Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.
Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.
This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.
Read the entire New York Times story--it is mind-boggling. Here is a young kid who decides to jump into the shady world of the arms trade--and the Pentagon happily gives this kid's company $300 million worth of arms contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the NY Times, AEY was an unknown defense company that has been thriving since 2003, when the Pentagon started tossing billions of dollars to train and equip police and military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Its rise from obscurity once seemed to make it a successful example of the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral elements of war-fighting strategy." This is the most important sentence in the Times story. The Pentagon is not sending their own experts to the former Communist bloc countries to purchase these old munitions. Instead, the Bush administration has ordered the Pentagon to throw the U.S. taxpayer's money into a giant trough to allow war-profiteers to get piggishly fat with profit. AEY is an example of the excessiveness the Bush administration is giving to these war-profiteers. The losers in this game are the U.S. taxpayer, whose money is going to these war-profiteers, and the Iraqi and Afghan police and military, who are getting stuck with this useless junk of munitions.
There are so many more details in this story that are just amazing. The 22-year-old kid, Efraim E. Diveroli, has been involved in two instances of domestic violence against his girlfriend--one of which, in November 2005, the "young woman sought an order of protection from him in the domestic violence division of Dade County Circuit Court." Miami police were also called out to Diveroli's condo "during an argument between him and another girlfriend. According to the police report, he had thrown her 'clothes out in the hallway and told her to get out.' A witness told the police Mr. Diveroli had dragged her back into the apartment. The police found the woman crying; she said she had not been dragged. Mr. Diveroli was not charged." AEY's vice president, David M. Packouz, was a licensed masseur. Both Diveroli and Packouz were involved in a fight with a valet parking attendant in December 2006, outside of Diveroli's condo. Miami police were again called out. When police searched Diveroli, they found a fake ID, which would allow him to purchase alcohol as a minor. Possession of forged documents is a felony, in which a felony conviction would nullify Diveroli's federal firearms license. Diveroli "entered a six-month diversion program for first offenders in May 2007 that spared him from standing trial." Reading this, I have to ask, this is the president of a $300 million arms company? It is almost like The Wild One meets The Lord of War.
Welcome to the world of the Bush administration's war profiteers.
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