US unhappy with Thai court's ruling on alleged arms dealer

      Check your foreign currency exchange rates against the Thai Baht with Bangkok Bank.

Check out Pattaya/Bangkok Shipping & Transport services

Bout escapes extradition to US

Writer: SURASAK GLAHANPublished: 12/08/2009 at 12:00 AMNewspaper section: News

A Bangkok court has dismissed a US request to extradite Russian arms trader Viktor Bout.The court yesterday ruled the charges against him were political and not punishable by Thai law.US officials said they were "disappointed" by the verdict. Thai prosecutors are considering an appeal. The Bangkok Criminal Court court ordered Mr Bout be released by Friday afternoon if Thai prosecutors had not lodged an appeal by that time. Mr Bout, 42, rushed to hug his tearful wife in the courtroom after Judge Jittakorn Pattanasiri read the verdict clearing him of terrorism charges. "I can't talk. There are so many emotions. I was very worried," wife Alla said.

Portrayed by the media as "the Merchant of Death" for his arms trading, Mr Bout was arrested in a Bangkok hotel in March last year in a sting operation. Agents from the US Drugs Enforcement Agency posed as rebels from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (Farc) seeking to buy millions of dollars in arms, including surface-to-air missiles, from Mr Bout. The US officials alleged Mr Bout's agreement to sell arms to Farc was tantamount to an act of terrorism, as the weapons would be used by the rebels to kill US citizens and destroy US property in Columbia.

The US made its extradition request to the Thai government based on the argument that Mr Bout was involved in a terrorist conspiracy to target the US. Farc is proscribed as a foreign terrorist organisation under US law. But Mr Bout denied the arms trafficking charges, saying he worked in the aviation and construction industries. The court yesterday dismissed US claims that Farc would use the weapons to kill US citizens and destroy its property due to a lack of evidence.

The court said, based on statements by prosecution witnesses, Farc's aim was to overthrow the Columbian government. As such their violent actions were considered political, as was Mr Bout's alleged support of Farc.

Bout was arrested by a bunch of American DEA agents though never accused of any drug crimes anywhere. So we have the DEA acting as world police & being a Policeman in Thailand with not so much of actual crimes but of morals. USA is, after all, the world’s biggest arms merchant and has a long history of selling to both sides. They can’t stand competition?

Having lost the extradition case, the United States government has asked the government of Colombia to write a letter to the government of Thailand begging to allow the extradition of Victor Bout to the United States!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Feb 2010: This latest indictment also charged Bout with money laundering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, and six separate counts of wire fraud. The charges are just the latest attempt by the US???

BUT WHATS THE DIFFERENCE WITH RUSSIAN VICTOR BOUT AND THE USA SUPPLYING ARMS TO MANY DICTATORS & ROGUES.

Canada's defence industry accounts for 650 firms, and 57,000 direct jobs, while the Canadian Defence Industries Association puts the figure at 1,559 firms. CDIA employment numbers roughly match those of the CCC. The Canadian defence industry sells about $5 billion dollars of goods and services per year, half of which are exported so maybe they export to whoever????.

A U.S. dealer who has grown rich moving arms for governments is Sarkis Soghanalian, president of United Industries, with branches in Miami, Beirut, Madrid, Athens, Geneva, and Baghdad. Sitting in his office atop a private hangar at Miami International Airport, Soghanalian claims his sales exceed $1 billion a year, with profits at 10%. He has a stable of Arabian horses, homes in Athens, Madrid, and Paris, as well as Miami, and a fleet of jets and helicopters to whisk him and his weapons anywhere at a moment's notice. Could he be the world's biggest arms merchant? Soghanalian a Lebanese worked for the CIA as a client and his fortunes turned.

German-born Ernst Werner Glatt, a man who used to buy weapons for USA CIA man Cummings in East Germany. Colleagues say Glatt got rich supplying the CIA with East bloc weapons for Afghanistan and the contras. Glatt with about $200 million a year in steady business and a multimillion-dollar Virginia farm called Black Eagle. Black Eagle Farm however was being foreclosed for failure to pay a $5.29 million loan from a Charlottesville bank & $56,000 in local taxes.

David Duncan, an elusive character who other dealers say peddled guns for the CIA out of South Florida. Duncan made the headlines when the Panamanian government seized a ship, the Pia Vesta, laden with 1,500 Kalashnikov rifles and 1,500 Soviet antitank rockets belonging to him. Duncan said at the time that the cargo, initially bound for Peru, was rerouted to Panama and was to have been flown from there to El Salvador. The true identity of the intended recipients has never become public. Duncan also runs an aircraft company that carries nonmilitary supplies and weapons to the contras. Says a veteran dealer: ''He's one of the CIA's pipsqueak smugglers.''

