrical current and voltage, thereby making the pulses stronger. As the device continues to blast out signals, the pulses then gradually decrease in duration. For a bomb circuit without protection diodes, such a burst of energy could theoretically fry its circuits or cause it to detonate.

Unfortunately, non-explosive systems 'tend to be massive, large in size and fairly expensive,' Altglibers wrote. But explosive systems are smaller, lighter and can generate a lot more electrical power. The Army solicitation refers to potentially using 'energy stored in ferromagnetic, ferroelectric or superconducting materials.' Possibly, these various magnets and superconductors could trap an electrical field inside a grenade, and when exploding, the grenade could compress the field. That would cause rapid changes in the field's structure, boosting its power and thus generating ' and releasing ' tremendous amounts of electromagnetic energy.

A downside to that, though, is superconducting materials have to stay cool. It's also likely to be a one-shot weapon as explosive pulse devices 'generally destroy themselves and, quite usually, the load they are driving,' according to Altgilbers. But if it's a grenade, then that might be no loss.

Less certain is how such a device would be used neuter a bomb detonated with minimal electrical parts, like the Taliban bombs that detonate when someone compresses a wooden pressure plate; whether it would inadvertently fry U.S. troops' own electronic circuits; or how difficult (or expensive) it'll be to develop an EMP grenade. One Israeli company has developed a much more conventional IED-jamming 'grenade,' but it uses tiny antennas to scram bomb signals instead of exploding out EMP waves. Perhaps if all else fails, the Army could consider it. If not, it might play another round of Halo in order to brainstorm.

Leon Panetta Has a Few More Drone Wars Ready to Go

There once was a time, just last year, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta thought the U.S. was thisclose to wiping al-Qaida off the face of the earth, once and for all. That appears to have gone up in the flames of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Now, a more dour Panetta believes that it's not enough to continue the drone strikes and commando raids in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; they've got to expand 'outside declared combat zones' to places like Nigeria, Mali and even Libya.

That was Panetta's message at Tuesday evening address to the Center for American Security, an influential Washington defense think tank. Panetta, a former director of the CIA, gave a strong defense of counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids, calling them 'the most precise campaign in the history of warfare,' and indicated strongly that they're only going to intensify in the coming years.

'This campaign against al Qaeda will largely take place outside declared combat zones,' Panetta said in his prepared remarks, 'using a small-footprint approach that includes precision operations, partnered activities with foreign Special Operations Forces, and capacity building so that partner countries can be more effective in combating terrorism on their own.' He referenced 'expanding our fleet of Predator and Reaper' drones and beefing up Special Operations Forces by another 8,000 commandos in the next five years. Even if combat is ending for most conventional units, those forces ' already frequently deployed ' aren't in for any respite.

For the past four years, drone strikes have battered tribal Pakistan and expanded into Yemen and Somalia. Without referring to the classified program specifically, Panetta credited them with killing al-Qaida's 'most effective leaders.' But notably, Panetta isn't talking anymore about killing another '10 to 20 key leaders' and declaring victory in the war on terror, as he did in 2011. The 'cancer' of the terrorist network has 'metastasized to other parts of the global body.' Talk of the Arab Spring demolishing al-Qaida's 'narrative' has given way to fears that al-Qaida is taking advantage of the fall of regional dictators 'to gain new sanctuary, incite violence, and sow instability.'

So Panetta is back to describing a sprawling global campaign 'in areas beyond the reach of effective security and governance.' The likely next targets are the Boko Haram Islamic militants in Nigeria; the extremists who appear in control of much of northern Mali; and, he said, 'we are concerned about Libya,' as the September Benghazi attack crystallized that the country the U.S. thought it liberated from Muammar Gadhafi last year may now be a tinderbox for 'violent extremists and affiliates of al-Qaida,' to whom Panetta attributed the Benghazi attacks.

Panetta is still seeking 'at least the 'beginning of the end'' of al-Qaida ' though that itself is a downgrade of the optimism he expressed last year after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. But there the desired future borrows heavily from the tactics of the present. Panetta wants to effectively wrap up the U.S.' major involvement in Afghanistan by 2014, while retaining a residual force to stop al-Qaida from coming back. He wants to keep the drone-and-commando operations going in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; and then he wants to expand the targeting to the newer, expanding al-Qaida offshoots in northern Africa, working through regional security forces when possible. In Mali, for instance, he talked about using 'partners in Western Africa,' rather than direct U.S. military action.

