U.S.-Funded Gun Suppliers Have Created a "Missing" Weapons Disaster

By Pratap Chatterjee, IPS News. Posted September 23, 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 22 (IPS) -- Clandestine gun suppliers, funded by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, have flooded Iraq with a million 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 $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's business. The report draws lessons from countries to make 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 U.S.-based nonprofit 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 U.S. Army Missile Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is run out of the Putnam Industrial Park in Madison, about a mile 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 the U.S. Congress that the fall of the Berlin Wall 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 an S-300, a series of Soviet long-range surface-to-air missile systems (the equivalent of the Patriot missile defence 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 U.S. military equipment. Taos also provides vehicles or spare parts to test ranges that rely on Russian radars and vehicles, and in the last five years, has won a number of orders to provide weapons for the U.S. 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 U.S. military contracts.

The Iraq Sales

Over the last 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's subcontractors were either operating illegally or had been listed by the United Nations for smuggling weapons.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, guns, amnesty international, arms dealers, taos industries, aerocom

Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of Iraq Inc. (Seven Stories Press, September 2004).

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