Disturbing Search Request of the decade: 213.42.21.150, searching Google for “who would handle a commercial shipment of arms and ammunitions from Sharjah to Baghdad”. That’ll be someone downstream of AS5384, or Etisalat (Emirates Telecom), the UAE’s fun-loving national telco monopoly, best known for blocking more websites than China. Ha. But there is some actual substance…
Read More War Profiteers Read My WeblogHard to say what the credibility index is here, but it’s certainly an interesting idea: were the IRA volunteers caught in Colombia there essentially as mercenaries, hiring out their valuable experience and technical advances to finance the movement after US donations dropped off? It’s an exit strategy more than a few armies have followed –…
Read More It’s a profession, a careerLong-time readers of our series on Viktor Bout may remember the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor’s report which implicated various people in Sierra Leone in terrorist financing. We’ve been interested for a long time in West Africa, and the links between Charles Taylor’s regime and Al-Qa’ida, not to mention the missing 727 case. One of the…
Read More TYR Exclusive: Interview with Paddy McKayThe US Uniform Code of Military Justice now applies to civilian employees, and a damn good thing too. Various people at BoingBoing wonder whether journalists might also be affected. Curiously, P.W. Singer is quoted as saying that “the Iraq war was the first where journalists could formally embed”. Really? I’m sure, completely so, that those…
Read More Contractors, and Journalists?Every blog and its cat has been discussing the tale that Richard Armitage supposedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age, but no-one seems to have mentioned a very obvious fact about this: Pakistan has an estimated 20-60 nuclear warheads deliverable by various means. Now, you don’t go round threatening to bomb nuclear…
Read More All the Pakistan that’s fit to printSeveral people have sent me this story from the Times (a newspaper that seems to be improving at the moment, despite being a Murdoch property). It deals with a British-owned airline, Avient, and its extremely dodgy activities in the DR Congo. As well as shifting arms in and diamonds out, Avient went so far as…
Read More Avient and their new market…But other than that, they’re swell fellows. CusterBattles in more trouble. Especially this: Ballard also noted that Custer Battles employees didn’t use metal detectors and ignored suggestions that an interrogator look over paperwork while a two-man team inspected each vehicle. “What horrified us most of all, however,” Ballard wrote, “was their refusal to open the…
Read More Incompetent, deceitful war profiteers..Remember this post from July 2005? Regarding the full sickology of the Iraqi war economy, it covered epic CPA corruption, heroin smuggling, Iraqi girls turning up turning tricks all over the Middle East, and of course Viktor Bout. In comments, someone claimed to have heard from a Kroll securigoon that Russian planes were bringing in…
Read More We love the corruptionIn the eastern DR Congo, an Antonov 26B has been destroyed in an accident, including everyone on board. According to Aviation Safety Network it was ER-AZT, serial number 97309005, with either “Galaxie” or “Kavatshi Airlines”. ER- is Moldovan registry. I have no further information at the moment regarding who the hell G/K are. There are…
Read More An-26 Down in DRCThere hasn’t been any Viktor Bout content here for quite a while..but fortunately, I now have some more interesting data. Everyone now knows about the flights between Baghdad International Airport and Dubai – they are still going on, by the way, under the IATA codes for Irbis, British Gulf, and Phoenix – but what about…
Read More New Mystery Jet Developments