The international war-profiteering racket works in strange ways these days.
Note: this subject was broached succinctly by OneCrankyDom a couple weeks ago here. I've attempted to flesh it out a little more. Besides, we need to keep this in the news so maybe Waxman will get the hint.
After struggling to come up with a way to categorize this little news tidbit, I finally chose: "Birds of a feather flock together." It just seemed apropos as I write this, probably because (1) the mode of shipment involved in this clearly criminal operation, and, (2) the fact that [master] criminals hire other [lowly] criminals to do their menial jobs.
That’s just a fact of life.
But, perhaps, international arms dealer Viktor Bout is not so "lowly" after all. And, even though he’d never measure up to his onetime crime bosses in Washington; to this day, Bout is considered one of the greatest threats to U.S. interests – in the same league as al-Qaeda kingpin Osama bin-Laden - by U.S. intelligence officials. Interpol even issued a warrant for his arrest and the U.N. Security Council has restricted his international travel.
Now, that said; who would make a better partner-in-crime for the Bush regime? Well, I guess the fact that Bout was indeed involved with our dear leaders, it calls for a well-deserved promotion to the "master" criminal category. But, I still say he can’t hold a candle to his boss in the White House. (no, the real boss)
A new book alleges that from 2003 through at least 2005, the U.S. government paid the wanted criminal, Viktor Bout roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi decimation Freedom. Bout’s cargo companies flew an estimated 1,000 supply trips into and out of Iraq, according to the book: "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible."
The authors of the book, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun attest that it could have been worse. Even after Bout gained his notoriety by allegedly aiding al-Qaeda with shipments to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Farah and Braun allege that he was allowed to pitch a multi-million dollar proposal to the CIA, back in September 2001, that in theory, would have helped the agency rout out the Taliban from Afghanistan and even capture Osama bin-Laden. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out.
Anyway, Farah is a former reporter for the Washington Post and Braun is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.
ABC News’ The Blotter has the first half of the story:
The deal never came together. But Bout found business with the United States in 2003, flying supplies into newly-invaded Iraq as a subcontractor to U.S. military contractors, including Fluor and Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), the authors say, citing military flight records as evidence. The flights continued even after President Bush signed an order banning Americans from doing business with Bout or his associates, the authors report.
A spokeswoman for KBR acknowledged to the authors the company had hired a Bout-connected cargo firm through an intermediary, but that it had no knowledge of the ties at the time. A request for comment to the Fluor Corporation from ABC News was not immediately answered.
In a January 2005 letter to Congress, then-Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted the Defense Department:
"... did conduct business with companies that, in turn, subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout."
Wolfy confessing? No, well, kinda sorta... maybe? Damn, nevermind.
Defense officials were busy making sure Bout's planes no longer flew for the United States, he wrote. Nine days after Wolfowitz's letter, a Bout-controlled plane touched down in Mosul, Iraq, according to the book's authors.
Bout's work in Iraq first became public in a May 2004 article in the Financial Times newspaper. CIA officials in Washington secretly warned colleagues in Baghdad of the ties in fall 2003, the authors report. "It would appear...that it did not make its way to the correct folks," the two quote an unnamed CIA official as saying.
In an interview with the Blotter on ABCNews.com, Farah said he and Braun calculated the number of flights by Bout-owned planes by reviewing U.S. Air Force fueling logs, military flight records and interviewing U.S. military officials and private air cargo contractors.
Bout didn't just walk away with millions of taxpayer dollars, the authors found. The military issued Bout's pilots supply cards allowing them to gas up their planes for free when landing in Iraq. A Defense Department spokesman confirmed to the authors that Bout's fleet made off with nearly 500,000 gallons of fuel from the Baghdad airport courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.
Bout made his fortune in the 1990s selling Soviet-era weaponry to Third World despots and insurgent groups. Using a "veiled, complex corporate structure," Bout dispatched fleets of Cold War-era Soviet cargo planes to some of the most inhospitable corners of the earth, running guns for dictators, including Liberia's Charles Taylor and Zaire's Mubuto Sese Seko, as well as rebel leaders in Angola, Sierra Leone and beyond. By 2000, U.S. government officials considered him one of the leading threats to the United States, on par with Osama bin Laden and global warming.
Incidentally, Bout was the inspiration for the 2005 film, "Lord of War" starring Nicolas Cage as an international arms dealer who would sell to all sides of any particular conflict across the world. (whoa, for a minute there I flashbacked to Prescott Bush. I guess it's that whole "Birds of a feather" thingy workin' again.
Bout reportedly rented his planes to the movie’s producers for use in the film.
Although the Russian native's net worth is not known, a conservative estimate of Bout’s wealth is reported to be in the tens of millions of dollars. He now resides in Moscow and reportedly travels using fake passports to circumvent the international travel ban.
A postscript from the authors:
"Bout pulled off the ultimate metamorphosis," the authors write, "from hunted international criminal to the U.S. military's secret deliveryman."
But, that’s not the end of the story by a longshot. In fact, this is where the plot thickens.
In Braun’s article published on August 13, 2007 in the Los Angeles Times Braun attempts to connect the dots between Viktor Bout and the recent, mysteriously missing weapons sent to Iraq. In my opinion, it’s a valiant effort.
THE UNITED STATES seems to be missing some guns in Iraq. Somehow, the U.S. military has lost track of 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols that were supposedly delivered from our caches to Iraqi security forces.
It was classic bureaucratic bungling, the Government Accountability Office concluded last month in a report criticizing the Pentagon's failure to keep proper records
and track weapons flows. But there may have been another factor -- the government's dangerous and bumbling use of bad guys.
Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout, canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.
When the U.S. government needed to fly four planeloads of seized weapons from an American base in Bosnia to Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in August 2004, they used a Moldovan air cargo firm tied to Bout's aviation empire. The problem is that the planes apparently never arrived. When Amnesty International investigators tried two years later to trace the shipment of more than 99 tons of AK-47s and other weapons, U.S. officials admitted they had no record of the flights landing in Baghdad.
Now, Braun notes that it’s not certain that the missing Bosnian weapons are one and the same allotment of weapons discovered missing by the GAO, Those weapons may be an additional loss. But, Bout’s involvement as transporter in the process raises concerns above a simple bureaucratic snafu, including the distinct possibility that the arms were diverted to another country or even to Iraq’s insurgents.
Back to the LA Times:
That's because Bout is about as bad as bad guys get. For more than a decade before he landed on U.S. payrolls, Bout's air cargo operations delivered tons of contraband weapons -- ranging from rifles to helicopter gunships -- to some of the world's most dangerous misfits.
He stoked wars across Africa, supplying Charles Taylor, the deposed Liberian president now on trial for war crimes. He ferried $50 million in guns and other cargo, and he even sold air freighters to the Taliban, whose mullahs shared their lethal inventories with Al Qaeda's terrorists in Afghanistan.
Bout also has a well-known record for working both sides of the fence. His planes armed both the Angolan government in Africa and rebel forces arrayed against it. He cut weapons deals with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance government before betraying it by arming the Taliban.
By the late 1990s, much of this was known to U.S. intelligence, which had targeted him for an early form of rendition in the hopes of putting him out of business. But then, just two years after the 9/11 attacks, Bout turned up as a linchpin in the U.S. supply line to Iraq. Air Force records obtained by The Times show that his planes flew hundreds of runs into the high-security zone at Baghdad International Airport, delivering everything from guns to drilling equipment to frozen food for customers from the U.S. Army to mega-contractor KBR Inc. The military officials who oversaw his flights knew nothing about the war-stoking background of the Bout network.
So, how did Bout get to be a valued U.S. contractor? Some in the European intelligence community believe Viktor Bout made a secret deal with the U.S. who used his clandestine talents to aid in the 2001 Operation Enduring Freedom campaign in Afghanistan. But, ample evidence of another documented example of good ol’ Bush regime incompetence exists in many circles, who maintain that the U.S. simply dropped the ball when it came to checking Bout’s bona fides in their rush to set up supply lines into Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Wolfy described the use of Bout’s planes as utilizing "second tier contractors." Apparently, both the Army Corp of Engineers and Kellogg, Brown & Root hired the lower level contractors on many occasions either directly or through air charter service.
But, of course, this brings us back to both the "incompetence" issue and the even more consequential, "unaccountability" propensity that seems to permeate throughout the Bush regime.
To me, the incompetence thing isn’t even in the realm of possibility. The Defense Department should have known the particulars on Viktor Bout. Even if U.S. intelligence hadn’t shared its knowledge of Bout’s arms trafficking and other criminal activities. Damming information on the notorious Mr. Bout could easily have been found in the public record; if they’d have bothered to look for it – enough information to at least steer the U.S. government clear of his services.
Defense officials could have circulated an informal "no fly" list to make sure that gunrunners like Bout were not hired. But "it was 'do it now, the fewer questions asked the better,' " said Air Force National Guard Lt. Col. Christopher Walker, who oversaw the air operations in Baghdad in 2004.
Once Bout's firms were hired, there also was no follow-up effort to learn more about their background and performance. There should have been spot-checks to scrutinize him, but oversight was nonexistent.
By the fall of 2004, however, Bout had been targeted by a Treasury Department freeze in assets, prompted by a United Nations' effort to use economic sanctions against Liberian dictator Taylor and his inner circle -- which included Bout. But weeding out Bout's contracts was not a pressing problem to the Defense Department -- even after he had become an official enemy of the U.S. government. ("We're talking about tens of thousands of contracts," said one Army official.)
Worse, as late as 2005, after Bout's nefarious background and his role in Iraq were publicly exposed, military officials pressured Treasury Department officials to hold off on sanctions against his business empire until he had finished a final run of supply flights to Iraq.
So, there you have it. There’s the point where simple incompetence turns into willful ignorance, or worse, deliberate complicity with criminal elements. It kinda shines a whole new light on Donald Rumsfeld’s "You go to war with the army you have – not with the army you wish to have."
Well, according to defense department officials, all is well now. No harm no foul, business as usual in unaccountability land. They’ve tightened up security procedures with contractors. However, they’ve refused inquiries on how they will scrutinize air transporters in the future, and without congressional oversight hearings or other means of public government accountability inquiries, the DoD is under no pressure to change anything.
And, there’s one thing certain about the Bush regime; past is prelude.
Last summer, a jumbo Il-76 flying the Khazakh flag swooped down to a landing in Mogadishu to unload arms for radical Islamic leaders who briefly seized control of Somalia. It was one of Bout's planes, concluded U.S. military intelligence officials.
Just another fun day in the U.S. foreign policy neighborhood!
Please contact Waxman's office. And, while you have his aid on the phone, remind him about Sibel Edmonds as well.
PLEASE, throw da bums out! (to save my sanity)
Peace
Links to more must-read information about the Bush regime’s connection to "The Merchant of Death." (this guy gets around!)
Financial Times
Financial Times (free 15-day trial signup required)
Wikipedia
Frontline/World
Africa's Merchant of Death
Global Policy Forum
MSNBC.com/Newsweek
"Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible."