NY jury convicts Russian arms dealer of trying to sell heavy weapons to Colombian terror group

By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, November 2, 2011

NEW YORK — A notorious Russian arms dealer accused of evading authorities for years while fueling violence in war zones around the globe was convicted Wednesday in swift fashion in a U.S. courtroom on charges he conspired to sell weaponry to South American terrorists.

Viktor Bout, known as the Merchant of Death, looked straight ahead and showed no emotion as a jury forewoman read guilty verdicts on each of four conspiracy counts — a conviction that could result in a life sentence. Jurors had deliberated only six hours over two days in federal court in Manhattan.

The outcome was immediately applauded by those who labored to bring Bout to justice before he was finally snared in an elaborate Drug Enforcement Administration sting in Thailand in 2008 and — over the objections of Russia — extradited last year to the United States.

“The guy was without a doubt one of the most dangerous of his kind on the face of the earth, and it’s reassuring to know he’ll be locked up behind bars where he belongs,” said Michael Braun a former DEA official involved in the investigation. “If he had been allowed to carry on, he would have gone right back doing his dirty business.”

The evidence proved that Bout, 44, was someone “ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Before Bout left court, he hugged one of his attorneys. The defense team said there would be an appeal.

“He’s resolute,” defense lawyer Kenneth Kaplan said of his client. “He’s a strong man. He accepts the verdict and is hopeful.”

For nearly two decades, the former Soviet military officer built a worldwide air cargo operation, amassing a fleet of more than 60 transport planes, hundreds of companies and a fortune reportedly in excess of $6 billion — exploits that were the main inspiration for the Nicholas Cage film “Lord of War.”

His aircraft flew from Afghanistan to Angola, carrying everything from raw minerals to gladiolas, drilling equipment to frozen fish. But the network’s specialty, according to authorities, was black market arms — assault rifles, ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles, helicopter gunships and a full range of sophisticated weapons systems, almost always sourced from Russian stocks or from Eastern European factories.

In the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S., British and United Nations authorities heard growing reports that Bout’s planes and maintenance operations, then headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, were aiding the Taliban while it sheltered al-Qaida militants in Afghanistan. Bout later denied that he worked with the Taliban or al-Qaida — and denied ever participating in black market arms deals.

In 2008, while under economic sanctions and a U.N. travel ban, Bout was approached in Moscow by a close associate about supplying weapons on the black market to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Bout was told that the group wanted to use drug-trafficking proceeds to pay for surface-to-air missiles and other weapons, making it clear it wanted to attack helicopter pilots and other Americans in Colombia, prosecutors said.

Neither man knew at the time that the two FARC officials they were dealing with were undercover informants working for the DEA, said the associate, South African businessman Andrew Smulian, who took the witness stand for the government as part of a plea deal.

At first, Bout dismissed the idea of a deal, Smulian testified.

“He said he didn’t deal with drug dealers,” Smulian said.

Smulian testified that Bout overcame his doubts and agreed that for a down payment of $20 million he would arrange for cargo planes to air-drop 100 tons of weapons into Colombia. Bout finalized the phony deal with the two DEA informants in a bugged hotel room in Bangkok in March 2008.

Jurors heard an informant on one tape saying: “We want to knock down those American sons of bitches.”

“Kill them, and kick them out of my country,” the informant says. “They don’t care where they go anymore. They go here, they go there. They go wherever they want. Why?”

Bout is quoted as saying on the tapes: “Yes, yes, yes. They act as if ... as if it was their home.”

One of the informants, Guatemala-born Carlos Sagastume, testified at trial that during the conversation Bout was writing on a sheet of paper a list of weapons he could provide and remarked, “And we have the same enemy.”

Asked on the witness stand what that meant, the informant responded, “He was referring to the Americans.”

Lawyers for Bout had offered what the government dismissively referred to as the “planes defense,” claiming their client had no intention of selling any weapons but acted as though he would so he could unload two old cargo planes for $5 million.

In closing arguments, the defense sought to convince the jury the DEA had framed a legitimate businessman by building its case on recorded conversations that were open to interpretation and never resulted in the exchange of any arms or money.

