Arming the Terrorists

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

[...]

Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case [effected by Tony Blair’s pressure on attorney general, Lord Goldsmith]. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved [in to] blackmail.

[...]

Bandar's payments were published in the Guardian and Switzerland subsequently launched a money-laundering inquiry into the Saudi arms deal. The US department of justice has launched its own investigation under the foreign corrupt practices act into the British money received in the US by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington.

Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided.

UK Guardian

This comes as no surprise to many who were claiming these threats were happening back when the BAE investigation was news in the summer of 2007, and it also doesn’t mean Bandar won’t be getting arms from the U.S.

January 14, 2008

[...]

administration said it notified Congress of its intention to offer the Saudis a controversial package of advanced weaponry as part of a multibillion-dollar deal with Gulf Arab allies.

The deal has raised concerns in Israel and among some of its allies about the military balance of power in the region.

Reuters

02/13/2008

[...]

It’s not often that Washington Republicans will go out of their way to attack the world’s largest oil supplier and Bush administration ally, Saudi Arabia. But that’s precisely what three GOP House members did yesterday in an attempt to prevent a planned $123 million arms sale to the strategically placed monarchy.

[...]

Reps. Frank Wolf (Va.), Zack Wamp (Tenn.) and Sue Myrick (N.C.) wondered yesterday who will subsequently rein in the Saudis. Between the three of them, they managed to take shots at the country’s religious intolerance, its support for Wahhabist maddrassas, and its dissemination of textbooks that encourage violence against non-Muslims. (Did they forget to mention that 15 of the 19 terrorists responsible for the 9-11 attacks were Saudi nationals? They did not.)

[...]

Though a House resolution to overturn the Saudi sale has gained significant support (80 Democrats and 13 Republicans have signed on), it hit a brick wall in the form of House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Cal.), who showed no support for blocking the deal. In a complicating twist, Lantos died Monday and will be honored at the Capitol tomorrow.

Wamp acknowledged that the push to kill the sale has no chance of gaining traction so immediately following Lantos’ death. Still, the Tennessee Republican had some words of warning for the country when the deal goes through.

"You know, we’ve tried to buy friends many times in this country’s history," he said. "And you just don’t—you just can’t do that. And I’m afraid economic interests trump our national security interests often.

Washington Independent

You think? Surely Bandar Bush shares his bribe booty with the rest of the family. Bribe booty I will remind you that was deposited into his account at the infamously convicted DC money-laundering Riggs Bank where none other than was CEO and president of Riggs Investment.

02/15/08

[...]

The U.S. Congress failed to block the sale of 900 satellite-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia by Feb. 14, the date the sale goes through without congressional action. But lawmakers who oppose the deal say they still have a chance to halt it.
The sale can be blocked simply by passing legislation opposing it, said an aide to Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.

That means that until the JDAMs are turned over to the Saudis, the sale can be halted, Wamp’s aide said

But to do so, the opponents would need to gain enough support in the House and Senate to override a presidential veto — two-thirds of the members in each house. About 250 House members have opposed the sale at various times since it was proposed last summer. Two-thirds of the House is 287.

Defense News

Good luck with that.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Et Tu Italia?

Searching for illegal drugs at an airport, Italian investigators came up with something else - a black market arms deal with Iraq.

The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge of the U.S. Baghdad command — a departure from the usual pattern of U.S.-overseen arms purchases.

Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons were headed is unclear.

The purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the 2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war.

  Yahoo

We've done so much for that country.

Meanwhile, the planned replacement of the army's AK-47s with U.S.-made M-16s may throw more assault rifles onto the black market. And the weapons free-for-all apparently is spilling over borders: Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to anti-government militants on their soil.

Meanwhile, we accuse Iran of supplying arms to the Iraqi fiasco.

"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S. Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian or Chinese weapons through questionable channels," the anti-Mafia prosecutor wrote in seeking the arrest warrant that short-circuited the complex deal.

Doesn't it just?

Iraqi middlemen in the Italian deal, in intercepted e-mails, claimed the arrangement had official American approval. A U.S. spokesman in Baghdad denied that.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised to find that to be true. Whether by inexcusable incompetence or by design, we seem to be arming all sides in Iraq. Good business for the arms manufacturers, eh George? Although, to be fair, in this instance, the Iraqis insisted on buying Russian-made weapons. Does the Carlyle Group have stock in Russian arms companies?

The arms broker in this case, al-Handal, turns out to have also been a front company in the food for oil scheme under Saddam Hussein's reign. They obviously weren't put out of business when Saddam was captured. (Of course, the Sunni militias are back in business now, with U.S. backing, too. Apparently, Saddam and Sons are the only ones out of business.)

Citing the names of "friends" in top U.S. military ranks in Iraq, al-Handal said his company has fulfilled scores of supply and service contracts for the U.S. occupation. Asked why he claimed U.S. approval for the abortive Italian weapons purchase, he said he had a document from the U.S. Army "that says, 'We allow al-Thuraya Group to do all kinds of business.'"

All kinds.

....hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Who's On First?

First we disarm them. Now we arm them.

One of the top US military commanders, Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, confirmed the US was moving in the direction of training and arming Sunni groups to secure their own areas, often under the mantle of the Iraqi police force.

[...]

It is the latest move in what is clearly becoming one of the main thrusts of the US exit strategy here - to empower and arm Sunni Arab tribes and factions, provided they pledge to resist outside militants like al-Qaeda.

  BBC News

That's a pretty big provision, and I see where there might just be some problems monitoring, much less enforcing, such a pledge.

Actually, what with having 190,000 assault rifles and pistols distributed in the country unaccounted for, we are actually simply arming the whole country. While simultaneously sending soldiers around door-to-door to confiscate weapons. I need a scorecard.

It's a big rat-f#@k. Isn't it?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Department of Lost and Found

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

  MSNBC

Some of 190,000. That's a lot of weapons. In fact, that's 30% of the weapons we supposedly distributed to the Iraqi forces in the past three years. Nice work. And we're being told it's the Iranians who are supplying the enemy.

It seems that the lion's share of the missing weaponry happened when General Petraeus was in charge of security training. You know General Petraeus - he's the guy who's supposed to report in September on how the surge is going and offer recommendations (and already says he doesn't think that he'll have anything "definitive" to report, so I wonder what kind of recommendations he might have to give: I recommend you give me more time?). He's the guy Iraqi President Maliki wants Bush to replace. He's also the guy who said that he thinks the key to success is "disrupting the attacks." Kind of stacked the odds against that outcome for himself by losing track of those weapons, didn't he?

I'm sure he'll think of some way to spin it all, though. After all, he's the guy who thinks we've been there so long that the Iraqis think we're liberators again.

"There is a period of omnipotence. There was a period in the beginning when there was a ‘golden hour’. Inevitably, it does not matter how much you were viewed as a liberator, over time you will be seen as an occupier. The interesting dynamic here is that we have been here long enough to become liberators again for certain sectors of the population, those that are affected by extremism."

  Think Progress

Loo-oooney Tunes.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.