posted on February 2, 2007 10:16:41 AM new
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Pentagon Selling F-14 Parts to Iran
By James Joyner
The Defense Department’s military surplus sales system is so incompetent that it is selling F-14 parts to Iran, reports AP’s Sharon Theimer.
Fighter jet parts and other sensitive U.S. military gear seized from front companies for Iran and brokers for China have been traced in criminal cases to a surprising source: the Pentagon.
In one case, federal investigators said, contraband purchased in Defense Department surplus auctions was delivered to Iran, a country President Bush has branded part of an “axis of evil.” In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents say those parts did make it to Iran.
Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or “de-milled” - rendered useless for military purposes - or, if auctioned, sold only to buyers who promise to obey U.S. arms embargoes, export controls and other laws. Yet the surplus sales can operate like a supermarket for arms dealers.
[…]
Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally. In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department’s surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again - customs evidence tags still attached - to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.
“That would be evidence of a significant breakdown, in my view, in controls and processes,” said Greg Kutz, the Government Accountability Office’s head of special investigations. “It shouldn’t happen the first time, let alone the second time.”
A Defense Department official, Fred Baillie, said his agency followed procedures. “The fact that those individuals chose to violate the law and the fact that the customs people caught them really indicates that the process is working,” said Baillie, the Defense Logistics Agency’s executive director of distribution. “Customs is supposed to check all exports to make sure that all the appropriate certifications and licenses had been granted.”
The Pentagon recently retired its Tomcats and is shipping tens of thousands of spare parts to its surplus office - the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service - where they could be sold in public auctions. Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.
[…]
The Pentagon’s public surplus sales took in $57 million in fiscal 2005. The agency also moves extra supplies around within the government and gives surplus military gear such as weapons, armored personnel carriers and aircraft to state and local law enforcement.
[…]
Asked why the Pentagon would sell any F-14 parts, given their value to Iran, Baillie said: “Our first priority truly is national security, and we take that very seriously. However, we have to balance that with our other requirement to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.”
In the context of a $439.3 billion defense budget, grossing $57 million in sales is less than a rounding error. When one subtracts the cost of running the program and monitoring it, it becomes quite trivial. And my guess is that the sale of items that would be of potential security concern–like supplying a country with which we might well soon be at war with fighter jet parts–amounts to an infinitesimal part of that.
So, why in the hell would we even consider putting them up for auction? Indeed, who else would be willing to pay serious money for parts for an airplane than is no longer in service anywhere else on the planet?
posted on February 2, 2007 10:16:48 AM newAnd they ARE..it's a FACT.
So thats proof positive, craw says so.
"When I talk to liberals, I don't expect them to understand my positions on various issues. I spend most of my time trying to help them understand their own." —Mike Adams
posted on February 2, 2007 11:39:57 AM new
LOL....yep, that's the new 'game' in town.
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on February 2, 2007 11:40:27 AM new
Why is the Pentagon DOING WHAT????
The correct answer is THEY'RE NOT.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Ann Coulter
[ edited by Linda_K on Feb 2, 2007 12:03 PM ]
posted on February 2, 2007 01:14:52 PM new
No wonder the Republicans are confused.
Linda says: why is the pentagon doing what?
In other words she does not know what the pentagon is doing, but then she replies with this:
The correct answer is THEY'RE NOT.
It is amazing. She does know what is going on, but yet she replies with a definite answer. Which is it? Linda knows what is going on or she doesn't. How can one have a definite answer if she doesn't know what is going on in the first place?
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on February 2, 2007 01:16:47 PM new
Mingo, I believe this is what you are referring to:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries — including Iran and China — who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department's surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components.
In one case, federal investigators said, the contraband made it to Iran, a country President George W. Bush branded part of an "axis of evil."
In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, say those parts made it to Iran.
The surplus sales can operate like a supermarket for arms dealers.
"Right Item, Right Time, Right Place, Right Price, Every Time. Best Value Solutions for America's Warfighters," the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service says on its Web site, calling itself "the place to obtain original U.S. Government surplus property."
Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally.
In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department's surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again — customs evidence tags still attached — to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.
That incident appalled even an expert on weaknesses in Pentagon surplus security controls.
"That would be evidence of a significant breakdown, in my view, in controls and processes," said Greg Kutz, the Government Accountability Office's head of special investigations. "It shouldn't happen the first time, let alone the second time."
A Defense Department official, Fred Baillie, said his agency followed procedures.
"The fact that those individuals chose to violate the law and the fact that the customs people caught them really indicates that the process is working," said Baillie, the Defense Logistics Agency's executive director of distribution. "Customs is supposed to check all exports to make sure that all the appropriate certifications and licenses had been granted."
The Pentagon recently retired its Tomcats and is shipping tens of thousands of spare parts to its surplus office — the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service — where they could be sold in public auctions. Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.
"It stands to reason Iran will be even more aggressive in seeking F-14 parts," said Stephen Bogni, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's arms export investigations. Iran can only produce about 15 percent of the parts itself, he said.
Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or "de-milled" — rendered useless for military purposes — or, if auctioned, sold only to buyers who promise to obey U.S. arms embargoes, export controls and other laws.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmingly easy to acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million (euro850,000) worth — including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance antennas — by driving onto a base and posing as defense contractors.
"They helped us load our van," Kutz said. Investigators used a fake identity to access a surplus Web site operated by a Pentagon contractor and bought still more, including a dozen microcircuits used on F-14 fighters.
The undercover buyers received phone calls from the Defense Department asking why they had no Social Security number or credit history, but they deflected the questions by presenting a phony utility bill and claiming to be an identity theft victim.
The Pentagon's public surplus sales took in $57 million (euro44 million) in fiscal 2005. The agency also moves extra supplies around within the government and gives surplus military gear such as weapons, armored personnel carriers and aircraft to state and local law enforcement.
Investigators have found the Pentagon's inventory and sales controls rife with errors. They say the sales are closely watched by friends and foes of the United States.
Among cases in which U.S. military technology made its way from surplus auctions to brokers for Iran, China and others:
—Items seized in December 2000 at a Bakersfield, California, warehouse that belonged to Multicore, described by U.S. prosecutors as a front company for Iran. Among the weaponry it acquired were fighter jet and missile components, including F-14 parts from Pentagon surplus sales, customs agents said. The surplus purchases were returned after two Multicore officers were sentenced to prison for weapons export violations. London-based Multicore is now out of business, but customs continues to investigate whether U.S. companies sold military equipment to it illegally.
In 2005, customs agents came upon the same surplus F-14 parts with the evidence labels still attached while investigating a different company suspected of serving as an Iranian front. They seized the items again. They declined to provide details because the investigation is ongoing.
—Arif Ali Durrani, a Pakistani, was convicted last year in California in the illegal export of weapons components to the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Belgium in 2004 and 2005 and sentenced to just over 12 years in prison. Customs investigators say the items included Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran that he bought from a U.S. company that acquired them from a Pentagon surplus sale, and that those parts made it to Iran via Malaysia. Durrani is appealing his conviction.
An accomplice, former Naval intelligence officer George Budenz, pleaded guilty and was sentenced in July to a year in prison. Durrani's prison term is his second; he was convicted in 1987 of illegally exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran.
—State Metal Industries, a Camden, New Jersey, company convicted in June of violating export laws over a shipment of AIM-7 Sparrow missile guidance parts it bought from Pentagon surplus in 2003 and sold to an entity partly owned by the Chinese government. The company pleaded guilty to an export violation, was fined $250,000 (euro193,185) and placed on probation for three years. Customs and Border Protection inspectors seized the parts — nearly 200 pieces of the guidance system for the Sparrow missile system — while inspecting cargo at a New Jersey port.
"Our mistake was selling it for export," said William Robertson, State Metal's attorney. He said the company knew the material was going to China but didn't know the Chinese government partially owned the buyer.
—In October, Ronald Wiseman, a longtime Pentagon surplus employee in the Middle East, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing surplus military Humvees and selling them to a customer in Saudi Arabia from 1999 to 2002. An accomplice, fellow surplus employee Gayden Woodson, will be sentenced this month.
The Humvees were equipped for combat zones and some were not recovered, Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Ingersoll said.
—A California company, All Ports, shipped hundreds of containers of U.S. military technology to China between 1994 and 1999, much of it acquired in Pentagon surplus sales, court documents show. Customs agents discovered the sales in May 1999 when All Ports tried to ship to China components for guided missiles, bombs, the B-1 bomber and underwater mines. The company and its owners were convicted in 2000; an appeals court upheld the conviction in 2002.
Rep. Christopher Shays called the cases "a huge breakdown, an absolute, huge breakdown."
"The military should not sell or give away any sensitive military equipment. If we no longer need it, it needs to be destroyed — totally destroyed," said Shays, until this month the chairman of a House panel on national security. "The Department of Defense should not be supplying sensitive military equipment to our adversaries, our enemies, terrorists."
It is no secret to defense experts that valuable technology can be found amid surplus scrap.
On a visit to a Defense Department surplus site about five years ago, defense consultant Randall Sweeney literally stumbled upon some that clearly should not have been up for sale.
"I was walking through a pile of supposedly de-milled electrical items and found a heat-seeking missile warhead intact," Sweeney said, declining to identify the surplus location for security reasons. "I carried it over and showed them. I said, 'This shouldn't be in here."'
Sweeney, president of Defense and Aerospace International in West Palm Beach, Florida, sees human error as a big problem. Surplus items are numbered, and an error of a single digit can make sensitive technology improperly available, he said. Knowledgeable buyers could easily spot a valuable item, he added: "I'm not the only sophisticated eye in the world."
Baillie said the Pentagon is working to tighten security. Steps include setting up property centers to better identify surplus parts and employing people skilled at spotting sensitive items. If there is uncertainty about whether an item is safe, he said, it is destroyed.
Of the 76,000 parts for the F-14, 60 percent are "general hardware" such as nuts and bolts and can be sold to the public without restriction, Baillie said. About 10,000 are unique to Tomcats and will be destroyed, he said.
