WAR: Global Arms - Trafficking Network Designated by US (Update: Viktor Bout Extradited)

August 01, 2007


Antonov An-12BK serial 9346904, now with something called "Meridian" in the Ukraine as UR-CAG...formerly ER-AXY with the following roll-call of Viktor Bout operations.

Aerocom, Asterias Commercial, Astral Aviation, ATI, ACS, Jet Line International...

Aug 6 2007


Today’s Washington Post brings the disturbing news of tens of thousands of weapons that were supposed to be delivered to Iraq from Bosnia that are now unaccounted for.

In fact, the number is likely far larger than the 190,000 mentioned in the story. And as the story notes, many of those missing weapons have likely been used against U.S. forces in Iraq, having been acquired by the insurgents.

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While the GAO report on which the Post based its story is useful, in fact the problem is far larger, as we show. Viktor Bout’s aircraft, we found, transported at least 200,000 AK-47 assault rifles from Bosnia arsenals, supposedly to Iraq in 2004, although there was no record of the weapons ever having arrived in Iraq.

August 12, 2007


It's quite surprising literally no-one during the recent reopening of the missing Iraqi guns story has thought fit to mention the delicious kicker that the shipment travelled in an aircraft chartered by a company that had just been shut down for coc aine-smuggling.

September 13, 2007


DF: The U.S. government response to revelations of the use of Viktor Bout to fly for government contractors in Iraq (not just a few flights, but hundreds, and perhaps a thousand) has been mixed. Bear in mind most of these flights occurred after President Bush had signed an executive order making it illegal to do business with Bout, because he represented a security threat to the United States. The State Department, under a congressional inquiry initiated by Senator Russell Feingold, found it had used Bout companies, acknowledged it, and stopped. Paul Wolfowitz, while at DOD, did not respond to queries for nine months, then acknowledged that DOD contractors had subcontracted to Bout companies. Despite the public revelation, the congressional inquiry, the executive order, and a subsequent Treasury Department order freezing the assets of Bout and his closest associates, the flights continued for many months, at least until the end of 2005. The Air Force cut him off immediately, but other branches of the military continued to use him.

October 23, 2007


The International Herald-Tribune has an interesting article about a Serbian gun-runner and colleague of Viktor Bout's, one Tomislav Damjanovic.

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the report is based on one prepared by the Belgrade-based South-Eastern European Small Arms Centre, which according to the IHT has been distributed among customs, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. You'll be pleased to know someone left a link to it in the comments; you can read it here (pdf).

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it was Damjanovic who took on US military contracts to acquire arms in the Balkans and send them to Iraq, and some other places too. The now-infamous 99 tonnes of weapons that went missing between Tuzla and Baghdad? One of his jobs.

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an aircraft he chartered from GST Aero (them!) travelled from Baghdad via Sharjah to Oman, where it ostensibly "refuelled", and then proceeded to be the famous first plane into Mogadishu.

Originally posted by twitchy
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

Originally posted by twitchy

Thought I'd throw this into the mix here Hellmutt...

Source
when he was just 11 years old when he performed a satanic ritual that demanded that he had to perform human sacrifices. This was the beginning of a macabre episode in the brutal Liberian civil war. He has admitted to killing several children just for the fun of it. His rise to fame came when he as a warlord commanded an brigade that called itself the Buttnaked brigade/battalion (it differs somewhat depending on the source), a group of ragtag drugged and drunken teenage soldiers. They did all dress upp in the most absurd style they could find, some had wedding gowns, dresses, purses and wigs, others where completely naked. General Butt naked himself drove a motorcycle completely naked, except for his sneakers and a blasting rifle. The nudity that became his trademark was said to protect him from bullets and therefore he and the Butt naked brigade was completely fearless, he says it was given to him by Satan. As an independent warlord he and his buttnaked brigade fought for the highest bidder. In the last years of the civil war it was Roosevelt Johnson that was his source of funds. In this war of brutality that shocked Liberia the Butt naked-brigade where the most gruesome, famous for using decapitated heads as soccer balls and sacrificed children before every battle for receiving their magical protection.

Source
Wolfowitz appointed chairman of arms-control advisory panel

WASHINGTON - Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues.
Wolfowitz, now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, will head Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's International Security Advisory Board, the State Department said yesterday in a statement.

"The ISAB provides the Department of State with a source of independent insight, advice, and innovation on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, political-military issues, and international security and related aspects of public diplomacy," the State Department said.

Wolfowitz was among the senior US officials who warned of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction capabilities, a key justification for invading Iraq and toppling the late dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the war on terror," Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in January 2003, two months before the US-led invasion of Iraq.