Yes, I’m going to lay the following at their feet! Corruption starts at the head of the beast. And you can’t get any more corrupt than a flock of in-power republicans!

Iraq’s Arms Bazaar

How firearms intended for Iraqi security forces are winding up in the hands of extremists across the region

The attacks were no mystery. What puzzled Turkish police was the weapons’ origin. Glocks are high-quality sidearms, but by last year they had practically become common street weapons in Turkey. [...] The manufacturer informed Ankara that the pistols were consigned originally to ” ‘US Mission Iraq’ [formerly the Coalition Provisional Authority], address: Republican Presidential Compound, Ministry of the Interior, Baghdad, Iraq.”

There are many more where those came from. [...] A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office last month showed that since 2004, some 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols, bought with U.S. money for Iraqi security forces, have gone missing.

The U.S. military has investigated the problem repeatedly-and the losses look more appalling every time. Major U.S. arms transfers began when Gen. David Petraeus was commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I), better known as Minsticky. Its mission was to train, arm and organize Iraq’s military and police forces, but the Iraqis’ weapons came via the State Department, and the supply line was actually run by private contractors. A certain sense of drama militated against good bookkeeping, too. In a recent radio interview, Petraeus-now the commander of all Coalition forces in Iraq-reminisced about helicopters ferrying weapons to Iraqi troops under fire at night in Najaf. Men were “kicking two battalions’ worth of equipment off the ramp and getting out of there while we could,” he said.

But there were also signs of problems more serious than bad record-keeping. One of Petraeus’s subordinates, Col. Theodore Westhusing, had taken leave from his position as a professor of ethics at West Point to serve a six-month tour as commander of the unit training counterterrorism and Special Operations Forces. By the spring of 2005, Westhusing had grown increasingly concerned about the corruption he thought he saw in the program. He was especially upset after receiving an anonymous letter on May 19, 2005, which claimed there was outright fraud by government contractors. Among the alleged problems: failure to account for almost 200 guns.

Westhusing passed the letter up the chain of command. A few days later he wrote a formal memo saying he thought the charges were off-base. But at the same time his conversations and e-mails with his family members became cryptic and he seemed concerned for his safety. Colleagues said he looked exhausted and preoccupied. On June 5, 2005, Westhusing was found dead in his temporary quarters at Camp Dublin near Baghdad airport, apparently having shot himself with his own pistol. “I cannot support a [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuses and liars,” he wrote in a note found near his body. “Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential-I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

Military investigators concluded that Westhusing’s death was a suicide and that the various complaints he leveled against commanders and contractors were “unfounded.”

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek

Source: MSNBC.com