But often, those partners are supplement to U.S. strikes, not a replacement for them. Yemeni security forces, for instance, are under U.S. patronage, but drone strikes still hit the country. What begins as U.S. assistance to foreign militaries can draw the U.S. deeper into its own operations, as Panetta effectively conceded.

If all that makes the future of counterterrorism seem a lot like the present, Panetta didn't envision any strategy to cut off al-Qaida's appeal once and for all. (Nor, for that matter, did he discuss the civilian toll his 'precise' campaign has taken.) That's vexed the U.S. for the past 11 years, to the point where it sponsors goodwill rap tours by American Muslim performers for want of better ideas. 'We are still struggling to develop an effective approach to address the factors that attract young men and women to extremist ideologies,' Panetta conceded. Or, to borrow a phrase: Osama bin Laden is dead, but al-Qaida is very much alive.

Pentagon Wants to Keep Running Its Afghan Drug War From Blackwater's HQ

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is supposed to be winding down. Its contractor-led drug war? Not so much.

Inside a compound in Kabul called Camp Integrity, the Pentagon stations a small group of officers to oversee the U.S. military's various operations to curb the spread of Afghanistan's cash crops of heroin and marijuana, which help line the Taliban's pockets. Only Camp Integrity isn't a U.S. military base at all. It's the 10-acre Afghanistan headquarters of the private security company formerly known as Blackwater.

Those officers work for an obscure Pentagon agency called the Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office, or CNTPO. Quietly, it's grown into one of the biggest dispensers of cash for private security contractors in the entire U.S. government: One pile of contracts last year from CNTPO was worth more than $3 billion. And it sees a future for itself in Afghanistan over the long haul.

Earlier this month, a U.S. government solicitation sought to hire a security firm to help CNTPO 'maintain a basic, operational support cell' in Kabul. Army Lt. Col. James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman, explains that 'cell' doesn't kick in the doors of any Afghan narco-kingpins. It handles the more mundane tasks of overseeing the contracts of the Pentagon's counter-narcotics programs, from 'training and linguists, and [providing] supplies, such as vehicles and equipment.' The solicitation, however, indicates those services aren't going anywhere: When all the options are exercised, the contract extends through September 29, 2015, over a year past the date when Afghan soldiers and cops are supposed to take over the war. And the 'government preferred location' to base CNTPO? Camp Integrity.

The envisioned Pentagon counter-narco-terrorism staff is pretty small: only two to four personnel. But protecting them at Camp Integrity is serious business. The November 6 solicitation calls for a security firm that can 'provide a secure armory and weapons maintenance service, including the ability to check-in and check-out weapons and ammunition,' particularly 9 mm pistols and M4 rifles; and to provide 'secure armored' transportation to the CNTPO team ' primarily 'in and around Kabul, but could include some remote locations.'

CNTPO has a longstanding relationship with Blackwater, the infamous security firm that is now known as Academi. In 2009, it gave Blackwater a contract to train Afghan police, and company employees used that contract to requisition guns from the U.S. military for their private use. Although that contract was ultimately taken out of CNTPO's hands, the office's relationship with Academi/Blackwater endures. Last year, Academi told Danger Room it has a contract with CNTPO, worth an undisclosed amount, to provide 'all-source intelligence analyst support and material procurement' for Afghanistan. An Academi spokeswoman, Kelley Gannon, declined to comment on Academi's relationship with CNTPO, or whether it'll bid on the new contract.

But its deal with Academi is just a small slice of CNTPO's efforts. It's got a sprawling mandate to fight drugs and terrorism. Last year, CNTPO offered security firms at least $3 billion, excluding the re-up options, for tasks as diverse as training Azerbaijani commandos and 'airlift services in the trans-Sahara region of Africa.' Some of its tasks appear to have little connections to either counterterrorism or counternarcotics, like 'media analysis and web-site development consultation to officials of the Government of Pakistan.'

