Home
Archive
Columnists
Video
Blogs
Discuss
About
Search
Donate
Advertise
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Register to Vote: Rock the Vote, powered by Working Assets Wireless
Advertisement
  • AlterNetYour turn

Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.


Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.

Further Adventures of 22-Year-Old Arms Dealer Efraim Diveroli

By Chris Nolan . Posted June 24, 2008.


Hearings on Capitol Hill today.
diveroli

Share and save this post:
Digg iconDelicious iconReddit iconFark iconYahoo! iconNewsvine! iconFacebook iconNewsTrust icon

More stories by Chris Nolan

Get AlterNet in
your mailbox!

 

The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing today to determine how in the hell 22-year-old Efraim Diveroli got a $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghanistan, Andrew Tilghman reports:

The story of arms dealer AEY Inc., run by the 22-year-old Miami man who was indicted last week, is getting worse by the minute.

I know you Peeksters love the Efraim Diveroli AEY arms trader scandal. So, here's your fix for today.

Four government officials are testifying on Capitol Hill today about how the company ended up with a $300 million U.S. military contract

providing unusable and probably illegal weapons to the Afghan Army.

So far, the officials haven't discussed the alleged State Department cover-up yet. But they are delving into AEY's previous contracts with the government  and it doesn't look good.

In his opening statement, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) revealed a series of previous problems that the military had with AEY. [TPMM]

Read documents from today's hearing here. One of the more remarkable revelations comes in Oversight Committee Chair Waxman's opening statement. "It appears that the Army agreed to pay $300 million for ammunition it could have gotten for free," he writes. Apparently, AEY sold ammunition that the originating countries were trying to give away for free.

More TPMM coverage of L'Affaire Diveroli is available here.

Please note: Anti-semitic comments are not welcome here. This is a defense procurement scandal, not a opportunity to burden us with your pathetic paranoid screeds about the International Jewish Conspiracy. Got it?

Digg!

See more stories tagged with: diveroli, aey

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »


Advertisement

 

Comments Turn comments off sitewide Give us feedback »
Comments closed.
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.
View:
What a way to kill a conversation
Posted by: blogbooks on Jun 24, 2008 2:07 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"Please note: Anti-semitic comments are not welcome here. This is a defense procurement scandal, not a opportunity to burden us with your pathetic paranoid screeds about the International Jewish Conspiracy. Got it?"

I like how your story includes a disclaimer even though there were no comments before this one.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

No screeds before
Posted by: kilgor on Jun 25, 2008 7:55 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The reason that no anti-semitic screeds were seen in previous postings is that Alternat probably had to censor them out. Hence, while no screeds may have appeared, that does not mean none were written.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

paranoia?
Posted by: Doubtom on Jun 25, 2008 8:22 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What, in the whole world, is funnier than a jew accusing others of paranoia? I'm laughing and therefor I'm obviously anti-semitic, unless I'm a jew , in which case, I'm obviously self-hating. This is a public service.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

?
Posted by: 113121 on Jun 25, 2008 8:37 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I speak every couple of days with several people who are proud of their Israel first and foremost political views. One of them votes in both Israel and the U.S. If I don't like this how do I express my dismay and the fact that I am very fond of my Jewish family and friends who don't hold those views? Do I end every comment with "Some of my best friends are Jewish?" Really, lets spell this out.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: ? Posted by: Doubtom
I concur this is not about an "International Jewish Conspiracy"
Posted by: channing on Jun 25, 2008 10:13 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Did you notice Lindsay your warning/disclaimer has gained all the comments so far? I'd like to address that and the substance of the article if that's ok.

For the record, and I've posted on this many times previously in debates with "yellow", (debates that to my knowledge ended with some mutual understanding btw) and others, that the term "Jewish" refers to religious people, not to elites who self-evidently despise "commoners" like us. There are indeed "pathetic paranoid screeds about the International Jewish Conspiracy", but this misrepresents the documented nature of the very real conspiracies driving our world into madness and also falsely accuses followers of the Jewish religion itself.

I concur with "113121" that most all actual Jewish practitioners are people who want nothing to do with genocide, elitism, secretism or global hegemony, but that doesn't mean people involved in these atrocities are not using the Jewish religion and Israel itself as subterfuge precisely because it allows them to run interference in any dialog by claiming "Anti semitism". This kind of obstruction in turn breeds those "screeds" because it's obvious to most that the best way to terminate hard investigations of facts or truths is to hide behind race, religion and/or condescension, oh, and secretism.

For some of us, religion itself can be safely described as a pathetic conspiracy, and therefore I agree with you Lindsey, this is not about Jewish anything, this IS about another corrupt self-identified "Jewish" individual willing to scam the American people and I consider this individual about as Jewish as I consider Adolf Bush Christian.

Now to the article.

I befriended a local lawyer about 10 years ago because of our shared community-activist interests, ending our very first conversation with him asking me why I don't run for mayor. I told him, "Not me, you, you're the lawyer". He did run as an independent against a well-financed repug and insider dem in the very next election with the support of hundreds of similar-minded activists and lost garnering 27% of the vote. The effort was not worthless however and everyone agreed we'd do it again. Here's where this becomes relevant to this story.

Under the fake GWOT with all its nazi-style no-bid plunder in DoD contracts, one individual who had one of these contracts, similar to the one mentioned in the article, stepped into the mayoral campaign with a huge check to back our once independent candidate... guess who stopped relying on and even communicating with the community activists that popularized his ascendancy? Don't bother, right? This time he won.

This DoD supplier doesn't actually produce/manufacture anything as two other significant defense-oriented manufacturers here do, he just buys/sells for the DoD what the DoD could easily arrange for itself, the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontract... this is called "privatization" and "free market" of course. The point is that this corruption afforded this otherwise fairly useless businessman to BUY his own Mayor and I believe this is exactly what's been happening all over the country.

The result is heavy-handed police-state local regulations, fines, 'sweeps', penalties, special access and real-estate favors for the financier, an administration that has lost its emphasis on balancing city demographic/economic issues, and intrusions into normally independent regional government entities and functions.

The 3rd Reich machine did it the same way. First robbing the productive economy and steering it into the military, essentially buying off resistance nationwide, one corruptible individual at a time.

Efraim Diveroli is a Fact of Flagrant Fascism that has hijacked the US today, real Americans must expose it for what it really is.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Sorry, this comment has been removed from the system.
Think!
Posted by: Doubtom on Jun 25, 2008 11:02 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
C'mon folks, think. THINK! What 22 yr. old do you know, who has these foreign connections and can land a multi-million dollar from a presumably sophisticated agency of our Federal Government with the assistance of Ambassadors and Generals? Doesn't this fairly scream of a much larger network? Isn't this punk just the tip of a real scandal and being a scandal, shouldn't we look forward to the inevitable cover-up so popular at the State Department and the Defense Department? Follow who benefits--follow the money.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: Precisely yellow... Posted by: channing
Where's Waldo?
Posted by: Bearzerker on Jun 27, 2008 5:55 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
... or another game we can play here, where's the FALL GUY?

AEY Inc. ??? where's the real puppetmaster here...???
22 yrs old and pulling off 300 million contracts? and no graft?...

This Administration just REEKS of corruption...
when will enough be enough and people seriously go after those who are profiting on death!

jeezus christ already!

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

OH NO THERE GOES MY CONTRACT
Posted by: AJWeishar on Jun 29, 2008 7:58 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
This guy is ruining it for all of us. My 12 year old daughter has a $200 million contract to send snow blowers to Basra.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]