DREGULATOR VOL. VII # 8: A FAREWELL TO AN ARMS DEALER

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Friday, March 28, 2008

posted by Cintra Wilson at 5:46 PM
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Let us now bid a big Dregulatorial 'Sayonara' to Victor Bout, the World's Most Dregsational international arms trader (immortalized as the lead character in the Nick Cage film "Lord of War.") Bout's phenomenal career arming the world's most skeevy terrorist and rebel organizations came to a dramatic halt on March 6 in Thailand, just after Bout delivered several hundred million dollars worth of arms to Bulgaria. It was, we are told, a DEA sting - Bout tried to sell weapons to DEA agents posing as Columbian FARC....and the Thai police nabbed him.

Not everyone thinks this is the whole story.

Witold Gadowski, in the Polish publication Gazeta Polska, suggested that Bout's arrest had little to do with any ingenuity on the part of the DEA. Bout, after all, had always enjoyed fabulous contacts in Moscow and cozy ties with the FSB, the Russian Security Service. Bout's arrest, says Gadowski, had more to do with Bout's getting sold out by the FSB as part of Russia's recent regime handover from Vladimir Putin to Dmitry Medeyev.

Sayeth Gadowski:

"Somebody in the Kremlin has decided to wind up a protective umbrella over the most wanted international criminals....Bout, used before in many actions, became useless ballast to the new 'tsarevich' - Medvedev....Now, when the President-elect Dmitry Medvedev is getting ready to do some 'face-saving' in Russia, the old 'kings' of the criminal underworld, serving the Kremlin as useful agents, are being dumped while new, still unknown replacements will take their place."

Begging the question: Who will buy this wonderful morning? Who will follow in Victor Bout's flaming hoofprints, step in and scoop up all the bargain bullets and armaments left in wet little bunkers all over the eastern bloc after the fall of the old Soviet Union?

Enter, precocious young American entrepreneur!

Plucky twenty-two-year-old Efriam Diveroli began a company called AEY Inc. several years ago. Mr. Diveroli has recently come to attention for trafficking faulty bullets to military and police forces in Afghanistan - which he was supposed to do, to fulfill his $300 million defense contract with the Pentagon.

Yes, OUR Pentagon.

The bigger joke is that Mr. Diveroli, who described himself as the "President and only official employee" of AEY in 2006, has, according to the New York Times, been supplying "ammunition or equipment" to the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transport Security Administration and the State Department since 2004....when he was nineteen years old.

The bullets he supplied to Afghanistan, it seems, have been a source of complaint because they're considerably decayed and ineffective; many were 42-years old, and from China (which is, uh, something like completely illegal.)

The Pentagon, in defending itself, claimed that Diveroli lied to them and said that the decaying Chinese munitions were Hungarian.

No man, those letters, on the side of the box? Uhhhh....Those aren't Chinese characters, man, those are, like....uh.... Magyar. That's, like, Ural-Altaic. I know, it looks Chinese, right? But it is so totally Hungarian! It's WAY Hungarian. The Dragon and the Chicken? Yeah, those are, like, Hungarian signs of, um....national greatness. Check it out, you wanna buy a Bulgarian IGLA missile?

If you think about it, the Pentagon giving $300 million dollars to this guy is sort of like the US Department of Health and Human Services approving the direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to physicians in the American Medical Association by a private subcontractor -- namely, Stuckey, the guy with the black TransAm who hangs around in front of the 7-Eleven near Pomona College.

See, see how these things go wrong when, in pursuit of the lowest bottom line, government jobs are left to private amateurs? If the Pentagon really wants to traffic in illegal international arms sales, they should at least give the contract to Dyncorp.

Anyway...we have bigger problems over here in the States.

The Cleveland Leader printed an interview by ex- Black Flag frontman-cum-raconteur Henry Rollins, who claims he has inside intel that Britney Spears had help signing on her latest album:

" (Britney) gets her phrasing basically from this older R&B woman. I found that out talking to an engineer. Britney apparently isn't actually the worst singer, she just has no feel. So they bring in this older black woman who sings the song, then Britney sings to it, and they kind of make a mix of the two voices, and that's what you hear on the records."

Insta-soul!

Perhaps Hillary should consider doing the same thing -- you know, get some earthy, warm-voiced African-American to record her campaign speeches, so she can lip-synch over them. If Obama won't do her tracks, she should try to get James Earl Jones. That might at least get the Pentagon behind her, as long as she does the heavy breathing correctly.

CAVEAT EMPTOR, fiends...and remember, when buying 90 million Albanian cartridges for your security troops on the border of Pakistan, make sure your arms dealer is old enough to grow his own mustache, and check the expiration dates on the cartons. It's just common sense.

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