All that points to an enduring role for the military going after drugs and drug money in Afghanistan. It's certainly an enduring problem: On Tuesday, the United Nations found that Afghan poppy cultivation rose nearly 20 percent over the past two years, especially in the southwestern Helmand province. Just last week, the U.S. military took the unusual step of classifying Mullah Naim Barich, the top Taliban operative in Helmand, as a 'significant foreign narcotics trafficker or kingpin,'' allowing the U.S. to target companies that do business with him.

But the U.S. mission in Afghanistan isn't supposed to be about going after drugs anymore. It wasn't one of the residual missions that Gen. Joseph Dunford, President Obama's nominee to run the Afghanistan war, described to the Senate last week. But since the Pentagon gives its counter-drug/counter-terrorism operations such a broad mission, a residual force in Afghanistan might find itself going after Barich and his illicit colleagues for years to come, all supported from Academi's Kabul compound.

Afghans Demand U.S. Hand Over Its Major Battlefield Prison

The U.S. military has promised to hand over control of its largest battlefield jail to the Afghan government ' eventually. The Afghan government has decided it's waited long enough.

For years, the U.S. has said it plans to give the Afghans control of the mega-jail it constructed on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field to house the suspected insurgents it captures. In March, after numerous delays, the military and the Afghan government inked a deal to relinquish control of the so-called Detention Facility in Parwan within six months. Eight months later, it hasn't happened, displeasing President Hamid Karzai.

Karzai has ordered his aides to implement the 'full Afghanization' of the detention center, blasting the U.S. for continuing to detain Afghans whom Afghan courts have ordered released. 'These acts are completely against the agreement that has been signed between Afghanistan and the U.S. president,' reads a statement from Karzai's office, which goes on to urge 'all required actions for full Afghanization of Bagram prison affairs and its complete transfer of authority to Afghans.'

The Pentagon says that remains the plan, but the hangup is on the Afghan side. 'In late August, after the majority of detainees had been transferred [to Afghan control], we paused transfers while we worked with the Afghans to clarify their plans for how detainees will be held in the future,' says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman. But it appears that whenever the U.S. will actually finish handing over the prison, 'we are restarting the transfer of detainees whom we have mutually assessed should be prosecuted by the Afghans.' A few dozen Afghan detainees remain at Parwan.

The Detention Facility at Parwan has been a star-crossed project during its four-year existence. In February, the military inadvertently burned Korans taken from the detention center, which sparked deadly riots across Afghanistan. This spring, a Pentagon inspector general report found construction at Parwan to be so shoddy that the door locks at the $60 million prison were 'incapable of locking either manually or electronically.' All this occurred at a detention center constructed entirely to remove the stigma of torture that had earlier taken place at the old Bagram jail ' except that human rights groups still suspect torture has occurred at the newer Parwan prison.

The U.S. still places some of the detainees it captures in Afghanistan at Parwan. That was always the plan ' except, under the March accord, the Afghans were supposed to be the stewards of those detainees by now. A September New York Times story suggested that the reason the U.S. paused the Parwan transfer was due to uneasiness over Afghan courts rapidly letting the detainees out of detention. (There are some non-Afghan detainees at Parwan, but they don't seem to be at the core of Karzai's objections.) Meanwhile, the U.S. has let out contracts to expand the very prison it says it seeks to hand over.

It's unclear what Karzai can do to actually take over the detention center. But the U.S. has just entered into talks for a post-2014 military presence in Afghanistan, which gives the Afghan president a fair amount of leverage.

Silent but Deadly: Special Forces Seek Quiet, Subsonic Bullets

Most bullets make small sonic booms when flying through the air, which to our ears sound like a loud, distinct 'crack!' For the Pentagon's special forces, that makes it hard to be sneaky about what they're shooting. Now the commandos want to be sneakier with slower, quieter bullets.

In its latest round of small-business solicitations, the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, is seeking out subsonic ammunition. The reason, according to the solicitation, is to 'provide superior covert and stealth capabilities' for not only the military, but police forces and the Department of Homeland Security. In theory, and for rifles in the 5.56, 7.62 and .338 calibers, the bullets will travel at low enough velocities to avoid breaking the sound barrier, thus creating no 'crack' noise. Breaking the sound barrier also pretty much negates the use of a sound suppressor, or 'silencer,' which the special forces would likely want to use against militants in Afghanistan and around the world.

