U.S. Military: Iraqi Gun Smuggling OK By Us

[babylonsister]

Today's Must Read
By Spencer Ackerman - November 12, 2007, 8:50AM


Your typical wartime logistics operation: from supplier to vendor to transport to customer... oh, and corrupt warehouser who'll sell your weaponry to the insurgency while U.S. military officers look the other way.

Welcome to the operation to get guns to the Iraqi security services, circa 2004-2005. According to Government Accountability Office investigations -- and at least one criminal investigation -- over 190,000 weapons sent to Iraq for the Iraqi security forces disappeared almost as soon as they got off the C-17s. General Petraeus, who was in charge of the effort at the time, commented recently that he thought expeditious delivery of weapons was more important than proper bookkeeping. The New York Times details that his men truly internalized that message -- even to the point of opting not to notice when Iraqi warehousers would turn contractor-run armories into a private, for-profit arms dealership.

Two Army majors, John Isgrigg III and Timmy W. Cox, assigned to the equipping mission told the Times about racing against other military units to claim palletized guns off the planes delivering them. They and their colleagues are open about how they didn't care about keeping proper records of their cargo, claiming that fastidiousness in a complex procurement operation is a hindrance to the mission:

“We had folks getting killed because equipment wasn’t moving,” said Col. Randy Hinton, the majors’ superior officer. “Were there times when all the right forms were not signed? Probably. But we had a mission to do, and we were going to do it the best way we could at that time.”

An interesting approach to following the law. The trouble is that their negligence, in part, led to an atmosphere of tolerance for weapons smuggling.

Thousands of Glocks, AK-47s, and machine guns delivered to Iraq were improperly catalogued in the name of efficiency. Serial numbers went unrecorded. And that meant the guns could simply disappear -- fallen off the back of the truck -- and the U.S. would have no way of tracking them. It was a system ripe for abuse. And an Iraqi warehouser named Kassim al-Saffar was just the man to abuse it.

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http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004684.php