Libyan Officials Threaten to Use ‘Human Shields’

 

The warning came a day after Britain’s top general was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.

That turning toward the West came after the Libyan leader saw how quickly the American-led invasion force toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003. But now, with the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries backing Libya’s rebels and demanding that Colonel Qaddafi quit, officials say the leader feels that his turn to the West has been rewarded by Western betrayal.

The threat to use human shields comes after a week of some of the heaviest airstrikes of the campaign. One attack was aimed at an underground command complex in Colonel Qaddafi’s compound in south-central Tripoli, with a volley of bombs aimed at the warren of tunnels and bunkers. Colonel Qaddafi surfaced a day later with an audio message broadcast on Libyan state television defying NATO and saying that he was “in a place where you can’t get me.”

Shortly before dusk on Monday, a new round of airstrikes hit the compound, but Libyan officials, often keen to take reporters to bombing sites, gave no details of what had been struck, or of any casualties.

Along with public statements of outrage about the airstrikes, there have been growing signs that they are wearing down the government’s ability to fight the war. With no air defenses, it has resorted to a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing that NATO has killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed or damaged civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, libraries, homes and guesthouses.

The campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties. That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.

 

Global Update: Syria: Fighting the Fungi That Threaten Wheat

Fungi that attack wheat are growing as a threat to the hungry inhabitants of poor countries. At a conference this week in Aleppo, Syria, scientists will be planning a counteroffensive.

The unusual venue was chosen both because Syria has been hit hard by “yellow rust” fungus and because Aleppo is home to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. The center was built in 1977 because the area has the right climate for research and because Aleppo is in the heart of the so-called Fertile Crescent, where agriculture began 10,000 years ago.

The fungi have damaged wheat grown in a broad ribbon of dry climate from Morocco to northern India, where as much as 60 percent of the crop has been lost, said Mahmoud Solh, the center’s director. The prevailing theory is that wetter winters caused by climate change are helping the fungi persist until new crops are planted.

Rich countries can afford fungicides and new resistant varieties of wheat; poor ones cannot. Food prices are being driven up by other factors, including summer fires and farmers growing crops for ethanol instead of food.

Before his death in 2009, Norman E. Borlaug, the plant biologist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize partly for his role in creating more vigorous varieties of wheat, called one particular fungus — known as Ug99 for its 1999 discovery in Uganda — “a looming catastrophe,” even more dangerous than the strain that destroyed 20 percent of American wheat in the 1950s. Since then, Ug99 has been joined by other fungal strains, like stem rust, above.

 

Could New High-Speed Wireless Internet Threaten GPS?

A new, ultra-fast wireless Internet network is threatening to overpower GPS signals across the U.S. and interfere with everything from airplanes to police cars to consumer navigation devices.

The problem stems from a recent government decision to let a Virginia company called LightSquared build a nationwide broadband network using airwaves next to those used for GPS. Manufacturers of GPS equipment warn that strong signals from the planned network could jam existing navigation systems.

A technical fix could be expensive — billions of dollars by one estimate — and there's no agreement on who should pay. Government officials pledge to block LightSquared from turning on its network as scheduled this year unless they receive assurances that GPS systems will still work.

The stakes are high not only for the GPS industry and its users, but also for those who would use LightSquared's network. In approving it, the Federal Communications Commission seeks to boost wireless competition and bring faster and cheaper Internet connections to all Americans — even in remote corners of the country.

LightSquared and the FCC both insist the new network can co-exist with GPS systems. But device makers fear GPS signals will suffer the way a radio station can get drowned out by a stronger broadcast in a nearby channel.

The problem, they say, is that sensitive satellite receivers — designed to pick up relatively weak signals coming from space — could be overwhelmed when LightSquared starts sending high-power signals from as many as 40,000 transmitters on the ground using the airwaves next door.

"The potential impact of GPS interference is so vast, it's hard to get your head around," said Jim Kirkland, vice president and general counsel of Trimble Navigation Ltd., which makes GPS systems. "Think 40,000 GPS dead spots covering millions of square miles in cities and towns throughout the U.S."

One of the biggest risks is to the GPS navigation systems used by about 40 percent of commercial and private planes. Backup systems that rely on ground-based radio signals are not as accurate and have coverage gaps. Some older private planes have no backup at all.

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