At present, the Defense Department does not have subsonic bullets 'classified for use in the calibers provided by any DoD service.' That doesn't mean special operations forces never use them. Commandos have used subsonic bullets since World War II, though these are mainly effective in smaller guns like the .22 and 9 mm caliber pistols. Subsonic bullets and fairly large-caliber war rifles, on the other hand, don't mix very well.

For one, to keep a bullet from breaking the sound barrier ' 1,100 feet per second at sea level ' requires several trade-offs at higher calibers. According to the solicitation, subsonic bullets 'experience significant accuracy problems due to excessive deviations in velocity.' The gunpowder (or propellant charge) for a subsonic bullet has to be used in smaller quantities than for a normal bullet, and the bullet itself has to be heavier. This results in bullet that is far and away less accurate, doesn't go nearly as far, and 'creates lower pressures which ' makes it hard to get a clean burn of the propellant causing rapid fouling of the weapon.'

In technical jargon, the failure of a clean 'burn' and the resulting lowered accuracy and range is called a failure of 'obturation.' Normally, a bullet expands ' or obturates ' to the size of its barrel after being fired, keeping the bullet on target and preventing the gases that propel it from rushing past and melting to the inside of the gun. The melted leading can be a pain in the ass to remove, and can permanently damage the weapon unless it's cleaned. Likewise, a bullet can't be too light or too heavy, because too much in either direction can prevent the bullet from obturating. Using subsonic bullets also causes a greater risk of jamming, which in a firefight could mean the difference between life and death.

Instead, the Pentagon has one idea about how to build a better subsonic bullet. One solution could be using 'polymer cased ammunition' as opposed to brass or steel. The Pentagon is somewhat vague about how this will work, but the idea is that polymer-cased bullets 'produce a reliable and consistent powder burn.' More specifically, polymer obturates at lower pressures, which means it may be possible to shoot a heavy bullet with less propellant while theoretically not trading for accuracy and range. Maybe.

To do it, the Defense Department might want to go back to the future. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Army spent $300 million on a canceled project called Advanced Combat Rifle to replace the standard M16 rifle. One proposed replacement, the Steyr ACR, used polymer cartridges, but supposedly suffered from inaccuracy due to the strength of the cartridges being inconsistent, though this could be conceivably solved by testing cartridges until they fire consistently. Perhaps SOCOM could do it better.

Marines' First Frontline Stealth Fighter Lacks Vital Gear

The U.S. Marine Corps has received its first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that, in theory, is meant for actual combat. But that doesn't mean the pricey, long-delayed JSF is going to be dropping bombs on enemy targets anytime soon. The Lockheed Martin-built plane's computerized logistical system, flight software and special helmet still aren't ready ' and it lacks weapons.

No, the Marines have taken possession of the combat-designated, but not combat-ready, F-35 in order to begin building up its stealth-fighter fleet. Not yet, anyway. The advance preparation should ensure that the Corps can send the new JSF squadrons into combat the moment the jet is finally fully equipped ' whenever that might be.

'The Marines are determined to get this plane into the field as soon as it can be safely accomplished,' Loren Thompson, a Lockheed consultant, told Reuters. 'They don't want to be slowed down by bureaucratic obstacles.' Instead, it's the technical obstacles that are dictating the timing of the F-35's combat readiness. No one is sure precisely when the jet will get the critical missing items, but it could be years.

Of all the military branches acquiring F-35s through history's most expensive weapons procurement effort, the Marines need the stealthy jet the most.  The Corps' existing Hornet and Harrier fighters are old and too few in number, especially after a Taliban attack on an air base in Afghanistan in September destroyed 1/15th of the Harrier fleet. 'We have equipment that has got to be recapitalized,' Marine commandant Gen. James Amos said last year.

What's more, the amphibious branch is already working with the Navy to build two multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers specifically intended to carry F-35s. The Corps has more JSF pilots in training than it has frontline jets for them to fly.

BF-19, the 19th copy of the vertical-landing JSF variant to roll out of Lockheed's Texas factory, arrived at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona on Friday afternoon with Maj A. C. Liberman behind the stick. There the F-35B joined Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121, a former Hornet unit that gave up its older jets in September. 'This aircraft will be used to conduct a full spectrum of aviation operations in support of combat missions and maritime readiness worldwide,' the Pentagon boasted about its new frontline JSF.

