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Today's Must Read
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.
Saffar managed the Baghdad Police Academy's armory for American Logistics Services, an American contractor since banned from Iraq. (ALS, now Lee Dynamics International, paid bribes to military contracting officers to win its $11 million deals to manage five such warehouses, according to a subsequent Army investigation.) Seeing the deliberately lax oversight, Saffar turned the armory into a private arms dealership. He sold guns to anyone he could, and received payment openly: one officer recalled seeing Saffar keep a briefcase stuffed with $20 bills in his office. All this occurred under the watchful eye of U.S. military officers:
He sold guns from the black market and from captured stocks. “There wasn’t anybody there who didn’t know what he was doing,” said [Ted Nordgaarden, an Alaska state trooper who worked as the police academy’s supply chief].[John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse,] said Mr. Saffar had a steady stream of customers, from Iraqis to South African private security contractors. “There were truckloads of stuff moving out of that armory without my authorization,” Mr. Tisdale said.
Mr. Tisdale said that he complained repeatedly to two top American Logistics executives, but they assured him that Mr. Saffar’s dealings were proper. The company has not responded to requests for comment.
Mr. Tisdale and other co-workers said they believed that an American military official, Lt. Col. Levonda Joey Selph, an Army officer who oversaw the warehouse contract and whose activities have been part of the investigation into American Logistics, also must have known about the arms dealings. Mr. Tisdale said the colonel regularly visited the armory and met with Mr. Saffar. Mr. Nordgaarden recalled seeing Colonel Selph at the warehouse 8 to 10 times over a year.
In an brief encounter outside her Northern Virginia home, Colonel Selph would say only that she was not guilty of any wrongdoing, and that she was under orders not to speak to the press. She would not say whose orders.
Tisdale, the retired Air Force master sergeant who managed a nearby armory, called Saffar's operation "the craziest thing in the world." But even crazier is an unanswered question: who was it that allowed the guns to be delivered to the warehouses without cataloging their serial numbers? Was that specified -- or, perhaps, neglected -- in ALS's contract? If so, that would indicate that -- at best -- procurement officials were incompetent to the point of dereliction. At worst, those officials knew an opportunity for a payday when they saw it.
This looks like a job for the Senate's newly-created wartime contracting commission.
Comments (36)
Pajaro wrote on November 12, 2007 9:17 AM:Bush commenting:
"well...er, war is messy, things git missplaced.
You, ya gotta arm all sides when you are look'n for democracy. If only one side has arms, how is that democracy?"
"I will have the vice president look into this, right Dick?"
Dick: [snears and nod]
jolly ranchero wrote on November 12, 2007 9:24 AM:I smell an angry-worded letter from Leahy, followed by 6 months of crickets, a subpeona to testify, followed by a "no thanks".
Bid'ness as usual.
Mafalda Hopkirk wrote on November 12, 2007 9:28 AM:Money disappeared. Weapons disappeared.
People disappeared too.
Oil, electricity, pure water... all disappeared.
At a certain point.... will Iraq disappear too?
Let's get our troops home before they disappear!
PwapVt wrote on November 12, 2007 9:35 AM:Well, the NRA is a major contributor, and assault weapons are a wet dream of theirs, so normalizing them to civilized society makes perfect philosophical sense. It's just like Indiana!
paul wrote on November 12, 2007 9:51 AM:That claim about corrupt practices in pursuit of efficiency is just so much thoroughgoing baloney. The most basic modern inventory control methods would let you track weapons serial numbers coming in and going out. And if a couple hundred thousand weapons are being diverted, then that's at least as many people getting killed because they didn't get what they needed (and their enemies did) as if you'd taken the time to do it right.
This seems like yet another example of what happens when you put utter amateurs in charge of an operation. (Not that 190,000 weapons one way or another would necessary have made a difference in the disastrous way the war went.)
moondancer wrote on November 12, 2007 9:51 AM:The war is almost won, nothing to see here. Move on. Move on. Move on.
Freewheelin' Freddie wrote on November 12, 2007 9:58 AM:Moondancers got it right.
Switch channels. New season coming up!
Richard Cownie wrote on November 12, 2007 10:13 AM:Milo Minderbinder is alive and well. How
SmileySam wrote on November 12, 2007 10:18 AM:long before the USAF accepts a contract
from the insurgency to bomb their own base ?
Time to go back and look at the planes those arms were shipped in on, and who owns them. I'm sure you will find a much deeper and disturbing story than this one.
Sebastian-PGP wrote on November 12, 2007 10:20 AM:Here in the US a gun store can lose its license and be shut down for not dotting I's and crossing T's (literally!) on federally required paperwork, or for not keeping the proper number of copies of documents required when you buy even one firearm.
But the Pentagon loses enough rifles to occupy half the planet and nobody'll even get slapped...because Joe American is too busy watching American Idol to be bothered.