U.S. authorities “don’t have anything,” defense attorney Albert Dayan said. “All they have is speculation, innuendo and conjecture.”

Prosecutor Brendan McGuire countered there was ample proof that Bout “did everything he could to show he could be the one-stop shop for FARC.”

Sentencing was set for Feb. 8.

Alleged ricin plot in Georgia was a long shot

Posted at 02:24 PM ET, 11/02/2011
WP
By Joby Warrick

From al-Qaeda to neo-Nazis, numerous hate groups have fantasized of pulling off a deadly terrorist attack using the highly lethal extract of the castor bean known as ricin. None has ever succeeded in carrying out such plans.

The four Georgians arrested this week in connection with an alleged terrorist plot may have been capable of advancing further than most amateur weaponeers, given their access to professional labs. (One had previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control, another for the Department of Agriculture.) But their chances for truly creating a weapon of mass destruction were tiny at best, biodefense experts say.

“Absolutely zero,” said Raymond Zilinskas, a microbiologist and expert on chemical and biological weapons.

The castor beans that are the source of ricin are relatively easy to obtain, and recipes for extracting the toxin are easily found on the Internet. But while a would-be terrorist could manufacture small batches of the poison in a basement or garage, the challenges involved in delivering lethal doses of ricin to large numbers of people are insurmountable for amateurs, said Zilinskas, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.

“No one has done it, as far as we know,” he said. “It is beyond the capabilities of anyone except professional weapons scientists.”

Ricin is regarded as one of the world’s most toxic natural substances, so poisonous that a dose the size of a few grains of salt can kill. It has been effectively used in the past as an assassination weapon, most famously during the slaying of Bulgarian novelist and defector Georgi Markov, who was killed in 1978 by a suspected Bulgarian agent using a specially modified umbrella to inject the pellet of ricin into his victim.

But even governments with dedicated weapons laboratories have struggled to create a ricin weapon that can kill on a large scale. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein tried to do so during the late 1980s, but his scientists abandoned the effort after finding it was too difficult to convert ricin into a fine power or mist, according to records unearthed by U.N. weapons inspectors.

Justice Department officials say one of the men involved in the latest case got so far as obtaining castor beans, and the four -- all 65 or older, all alleged members of a far-right militia movement — had talked about using ricin in attacks on several U.S. cities.

Frederick Thomas, 73, one of the alleged co-conspirators, was quoted by court records as having boasted of his plans to kill, telling an undercover agent, “I’ve been to war, and I’ve taken life before, and I can do it again.”

Thomas’s wife, Charlotte, reached by phone by an Associated Press reporter, dismissed the alleged plot as “baloney.”

Worker suing intelligence agency claims anti-Muslim bias

Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 11/01/2011
WP
By Ed O'Keefe

A Northern Virginia man is filing a discrimination lawsuit against one of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies, claiming it revoked his security clearance because his wife attended an Islamic school and works for a Muslim nonprofit group.
Eye Opener

Mahmoud M. Hegab, hired in 2010 as a budget analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sued in U.S. District Court in Alexandria last month and asked the agency to reverse its decision to revoke his clearance and place him on unpaid leave.

In court papers, Hegab, who lives in Alexandria, said he joined the agency in January 2010 and informed officials during his orientation that he had married his wife, Bushra Nusairat, between the time of his security clearance investigation and the date he reported to work.

The NGA supplies satellite imagery to the military and requires its 16,000 workers to obtain a top secret security clearance as a condition of employment. But the agency revoked Hegab’s clearance last November, citing concerns with Nusairat’s background; he was placed on unpaid leave in January.

Nusairat is a program associate with Islamic Relief USA, a nonprofit that partners with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and other global aid groups to provide food aid and public health and educational programs in poor or disaster-prone regions of the world.

Hegab’s attorney, Sheldon Cohen, argued in court papers that the decision to revoke his clearance “was based solely” on Nusairat’s “religion, Islam, her constitutionally protected speech, and her association with, and employment by, an Islamic faith-based organization.”

