Arms deal embarrasses U.S. military

[questionmark]

July 14, 2008, 8:15

Shady Afghan arms deal embarrasses U.S. military

The U.S. government is embroiled in a scandal over a contract to supply munitions to the Afghan army. With millions of dollars apparently having been wasted, questions are now being asked about how the contract came to be approved.

The U.S. created the Afghan army during the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban six years ago. But now it seems the army has recently been supplied with faulty ammo.

In January 2007, the American government awarded a $US 300 million to a Miami-based company run by a 21-year-old. Efraim E. Deveroly became the main U.S. contractor supplying munitions to Afghanistan.

He promptly got down to business. Together with other young arms dealers, Deveroly is alleged to have supplied banned Chinese ammunition - some of it 50 years old - shipping it from Albania and claiming it was made in Hungary.

The company's contract was terminated after five months because of alleged fraud, but only after $US 66 million of American taxpayers’ cash had already been spent.

Eric Schmitt is one of the New York Times reporters who were first to bring the scam into the spotlight. He says AEY exploited a weakness in the American legal system.

"If they were buying ammunition for the U.S. army, they’d use one of set regulations’, he said. ‘But because this ammunition was being used for Afghanistan, they used a different set of regulations that had some loopholes that this company successfully exploited," Schmitt said.

The U.S. State Department has a watch list of potential arms traffickers. AEY and the people who ran it were on it. However, there is no evidence that the Defense Department took the time to check the list before signing the AEY contract.

Making matters worse are claims that the U.S. State Department may have been involved in a cover-up.

Eric Schmitt believes the most disturbing part of the scandal is just how far it seems to reach.

"The Albanian Defense Minister came up with a plan that was essentially ‘let’s get rid of the evidence and according to the officer who was there, the U.S. Ambassador agreed to this plan," Schmitt says.

The Ambassador, however, denies all the allegations being made.

The U.S. House of Representatives held an investigation of its own. And one of the things it discovered was that the need for the contract was questionable in the first place.

At the time the AEY contract was awarded, a number of countries had offered to donate ammunition without charge.

Lindsey Beyerstein is an investigative journalist and popular blogger who has been looking into the scam.

Full story, source: Russia Today

[itsnotoutthere]

Guess this follows on from the BBC Panorama program :- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7438372.stm

Chickens coming home to roost perhaps.

[Aztec Warrior]

Given the source, I have my doubts about the veracity of this report. There was also a CSI Miami episode about the exact same thing. A young arms dealer in Miami buys old and rusted ammo from an Eastern bloc nation, where he gets it real cheap and resells it to a foreign entity. From Episode 621

Prints on one of the unspent rounds from the parking garage leads the CSIs to Brad Gower, who tells the CSIs he sells ammunition and does spot checks on bullets, meaning his prints are likely on thousands of rounds. He notes that he has an independent defense contract, but agrees to help Horatio trace the shipment the bullet was in. In the lab, Calleigh examines the bullets, noticing the oxidation on them, but when she gets a call from Tripp, one of the bullets rolls off the lab table and falls to the floor, causing it to shoot up to the ceiling and start a fire in the lab. She's dejected at possibly compromising the case into Delko discovers an undamaged round in the wreckage. Calleigh examines the bullet, determining it's almost forty years old, meaning Gower has illegally been selling old ammunition.

[Clocker]

Yup, considering the source I'm not sure how accurate this is.

[itsnotoutthere]

Panorama investigates claims that as much as $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq.

When the US goes to war, corporate America goes too.

There are contracts for caterers, tanker drivers, security guards and even interrogators, many of them through companies with links to the White House.

Now more than 70 whistleblower cases threaten to reveal the scandals behind billions of dollars worth of waste, theft and corruption during the Iraq war.

Gagging orders

A total of $23bn (£11.75bn) is under scrutiny.

The US justice department has imposed gagging orders which prevent the real scale of the problem emerging.

But Panorama's Jane Corbin has spoken to some of those involved - with astonishing stories to tell of who got rich and who got burned.

She hears allegations of mismanagement, fraud and waste; tales of contractors chosen for their US government connections without a competitive bidding process; contractors inflating their costs and double counting to increase their profits and billions supposed to be used to rebuild the Iraqi military allegedly ending up in the pockets of some Iraqi government officials.

Even the contract to oversee the expenditure went to a company with no relevant qualification in accounting.

"They are the quintessential war profiteers," said a witness to one of the most notorious companies involved. "They made money out of chaos."