US in secret gun deal

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands. A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war. The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."

European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working to oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious that the Pentagon's covert arms-to-Iraq programme has undermined the disarmament project. "It's difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they're all holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of dollars," said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.

The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium, but under US pressure it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead. The British government is funding a programme to destroy 250,000 small arms, a legacy of the Bosnian war, but the project is faltering because people are reluctant to surrender weapons that might mean money. Nato and European officials confirm there is nothing illegal about the Bosnian government or the Pentagon taking arms to Iraq; the problem is one of transparency and the way the arms deals have been conducted.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1773002,00.html

:shrug:

it won't. :(

Guns from Bosnia being shipped to Iraq? There must be more to this.

It vaguely reminds me of the Reagan/BushI 1980's U.S. "guns for hostages" dealing between the Nicaragua contras and Iran.

To quote Bob Dylan "there's something funny going on, I can feel it the air".

or in this case civil war.

nm

It would make sense and would correspond with historical precedent.

They can talk all they want about WMD, the policy is regime change. There have been reports recently of shelling, even a missile strike, by Iran against targets in the Kurdish part of Iraq. It could be that anti-government Iranian guerillas are operating out of safe havens in Iraq.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-05/12/content_4539790.htm

Bosnian defense minister denies secret shipment of arms to Iraq

www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-12 20:56:42


BELGRADE, May 12 (Xinhua)-- Bosnia's defense minister denied on Thursday any clandestine shipment of arms to Iraq, saying its weapons delivery to the country was legal and that they had gone into the possession of the new Iraqi government, according to newsreports from Bosnia-Herzegovina's capital Sarajevo.

The remarks came as a response to Amnesty International's claimthat Bosnia had sold some 200,000 small arms to Iraq in a secret and non-transparent fashion, and that part of the shipment had not ended up with Iraqi security forces as intended.

In an official statement, Bosnia-Herzegovina's Defense Minister Nikola Radovanovic termed the claims as unfounded, insisting that all of the 200,000 guns had ended up with the new Iraqi government and their security forces.

In its report, the London-based group Amnesty, which investigated the sale of the arms, said that the U.S. government had arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, using a web of private companies, at least one of which was an arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.

"There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands.
There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."

I just keep thinking that BushCo$ has been arming the insurgents???
This is pretty fucked up....
"Where's Ollie North?"; someone asked.
Where the hell has that fucker been? He was in Iraq last year, wasn't he?

K & R'd

Damn these magots are beyond forgiveness.