The Secret Arms Deal Behind America’s Syria Fiasco (An American was killed. Shades of Benghazi?)

buzzfeed.com ^ | Sept. 17, 2015, at 11:00 a.m. | Aram Roston

[Trumpinator]

The Secret Arms Deal Behind America’s Syria Fiasco

A multimillion-dollar deal with a minuscule arms dealer led to the death of a US citizen, delays in arming Syrian rebels, and the purchase of weapons from a pro-Russia dictatorship — all for a pile of defective 30-year-old weapons.

posted on Sept. 17, 2015, at 11:00 a.m.

Aram Roston BuzzFeed News Reporter

At the heart of the high-stakes U.S. program to train and equip Syrian rebels to fight ISIS is a multimillion-dollar arms deal that the Pentagon farmed out to a tiny, little-known private company called Purple Shovel LLC. A BuzzFeed News investigation, based on inside documents and confidential sources familiar with the Syria operation, has found:

▸ Purple Shovel, through the subcontractors it selected and oversaw, tried to sell the U.S. thousands of Russian-style rocket-propelled grenades that were considered unreliable because they were manufactured three decades ago, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union.

▸ The U.S. government rejected them, and that delayed to the effort to stand up the Syrian rebel force.

▸ An American contractor, 41-year-old Francis Norwillo, was killed in a weapons explosion in Bulgaria while training with such outdated grenades.

▸ The U.S. violated its own policy and gave Purple Shovel approval to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech missiles for the rebels from Belarus, a dictatorship that is under sanctions by the European Union. Belarus, which has supplied weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and is accused of human rights violations, is normally off-limits to U.S. arms dealers. But the U.S. military and State Department agreed to make an exception, allowing 700 powerful anti-tank missiles to be purchased, with U.S. taxpayer funds, for the rebels.

[gattaca]

bmp

[Trumpinator]

Putin in this case was telling the truth in 2013 about Syria:

"They lie beautifully, of course. I saw debates in Congress. A congressman asks Mr Kerry: 'Is al Qaeda there?' He says: 'No, I am telling you responsibly that it is not'," Putin said at a meeting of his human rights council in the Kremlin.

And now 2 years later our own internal govt assessment agrees with Putin:

Obama administration’s picture of Syrian moderates either dangerous naivete or an outright lie, according to government’s internal assessments

http://www.heraldonline.com/news/article31183583.html

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Thanks.

[Carry_Okie]

This is the first I heard of this. I just know I heard reports that maybe Benghazi happened because of an arms deal gone sour with the Turks over shipping Qaddafis surplus weapons to Syria but done in such a way as to not link the USA to it.

My take is that Benghazi was a deliberate hit on Stevens because he knew too much about both the Syrian arms pipeline and the fact that the US had illegally armed an AQ affiliate in Libya.

[LucyT]

Check out article, then # 2 , # 5 .

.

[Nachum]

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