Sam Cummings, 59, an amiable, American-born British citizen and former CIA agent. Cummings learned his trade traveling around Europe after World War II buying stashes of surplus weapons for the CIA. In 1953 he went into business for himself, buying arms from both the East and West blocs and reselling them for whatever the market would bear. Cummings says he does about $80 million a year in sales from offices in Virginia, England, and a penthouse in Monte Carlo that is just steps from the onetime home of Sir Basil Zaharoff, an infamous turn-of-the-century arms dealer. LIKE MOST arms merchants, Cummings says he would sell to almost anyone if the government allowed it.

Jean Bernard Lasnaud, who deals arms in his south Florida condo under the USA protection yet this man sold arms to Croatia, Ecuador & Sierra Leone where arms to rebel forces had been embargoed since 1997 etc. Between 1992 and 1995, Argentina's President Carlos Menem signed decrees authorizing sales of Argentine-made arms to Uruguay and Panama. But instead were sent to Croatia, which was under a U.N. arms embargo, and Ecuador, embargoed by the 1945 Rio Accord because of its ongoing war with Peru. Lasnaud dealt missiles, tanks, and rocket launchers from his condo in south Florida with impunity & even after Argentina requested his extradition the USA said no? Lasnaud's Caribbean Group sold $1-2m worth of arms a year & in 2002 he took off from the USA & disappeared. It is unclear if he was ever sent to Argentina or prosecuted. Two years after his arrest, he was again selling arms through his websites Transcon Services in Montreal, and General Equipment Corporation International in Tamarac, Florida. His ability to operate unhindered in the US is because he is considered an “asset” to US agencies providing services to the US, as well as to countries like Croatia which the US wanted to arm but could not because of the UN embargo. The U.S. Department of Justice had refused to pick him up while he lived free and easy in the USA, citing "insufficient evidence"

Like Lasnaud, Lebanese citizen Sarkis Soghanalian is another arms dealer in the international arms trade – both of them receiving pat from the US. With more than 40 years of experience and billions of dollars in brokered deals, Soghanalian insists that all his deals - whether they were with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or rebels in Central America – were done with the approval of the US government, according to a web portal on international arms deal. He died at age 82. He became a major arms supplier to Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, operated a fleet of cargo planes and owned homes in a dozen countries but because he could speal several languages was as asset to the US it is believed.

Monzer Al Kassar from Syria started out as a petty hashish drug dealer who then went into the business of selling illegal sale of Polish arms to Croatia and Bosnia. He was extradited from Spain to the US in 2008, as he had agreed to sell weapons to informants working for the United States. Kassar had agreed to sell surface-to-air missiles and other weapons to the FARC. The informants being DEA had said the weapons would be used by the group to kill American military personnel in Colombia so he was sentenced to jail it seems for 30 years Sept 2011?

Chilean, Luis Felipe Moreno Godoy, an associate of the international arms dealer Monzer Al-Kassar was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. In 2007, AL KASSAR and MORENO GODOY agreed to sell to the FARC more than 12,000 weapons — including thousands of machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and surface-to-air missile systems, or “SAMs” — along with 2 million rounds of ammunition.” Moreno, 60, was caught in Bucharest a couple years ago, but had been living in Spain.

Leonid Efimovich Minin, a thug from the Ukraine. He was arrested in 2001 for arms charges smuggling and distributing illegal weapons into Italy Minin & was a mafia type criminal after the eatern bloc came apart & was charged with international gun smuggling and using a fake EUC to sell arms to Liberia and Sierra Leone. He is implicated for his role in two shipments: 113 tons of arms delivered to Ivory Coast on July 12, 2000; and 68 tons to Burkina Faso on March 13, 1999.

US COMPANIES like General Dynamics one of the USAs biggest arms dealers sells billions of arms from M1 tanks to submarines and F16s. Its General Manager Panagiotis Takis Veliotis, was indicted on kickback, fraud, conspiracy, perjury, and racketeering charges & then came William Anders, GD's chief 1991-1993, who pocketed $44.3 million in earnings and stock benefits, becoming the highest-paid executive in the defense industry. During the 1970s, U.S. companies sold to the Chilean junta and to the Shah of Iran. In the 1980s it was Stinger missiles for the mujahaddin in Afghanistan (the CIA budgeted $55 million to try and buy them back in 1993), and arms for the drug-running contras and secret missiles for Iran & then Bin Laden himsel and the list goes on. Prior to the Gulf War, the USA armed Iraq and today theres no stopping the supply of weapons as we see the use of white phosphorus bombs banned being used by Irael on the Palestinians in Gaza Jan 15th 2009.

White phosphorus was used in 1988 by Iraqi forces against its own Kurdish citizens, 1993 by Israeli forces in Lebanon, 1994 by Russian forces in Chechnya, in 1995 by Serbian forces in Serbia, in 2006 by Israeli forces in Lebanon,in 2004 by American forces in Iraq, and in 2008-2009 by Israeli forces in Gaza---yet these governments do not care about the harm to citizens.

The most notorious weapons merchant is Saudi Arabian Adnan Khashoggi, a mastermind behind the U.S. arms sales to Iran. Source: http://money.cnn.com