Not 'Broken' by a Damnsight, Just Incredibly Corrupt
November 11, 2007
Broken Supply Channel Sent Arms for Iraq Astray
By ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
This article was reported by Eric Schmitt, Ginger Thompson, Margot Williams and James Glanz, and was written by Mr. Schmitt and Ms. Thompson.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 — As the insurgency in Iraq escalated in the spring of 2004, American officials entrusted an Iraqi businessman with issuing weapons to Iraqi police cadets training to help quell the violence.
By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.
. . . that armory and other warehouses help explain how the American military lost track of some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraq’s security forces in 2004 and 2005 . . .
. . . the assistant director of operations for American Logistics, defended Colonel Selph as the one person trying to establish order in the chaos that characterized the early months of the reconstruction effort. And he said that though Mr. Saffar’s arms business might look bad from a distance, it hardly raised an eyebrow in Baghdad.
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Sunday must be the preferred day for leaking out the bad news on the privatization of America's wars--first the Boeing spy satellite disaster and now American Logistics and their theft of armaments. It will be interesting to see how long the press hangs on to these stories. My personal guess is about a tenth as long as the latest Britney or Paris event.
But Donald has a lot to answer for at that new Stanford think-tank job that was bought for him at the bargain price of $10 mil.
Question: Does anything this bent administration does turn out anywhere even close to success?
Answer: Only the privatizing--and that works out only on behalf of those in the fix.
By the way, should you believe (in error) that this was all the fault of Republicans--be advised that each and every step of the way along this path of national destruction was enabled by the Democrats in a Congress so fearful as to be impotent.