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So who are the Libyan rebels that we’re now supporting in their fight against Muammar Qaddafi? Mark Thompson reports that a lot of them are the same folks who were fighting us in Iraq four years ago:

A West Point analysis of the foreign fighters involved in the increasing carnage showed that the nation sending the most militants to Iraq from August 2006 to August 2007, was, on a per-capita basis, Libya….Drilling down into the data, the December 2007 examination from the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center showed that nearly all of the Libyan fighters came from the northeastern part of the country [Darnah and Benghazi in the pie chart above], which is where the rebels we are now helping hail from. It’s a small sample, but something to keep in mind.

Just another data point to tuck into the back of your mind as all this stuff unfolds.