Shady deals in Iraq's arms bazaar
By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO - Clandestine gun suppliers, funded by the United States and
Iraqi governments, have flooded Iraq with millions of weapons since 2003,
charges a new Amnesty International investigation.
Because of faulty or non-existent government tracking systems, many of those
guns have gone missing, and some have turned up in the hands of insurgents.
Contracts with one of these companies, Taos Industries, account for almost half
of the US$217 million Baghdad and Washington have officially spent to arm the
Iraqi army, police and security forces employed by various Iraqi ministries.
Amnesty's new report "Blood at the Crossroads: Making the Case
for a Global Arms Trade Treaty", shines a light on the catastrophic
human-rights consequences of the kind of unrestrained arms trading that forms
much of Taos' business. The report draws lessons from countries for
recommendations on how to prevent human-rights abuses when governments sell or
transfer conventional arms to other countries. Research for the report was
conducted by TransArms, a US-based non-profit group that tracks global arms
transfers.
Taos Industries
Taos Industries, the biggest corporate supplier of small arms to Iraq since the
invasion in 2003, was founded by David Hogan shortly after he retired from the
military in 1989. Hogan had been chief of foreign intelligence for the US Army
Missile Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is
run out of the Putnam Industrial Park in Madison, about a kilometer from the
military base.
A few years after Taos was created, Keith R Hall, deputy assistant secretary of
defense for Intelligence under president Bill Clinton, told US Congress that
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 had created an "opportunity to acquire and
exploit major, state-of-the-art weapons systems".
From his vantage point as a former intelligence official in the missile
command, with knowledge of the "black budget" or secret military contracts used
to buy such systems, Hogan was well aware that such opportunities could be
profitable.
In the early 1990s, he started bidding on classified contracts put out by the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's military intelligence branch.
At first he was beaten out by better-connected dealers, such as Carlyle Group
subsidiary BDM International of McLean, Virginia, which won the bid to acquire
a S-300, a series of Soviet long-range surface-to-air missile systems (the
equivalent of the Patriot missile defense system).
Despite losing this major contract, Taos won lucrative orders over the next
decade to sell spare parts to foreign military customers that use older US
military equipment. Taos also provides vehicles or spare parts to test ranges
that rely on Russian radars and vehicles, and in the past five years, has won a
number of orders to provide weapons for the US military-backed governments in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Taos was bought in October 2006 by Agility, a Kuwaiti company that is operated
by the family of Jamil Sultan al-Essa, to allow them to bid on classified US
military contracts.
The Iraq sales
Over the past five years since the invasion of Iraq, Taos has received seven of
the 47 weapons supply contracts listed by Amnesty, worth $95.1 million out of
the $217 million total.
The majority of sales were for Soviet-type infantry weapons. Among the weapons
listed in some 35 contract documents reviewed by CorpWatch were requests for
assault rifles (AK-47s), M4 Benelli shotguns, portable machine guns (RPK, PKM),
sniper rifles, shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenades (RPG-7), UBGL M1
grenade launcher and 9mm pistols (mostly Glocks), and ammunition.
Amnesty investigators have also uncovered documents that suggest that several
of Taos' sub-contractors were either operating illegally or had been listed by
the United Nations for smuggling weapons.
For example, Amnesty alleges that Taos first sub-contracted to a
Moldovan/Ukrainian company, Aerocom, to transport from Bosnia to Iraq 99 tonnes
of arms for the Iraqi security forces. The sales for the year ending June 31,
2005, were mostly for Kalashnikov rifles.
Aerocom has a history of shady dealings. In 2002 an expert report commissioned
by the United Nations Security Council charged the company with smuggling
weapons from Serbia to Liberia in violation of a UN arms embargo. In August
2004, Moldovan authorities revoked Aerocom's air operating license. Scout, a
Croatian company named as the broker in these shipments, was not registered in
Croatia to deal in arms.
In May 2005, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera revealed that Taos had
supplied thousands of Italian-made Beretta 92S pistols that were among the
weapons seized in Iraq from al-Qaeda operatives responsible for killing
civilians. The Beretta pistols had been dispatched in July 2004 from Britain to
the US military base in Baghdad. An Italian court investigation the next year
questioned the shadowy methods used in shipping the guns from Italy to Britain.
Despite the Italian reporting and the publication of the Aerocom contracts in a
2006 Amnesty report "Dead on Time", the US government continued to award
contracts to Taos as recently as October 2007.
Taos Industries refused to answer the specific allegations in Blood at the
Crossroads.
"Amnesty International's reporting about Taos Industries is factually
inaccurate and misleading. Taos' operations have been conducted transparently
and within US Department of Defense guidelines," the company said in a
statement released to CorpWatch.
"Taos sells and delivers equipment to only one client: the US government. The
company has shared information about the transactions in the Amnesty reports
with Congress and the Defense Department."
Amnesty researchers note that blame must also be assigned to the US officials
who ran the program, who admit their arms control systems for contracts such as
the Taos one using Aerocom have been flawed.
Missing weapons
Indeed, two US government investigative reports have highlighted this problem.
An October 2006 report by the US Special Inspector General to Iraq calculates
that serial numbers were logged for only 2.7% of the 370,000 infantry weapons
supplied to the Iraqi security forces under US government contracts. In many
cases, contractors delivering arms imports did not turn in the obligatory
official inspection reports, known as DD-250s, substituting instead "Adequate
for Payment" paperwork.
A July 2007 report by the US Government Accountability Office revealed that at
least 190,000 weapons were "unaccounted for" in Iraq because of discrepancies
between what was authorized for export and what the Multinational Security
Transition Command-Iraq recorded for the period between June 2004 and July
2007.
Arms experts say this was a serious mistake. "It is likely that a large
proportion of the hundreds of thousands of small arms and light weapons that
have 'gone missing' in Iraq are either in the hands of anti-US insurgents or in
other countries, fueling conflicts there," said William Hartung, the director
of the Arms and Security Initiative of the New America Foundation.
Amnesty says the situation in Iraq should also be seen as part of the bigger
global problem of unrestricted arms sales.
"The time for an arms trade treaty is now," said Amnesty's Brian Wood. ”Sixty
years after the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the same
governments can and should deliver an effective agreement on international arms
transfers with human rights at its heart."
Pratap Chatterjee is the managing editor of Corpwatch, a California-based
group that investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights,
environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world.
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