Sure, eventually. And only after a more testing, more design changes and potentially millions of dollars in modifications each to this jet and others like it. The Marines anticipate VMFA-121 being war-ready with 16 fully-equipped F-35s no earlier than 2015, a slip of one year compared to the 2011 plan. In the meantime, the squadron will oversee some pilot and ground-crew training, complementing the main instructional effort in Florida and testing in California.

BF-19 is part of the Pentagon's Low-Rate Initial Production of the stealthy JSF, meaning it was expensive ' no less than $200 million ' and assembled while Lockheed and the military were still working out the plane's precise configuration. In April the Defense Department paid Lockheed $65 million to fix identified problems on dozens of F-35s it had already manufactured, presumably including BF-19.

JSF flight testing began in 2006 but is only 25 percent complete. As such, the list of things the F-35 still doesn't have is a long one.

A working helmet, for one. JSF pilots are meant to wear an advanced new visor, built by Vision Systems International, that displays streaming video from the plane's nose-mounted sensors, in effect allowing a pilot to peer through the cockpit floor ' as though the jet itself were invisible to the occupant. But the video lags, especially at night, forcing the Pentagon to commission a less sophisticated back-up helmet from BAE Systems.

The military still wants the original headgear and has dedicated one of the F-35 test models to flying only helmet trials. 'We're making great progress,' Tom Burbage, a Lockheed veep, said of the helmet last month. But he didn't say when this critical gear might be ready for war.

The latest F-35Bs, including Yuma's copy, are also flying with a temporary software suite known as Block 1B. The Marines have said the jet won't be capable of flying and fighting in real combat until it has the Block 2B software that is only now entering testing. With 24 million lines of code ' nine million more than originally envisioned ' there's no telling how long testing could take. Air Force Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the JSF program head, warned that software is the riskiest facet of F-35 development and the most likely to cause delays.

Bogdan's warning also applies to the software for the F-35's logistical support system. In a radical departure from previous warplanes, the JSF is supposed to come plugged into a fully computerized supply system that tracks every F-35 in the world, ensures spare parts go where they're needed and logs all the pilots' mission plans. But the so-called 'Autonomic Logistics Information System' is behind schedule and, as the Navy discovered when it hacked the system, vulnerable to cyber-attacks. 'If it doesn't work, this airplane doesn't work,' Bogdan said of ALIS.

Lastly, weapons. The JSF test team only recently dropped an inert satellite-guided bomb and jettisoned, not fired, a dummy air-t0-air missiles from the F-35's fast-opening internal weapons bays. There were no targets. 'The targeting aspect will come further down the road,' said Victor Chen, a JSF program spokesperson. Chen did not specify when that might occur, although it's fair to say the Marines hope it's soon.

JSF pilots are in training. Their carriers are being built. The frontline squadrons are standing up. All the Corps needs now is the planes themselves, fully tested, fully equipped and ready for combat.

Kabul Movie Houses Take a Break From Insurgents and Chaos

A symptom of the war in Afghanistan is that the images traveling west from the country are often bleak. That has an unintentional distancing effect for audiences, says photographer Jonathan Saruk. He worries that after seeing so many pictures of Afghan drug addicts, jihadists and amputees that people in the United States might be unable to relate to Afghans as people any more.

In 2008 Saruk was embedded with U.S. forces but left to find stories that other journalists were not covering ' that gave a more complete picture of life in Kabul. He photographed a game show, a driving school and also the city's recently resurrected movie theaters.

'I wanted to try and find things that helped bring people a little bit closer to the Afghans and help people to see them in a different light,' he says. 'I wanted people to know that they're not all sitting out in the mountains trying to kill U.S. troops.'

The Taliban outlawed movie theaters in Kabul (along with museums and zoos) from the late '90s until the group was overthrown in the American-led invasion of 2001. During the ban, many of the buildings had been destroyed along with the film projectors and film archives. Since the American occupation, however, movies have come back and become a gathering spot for young Afghan men (women do not attend, children only rarely).