An additional 23,000 parts are valuable for military and commercial use and are being studied to see whether it's safe to sell them, Baillie said.
Asked why the Pentagon would sell any F-14 parts, given their value to Iran, Baillie said: "Our first priority truly is national security, and we take that very seriously. However, we have to balance that with our other requirement to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money."
Kutz, the government investigator, said surplus F-14 parts shouldn't be sold. He believes Iran already has Tomcat parts from Pentagon surplus sales: "The key now is, going forward, to shut that down and not let it happen again."
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on February 2, 2007 01:23:56 PM new
The OP statement was VERY FALSE, VERY MISLEADING. Period.
And I stand by exactly what I said. The "pentagon is NOT supporting these weapons being sold to Iran".
THAT is FALSE.
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Split personality...can't decide just who you are so you use both userids.
========
NO WHERE does that Fox News article logansdad posted state the 'pentagon supports this'. NO WHERE.....sybil.
Again, it's a figment of your own fantasies.
And now we also have logansdad coming into TRY and save your rear end. Used to be helen who would try and support what YOU couldn't. But now that you've pissed her off too....tsk tsk tsk....you'll have to depend on ol' logansdad....and he's not good at doing so at all.
Hang in there sybil....maybe someday you'll find out who you really are.
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on February 2, 2007 02:28:00 PM new
""""Linda_K
posted on February 2, 2007 02:15:56 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOL
Playing Sybil again today are you? LOL LOL LOL
Split personality...can't decide just who you are so you use both userids.
========
NO WHERE does that Fox News article logansdad posted state the 'pentagon supports this'. NO WHERE.....sybil.
Again, it's a figment of your own fantasies.
And now we also have logansdad coming into TRY and save your rear end. Used to be helen who would try and support what YOU couldn't. But now that you've pissed her off too....tsk tsk tsk....you'll have to depend on ol' logansdad....and he's not good at doing so at all.
Hang in there sybil....maybe someday you'll find out who you really are.""""
LOLOL! Thank you linDUH for admitting in your usual style that you had no facts and are wrong !
posted on February 2, 2007 03:10:14 PM new
So the three clowns agree.....but again....none of them can point out just where the pentagon was SUPPORTING this.
Buy hey....none of them deal in reality anyway. They all live in a constant state of DENIAL.
What was I expecting this time?....for them to point out just where the officials at the pentagon WERE saying they support the selling of these arms to our enemies[/b]?
ROFLMHO.
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on February 2, 2007 03:55:57 PM new
linduh, it's nobody's fault but yours that you refuse to read, or are incapable of reading, the posts here.
An intelligent, educated person could easily see where the problem with the Pentagon is....
Try having someone read the following very slowly to you....
"""Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.""
"""Asked why the Pentagon would sell any F-14 parts, given their value to Iran, Baillie said: “Our first priority truly is national security, and we take that very seriously. However, we have to balance that with our other requirement to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.”"""
posted on February 2, 2007 10:20:46 PM new
The F-14 is now classed as obsolete junk and are being scrapped and the mundane hardware (nuts, bolts, fittings, etc) offered at auction. Anything of military use or protected technology is not part of the process.
This is mostly headlines for people who can't read. Chalk another one up for the dummy brigade.
[ edited by desquirrel on Feb 2, 2007 10:21 PM ]
posted on February 3, 2007 06:21:34 AM new
poor duhsquirrell...he drools, ""This is mostly headlines for people who can't read. Chalk another one up for the dummy brigade."
WHO can't read?
""""""Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.""""
Why would they BUY it if they couldn't USE it ....show us where it says they're only selling nuts and bolts ?????
No, it's just more underhanded shenanigans under the bushit administration.
posted on February 3, 2007 11:48:46 AM new
One of the things which demonstrates an incredible level of stupidity is your general confusion regarding editorials and op ed pieces with NEWS. If you then couple this with a total ignorance of the subject matter of said op-ed piece and add the compulsion formulate and squeak out an opinion, you wind up with a truly emarrassing picture.
posted on February 3, 2007 04:19:19 PM new
"""One of the things which demonstrates an incredible level of stupidity """
1. ...is faulting others for having opinions....
2. ..ASSuming that duhsquirrel is the only person in the world with firsthand information on everything..
3. ...ASSuming anyone needs firsthand information to form an opinion..( I believe in Global Warming but never went on a scientific expedition to Antartica..)
4. ...ASSuming an editorial or opinion piece is never based on facts...
posted on February 3, 2007 05:31:29 PM newNO WHERE does that Fox News article logansdad posted state the 'pentagon supports this'. NO WHERE.....sybil.
Of course they do not. They are taking a blind eye that it is happening. They are not denying it is happening or even preventing it. It is a good thing the governement is not trying to get rid of old nuclear weapons.
They are using your philosphy of "Why is the Pentagon DOING WHAT????"
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on February 4, 2007 12:25:30 PM new
Again "opinions" can be had ABOUT facts, but they cannot REPLACE fact no matter how left you go.
If you spend your time reading news sources rather than editorials you would know about the area in the West where warplanes are stripped of "sensitive" parts and the rest auctioned. This was besides articles specific to the F14.