Landmine wrote on November 12, 2007 10:21 AM:Whe I was drinking, my life was like this. No plans, records, accountability, honesty.
E in MD wrote on November 12, 2007 10:38 AM:All I needed was the connections or being in the right place at the right time and I could have been a Millionaire...or a Congressman or even President...and not had to go through the pain of getting sober.
I'm sure they went the same way as the 300,000 tons of high grade explosives that vanished the day of the invasion.
look the other way wrote on November 12, 2007 10:50 AM:That's why America is so great,...it's only wrong if the other guy gets caught doing it. Isn't selling guns/arms/bombs what Bush's democracy is all about anyways.
And Rudy thinks we should waste more money on the military complex....we're in trouble!
anonymouse wrote on November 12, 2007 11:09 AM:Just remember....
Our troops will NEVER be as important as the crooks running the war. This is why nobody will be prosecuted for giving weapons to folks who kill our own soldiers.
Our young folks are totally expendable. The important people will be protected at ALL costs... and THEY are the wealthy...
"WE the PEOPLE" have no qualms aboout killing our own young folks... as long as the important people get rich...
Over $400 billion... that's over half the total military spending for the entire world... not including the two ongoing wars.
$200 billion a year would turn every home in the United States into solar powered homes in eight years... with power left over to supply industry.
Our priority, however, is to give money to folks so they can kill our own heros...
I guess other countries deserve a democracy much more than we do... IMHO
Phil wrote on November 12, 2007 11:14 AM:You go to war with the logistics operations you bastardize, not the logistics operations you had originally.
unpoetaloco wrote on November 12, 2007 11:19 AM:God only knows how many American soldiers are also selling things via black market, and to whom.
desaparecido wrote on November 12, 2007 11:39 AM:What? Corruption and wartime profiteering? I'm stunned.
www.tshirtinsurgency.com
thomas babysteps wrote on November 12, 2007 11:54 AM:this seems to me to be the most important sentence in this article: General Petraeus, who was in charge of the effort at the time,
tin foil wrote on November 12, 2007 11:58 AM:190,000 missing weapons...is this the reason al-Maliki was complaining 1/07 about the lack of weapons for the Iraqi army????
andhowe wrote on November 12, 2007 12:00 PM:Let's just ask Gen. Milo Minderbinder.
Mooser wrote on November 12, 2007 12:12 PM:Gee, could somebody please refer me to the overwhelming body of evidence that agressive war is a good way to acheive policy objectives? It seemed to be a foregone conclusion by 2001.
Brian C.B. wrote on November 12, 2007 12:34 PM:Oh, I know, must have been that glorious Gulf War One!
Unfortunately, there was no one to give the Army even a semblance of a fight, this time. So really, leaving several hundred tons of high explosive and supplying small arms was the decent thing to do. Only fair. And it works, cause with that and a little goosing of the population we got a war going.
We are ingenious!
Friend of mine in the Army (a lawyer) recalls one war game exercise (yes, he had to participate) that ground to a halt here in the US because one soldier lost his rifle. Everyone stopped to look for it and nothing resumed until it was found. Naturally, the soldier who misplaced it was severely punished. Another Army guy I know who was discharged (time was up) after about 3 months in Iraq said some soldier in his regiment had his rifle stolen by an Iraqi and my friend remembers thinking, when he heard about it, "Don't let it be one of my guys. For God's sake, please!" It wasn't one of his subordinates, but the guilty soldier and his non-com were thrashed and reprimanded and payed hell. This was in the early days of the occupation.
Apparently, standards changed.
MANIMAL! wrote on November 12, 2007 1:23 PM:Seems we need to keep the insurgency well armed to justify our continued occupation.
ScottW wrote on November 12, 2007 1:41 PM:Vets, First, Happy Veteran's Day, second was this happening in Vietnam, Korea, or WWII ?
CranialRectalLoopback wrote on November 12, 2007 1:45 PM:Freedom isn't free. Now shut up and die.
TJ wrote on November 12, 2007 2:40 PM:No kidding.
This is only one of many examples of the Bush Bunch's blithering no-limits of incompetence & mis-management extends well around & throughout the military command.
Talking about making 'lists' for things, as with Kerik, I wish someone would make a 'list' of the zillions of Bush blunders, starting with day one.
What ever happened to his wish for a trip to Mars anyway, how come the dems never bring things like that (which is true) up to counter the repug propaganda (which are all lies)?? Too bad, guess there is so much of a flood of incompetence that it leaves everyone's heads spinning.
TheraP wrote on November 12, 2007 2:53 PM:There is such a list, TJ. "Hugh's List of Bush Scandals" - updated frequently.
Brace yourself for a huge amount of reading!