This resurgence allowed Saruk to capture the perspective he was looking for and potentially pry open a view of the country at large. His intimate photos show crowded theaters with men laughing and buying concessions'movie goers jumping onto the theater stages and dancing along with the Bollywood dancers in the films.

According to Sam French, an American director who has worked extensively in Afghanistan, most of the films screened at the two main movies houses in Kabul are from Pakistan and India. Occasionally he says they show an American movie like Titanic or Rambo III.

French helps run the Afghan Film Project, a non-profit that pairs young Afghan film makers with a host of international film professionals. A recent such collaboration, aided by Afghan-Canadian filmmaker Ariel Nasr, yielded the acclaimed film Buzkashi Boys which is being considered for an Academy Award nomination.

It's all part of a growing Afghan film industry lead by directors such as Siddiq Barmak, Barmak Akram and Atiq Rahimi. Kabul University has even started offering film classes.

Saruk says the lack of women and children at the theaters is a reminder of the conservative traditions that still govern the country. Nonetheless, he was glad to bring viewers into a country that is often only identified with turmoil and violence.

'Afghanistan is certainly a difficult place, but there are positive things happening there,' he says. 'I think it's been hard for people sitting at home to relate to Afghans so I hope my work shows that they are human too.'

All Photos: Jonathan Saruk/Reportage by Getty Images

YouTube Refuses to Yank Israeli Kill Video as Hamas Attacks Jerusalem

YouTube is rejecting calls to take down a video showing the assassination of Hamas' military leader, despite the video-sharing service's apparent ban on 'graphic or gratuitous violence.'

Israel launched its 'Operation Pillars of Defense' on Wednesday by blowing up Ahmed al-Jabari as he was driving his car down the street in Gaza. Hours later, aerial footage of the kill shot was posted to YouTube ' and instantly went viral, racking up nearly two million views.

The video not only kicked of a fierce battle of opinion on social media that's roughly paralleling the rockets-and-airstrikes conflict. It also appeared to violate YouTube's community guidelines, which tells users: 'if your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it.'

But a YouTube employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the guidelines are just that ' guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. Users can flag a video as potentially objectionable, but the decision to take a clip down ultimately rests with YouTube's global team of reviewers. The calculations get complicated, especially for warzone footage.

'We look at videos on a case-by-case videos when they're flagged,' the employee tells Danger Room. 'And we look at the context, the intent with which something is posted.'

A snuff film, posted just for the sick thrill of it, won't last long. But a similarly graphic clip, posted in 'documentary fashion' or for political effect, 'will be judged differently,' the employee adds.

Hamas and its military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, are trying to provoke sympathy and outrage over the caught-on-video slaying of Jabari, and over the civilian deaths that have come from Israel's air attacks on Gaza. But any good will may have just evaporated. Hamas ' which claims to be an Islamic movement ' is now firing rockets at Jerusalem, Islam's third-holiest city, and bragging about it on Twitter. (Remember, these are unguided projectiles that could land on a school or a mosque as easily a military checkpoint.) That's in addition to shooting off hundreds of missiles and rockets at the civilian centers like Ashdod, Tel Aviv, and Beersheba. In the last year, more than 700 rockets, mortars, and missiles have been launched from Gaza.

The Israeli missile defense system known as Iron Dome has been remarkably capable, stopping 184 rockets in recent days, the AFP reports. But it has not been perfect. Three Israeli civilians were slain on Thursday in the southern town of Kiryat Malakhi.

This is the second time in recent months that YouTube's guidelines have become an international political issue. Back in September, the White House asked Google, YouTube's corporate parent, to double-check if the incendiary anti-Islam video 'The Innocence of Muslims' violated YouTube's guidelines. The video-sharing service declined to do so ' although YouTube did block it in several Muslim countries. President Obama later spoke up in favor of the free flow of information. (Separately, a California judge rebuffed an 'Innocence' actress' request to pull the video on copyright grounds.)

YouTube has become one of the primary windows into the world's far-flung conflicts ' especially ones like the Syrian civil war, which has only a handful of outside journalists reporting from the battlefields. But the video-sharers deny that they're setting any kind of precedent by leaving the disturbers video of Jabari's death on YouTube. That's just not how YouTube works, apparently. 'This is not about who you are but what you post,' the employee says. 'Everything's done a-fresh.'