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A lawyer for the former Blackwater president who has been charged with gun crimes hinted at his client’s defense Wednesday, telling a North Carolina court room that a US government agency approved of what the company was doing.

Ken Bell — attorney for Gary Jackson, who was arrested last week along with four other Blackwater staffers — told the court that “all of this was with the knowledge of, the request of, for the convenience of, an agency of the US government,” reports the News & Observer in North Carolina.

While Bell would not say which US government agency that may have been, the News & Observer article suggests that he was talking about the CIA.

“The company has close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. The company has provided security to CIA stations and officers in Afghanistan and other countries, and several Blackwater officials were once high ranking CIA officials,” the article states.

Federal prosecutors indicted Jackson, who was president of Blackwater until last year, last week in a case that stemmed from a raid on Blackwater’s North Carolina headquarters in 2008, which turned up 22 automatic weapons, including 17 Russian-made AK-47s.

“The 22-page indictment includes accusations of falsifying paperwork to give a firearms gift to the king of Jordan and using the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, which had less than a dozen uniformed officers at the time, as a front to buy AK-47s for Blackwater’s training facility in Moyock,” the News & Observer reports.

Prosecutors told the court in Wednesday’s bail bond hearing that, as president, Jackson ran Blackwater with “sheer arrogance” and a “scofflaw attitude,” the Associated Press reports.

The News & Observer states that, if the agency involved is indeed the CIA, it may complicate the trial because of the presence of classified information.

Lawyers and court personnel need security clearances, and special evidence rooms are required. Special computers are needed to draft motions, according to Richard Myers, a UNC law professor who has worked with classified materials both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney.

“It certainly makes your prosecution more complex,” Myers said.

Defendants often try to introduce classified material in an effort to make prosecution more difficult.

In February, the Senate Armed Services Committee found “reckless” use of weapons by Blackwater employees in Afghanistan, and found Blackwater staffers had removed weapons from US military facilities without proper authorization.

In one instance, a Blackwater employee signed out military weapons under the name “Eric Cartman,” a character in TV’s South Park.

Need a lesson on how to make money in a war zone?

Try studying defense contractor KBR, a former unit of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. The engineering logistics company — whose conflict zone days date to the Vietnam War — won a contract worth $4.6 million to repair military vehicles at a base outside Baghdad. For the job, they employed 144 mechanics.

How many hours do you think they worked?

According to an analysis by Mother Jones, based on a report by a Pentagon Inspector General, the 144 KBR mechanics worked as little as 43 minutes per month, on average.

Even KBR’s internal figures tell a shocking story of military contract waste. The company says that of the workers they had, just 6.6 percent were being used at any given time, on average. KBR said that “worker utilization” rates ranged from a meager 3.97 percent in April 2009 to 9.65 percent in September 2008.

Read the rest of the story at: RawStory

Nontoxic ‘Ghost chili’ grenade will function like tear gas

The Indian military has a new weapon against terrorism: the world’s hottest chili.

After conducting tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-sized “bhut jolokia,” or “ghost chili,” to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects, defense officials said Tuesday.

The bhut jolokia was accepted by Guinness World Records in 2007 as the world’s spiciest chili. It is grown and eaten in India’s northeast for its taste, as a cure for stomach troubles and a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili’s spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.

“The chili grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defense laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organization,” Col. R. Kalia, a defense spokesman in the northeastern state of Assam, told The Associated Press.

“This is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs,” R. B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the New Delhi headquarters of the DRDO said.

Srivastava, who led a defense research laboratory in Assam, said trials are also on to produce bhut jolokia-based aerosol sprays to be used by women against attackers and for the police to control and disperse mobs.

Source: MSNBC

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, just awarded a $32 million contract to build an all-terrain quadruped robot that carry equipment into battle for our troops.

The contract has been awarded to Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–”first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

Here is a video of  BigDog kicking it on a beach in Thailand.

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it’ll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that’s right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard “If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops” as described by BD’s president Marc Raibert.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it’s prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple “squad support” label would suggest. It’s placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat–essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won’t be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Here is video of  BigDog auto-tracking a human.

Stay tuned for: Drone Wars

From a tactical military standpoint, land mines have a certain set-it-and-forget-it appeal; you blanket an area in munitions and move on, secure in the fact that if the enemy tries to cross that terrain they’ll find an automated resistance waiting for them. But we all know that land mines are also one of modern warfare’s most indiscriminate and devastating developments, with the capacity to kill and maim innocent people even decades after hostilities have ceased. To remedy this problem, arms maker Metal Storm has developed a virtual minefield that delivers the tactical advantage of land mines without blanketing areas with dangerous ordnance that could be left behind.

From a tactical perspective, the virtual minefield is even better than the real deal because it can be turned on and off to allow friendly troop movement across a “minefield.” The computer can even deactivate a specific path through an area to allow troops to move through, reactivating it when friendlies are clear.

Smart Virtual Minefield Offers Tactical Coverage Without the Ugly Unexploded Ordnance (Popular Science)

Metal Storm’s virtual minefield gets a patent (Gizmag)