(click my name)
Charles Bowman wrote on November 12, 2007 3:34 PM:I don't recall General Petraeus saying,"the buck stops here!" Or was that what was meant when his subordinates stated that they weren't too interested in normal logistical procedures? I think that the corruption of the military in Iraq will dwarf that of Vietnam and it was enormous in that era! I think that Petraeus subordinates need to get it all off their chests!
Henk wrote on November 12, 2007 3:49 PM:This guy here is typical of Bushit logic "“We had folks getting killed because equipment wasn’t moving,” said Col. Randy Hinton"
I wonder how many are being killed now because of the way that Randy was doing his job?
Another great feat of Bush's military happened recently when a Chinese sub surfaced, TOTALLY UN-NOTICED!!!, in the middle of US Navy war games. It was in striking distance of a US Aircraft Carrier even though it had a full compliment of Battleships and two Sub protecting.
bobstandard wrote on November 12, 2007 5:02 PM:More than anything, I think this was just another way to help transfer wealth from the US Treasury into the hands of the well connected. I don't believe that the whole episode wasn't planned out with the precision of any lucrative business deal. And in the sense of economics, it worked out great with many along the line getting a taste of the action. Perfectly unconscionable, of course.
Roberta wrote on November 12, 2007 9:14 PM:TheraP,
So glad you put a link to this marvelous resource. Thank Godzilla that there are people who have the time and patience to compile comprehensive lists like this one.
D.R. Marvel wrote on November 12, 2007 9:23 PM:The first shipment of M-16 rifles to Vietnam disappeared between the port and the armory they were supposed to be issued from.
Shit happens, and shit stays the same ( loosely translated from the French)
The Oracle wrote on November 12, 2007 11:08 PM:Loose lips sink ships (Valerie Plame Wilson outing) and loose bookkeeping sinks wars.
Not only, apparently, was the culture of corruption and lawless Bush administration loose with arms being shipped to and distributed in Iraq (with some of these lost weapons no doubt being used to kill U.S. soldiers)...they were also very loose in shipping pallet-loads of money into Iraq, falling into who knows whose hands. How many billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been lost in Iraq? Nine billion? Twenty billion? Due to lax bookkeeping, we'll probably never know.
Bandot wrote on November 20, 2007 10:03 PM:I was there and I am mentioned in the article. When you read it please keep in mind what I have added below. Because the New York Times did not get it right. Close but not correct.
DLP wrote on November 30, 2007 3:10 AM:1. The weapons were not taken out of the BPA by the truck load unless approved by US Army.
2. Like I said before Iraq is a cash society. Briefcase or duffle bag of cash is suspicious in USA and not usual in Iraq.
3.It would not have made a difference recording serial numbers when you have Isgrigg and Cox stealing weapons from the tarmac.
4. Cox and Isgrigg NEVER called ahead that's why I was at BIAP to help skylink.
5.The "Maze of Red Tape" was getting the serial numbers recorded and DD250 signed so supplier could be paid. It took 1 or 2 days. Major delays were caused by air cargo hold ups in Germany and Turkey.
6.Col. Hinton could have done better by stopping Isgrigg and Cox from stealing weapons. But as usual said nothing.
7.Apperantly Col. Hinton agrees with theft as being the best way according to your article.
8. Actually the US Army has a 10 year plan for Iraq 2014.
9. Not only South African PSD teams but American PSD teams they received ammunition mainly, few weapons.
10. Tisdale at times had properly been informed to release weapons but would make it necessary for Victor Noe and I to drive ourselves through the red zone to tell him to get his job done. Yet another reason he was fired.
11.If Tisdale thought there was some illegal activity he could have reported it to the US Army CID that was guarding the base. But that never happened.
Thomas Babysteps- Search your name on Zabasearch. ((check messages))
Jack the Bear wrote on December 1, 2007 6:12 PM:Bandot,
Your name is quite telling.
Skylink was part of the problem. It was as shill business set up to continue working the ALS business.
The majors didn't steal weapons, they were avoiding losing them in the warehouse system and to LTC Selph. The ALS/Skylink warehouses were like the roach motel, weapons went in and didn't come out.
How do I know this? I used to drive one of the trucks that picked up the weapons on the tarmac. They were promptly delivered to the Iraqis and paperwork completed or taken to Taji and placed in a secure warehouse run by military. If we called ahead, we got hit 30% of the time we rolled. When we didn't call ahead, we never got hit. You do the math. Someone in one of the warehouses was tipping off the badguys, but you all were too stupid or too well paid to figure it out. Unfortunately, LTC Selph took control of the Taji warehouses and who knows what happened after that.
Victor Noe, LTC Selph and probably you and LTC Davis will answer for your actions. Oh yes, if you haven't read it yet, LTC Davis was caught taking bribes and is rolling over on all of you. Better make a deal with the feds while you can!