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23
Jun
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by QuestionGirl • 1:40 pm
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From TPM:
Was the State Department involved in a shoddy and potentially illegal ammo shipment that led to the arrest of a 22-year-old Miami arms dealer last week?
That’s what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) now says. The House oversight committee says it has evidence that the U.S. embassy in Albania helped Albanian officials keep the allegedly illegal shipment of Chinese-made ammunition to Afghanistan under wraps and then failed to disclose that information when Waxman’s committee asked about it.
Last week we updated you about the arrest of Efraim Diveroli and three of his business partners with AEY Inc. Federal prosecutors say he violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits buying and selling weapons from certain countries, including China. The ammunition in question was obtained by AEY from an Albanian arms dealer.
Waxman’s new– and potentially explosive — evidence stems from an interview by the oversight committee of Army Maj. Larry Harrison, the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Albania. Harrison told the committee about a previously undisclosed November meeting that included Albanian officials and U.S. Ambassador John Withers and others from the U.S. embassy in Tirana.
Waxman describes Harrison’s account of the meeting in a letter today to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
As a result of discussions that went late into the night, the Albanian Defense Minister ordered one of his top generals to remove all evidence of Chinese packaging before the site was inspected the following day. Major Harrison told the Committee: “the Ambassador agreed that this would alleviate the suspicion of wrongdoing.”
Filed: Arms Deals, Congressional Hearings