The couple declined to comment. But Cohen, an Arlington attorney who has represented hundreds of federal employees in security clearance disputes, said NGA officials closely probed Nusairat’s background once they learned of Hegab’s marriage.

Cohen described Islamic Relief USA as a “noncontroversial organization,” and said he did not know of other cases where someone lost his clearance because his wife or a close relative worked for such a group.

A Fairfax native, Nusairat graduated in 2005 from the Islamic Saudi Academy, a Saudi-backed school that came under close scrutiny for using textbooks that promoted violence and religious intolerance. The school’s 1999 valedictorian also was convicted of plotting with al-Qaeda to kill George W. Bush.

Nusairat then attended George Mason University, where she studied international diplomacy and Islamic studies and led the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine.

Court papers also said that during the course of its investigation, the NGA discovered a photo believed to be of Nusairat attending a 2003 anti-Iraq war protest in Washington — when she was 16 years old.

As Hegab appealed the NGA’s decision in a series of written responses, court documents said he told the agency that his wife had been born and raised in Virginia, attended the Islamic Saudi Academy because her parents believed the school provided an education on par with other ethnic and religious-affiliated schools in the Washington area, and attended the anti-war rally along with thousands of other Americans, including military veterans and lawmakers.

In March, the NGA told Hegab that he had mitigated the agency’s concerns regarding his wife’s educational background, but the agency maintained its concerns with Nusairat’s “current affiliation with one or more organizations which consist of groups who are organized largely around their non-United States origin.”

When Cohen asked the agency for further details, officials did not deny they were expressing concerns with Islamic Relief USA, he said.

Founded in 1993, Islamic Relief USA maintains offices in four states and has earned top accreditations and awards from charity auditors. Most recently, it worked with the Agriculture Department on a summer feeding program for underprivileged children and provided aid to victims of spring tornadoes in Alabama.

Hebah Reed, a charity spokeswoman, confirmed Nusairat’s employment but could not comment further on the case.

“We have not received any complaints from any of our organization’s employees about discrimination when it comes to obtaining security clearances,” Reed said in an e-mail. “In fact, because of the nature of our work, we do work closely with many federal and local agencies on a regular basis and anti-Muslim discrimination has not been a concern.”

Lawyers said the Hebag case was the first they knew of where clearance was revoked because of a spouse’s ties to Islamic organizations. But federal agencies have a well-documented history of revoking clearances because of an employee’s family or marital ties.

During the Cold War, intelligence agencies regularly denied clearances to individuals whose spouses were involved with communist or so-called fellow traveler organizations. People with relatives in or from Russia or other Warsaw Pact countries also were denied clearances.

More recently, agencies have rejected applicants and employees because they have family living in the Middle East or Afghanistan, said Mark F. Riley, an Annapolis attorney who also handles security clearance cases. Riley recalled a client who dropped legal challenges against his federal employer because he needed to travel to a Middle Eastern country to bail out an imprisoned brother.

An NGA spokesman referred questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, which also declined to comment. The Justice Department must respond to the suit by Dec. 6.

Cohen expects the government to seek a dismissal of the case. If that happens, “we’ll go on from there,” he said, “but we intend to fight.”

Abdullah: Jordan ‘last man standing’ for Israel

October 27, 2011

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Jordan's King Abdullah II said he would stand by his country's peace treaty with Israel, although he expressed doubts about the Egypt-Israel peace.

"You have seen what has happened in Egypt [and] Turkey," Abdullah told The Washington Post in an interview this week, referring to Israel's deteriorating relations with both countries, particularly since the overthrow earlier this year of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. "We are actually the last man standing with our relationship with Israel."

The king expressed doubts about the viability of Israel-Egypt peace in the wake of President Hosni Mubarak's removal, describing the prospect of an Egyptian abrogation of the peace treaty as a "very, very strong possibility."

Abdullah said he would stand by the peace with Israel, and might even take a more active role in the peace process.

"Because of the loss of Egypt’s political leadership, the rest of us are having to step up," he said. "On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Jordan’s relationship with the Palestinians has had to take a step forward."

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq

October 29, 2011
NYT
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.

The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama’s announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

The size of the standby American combat force to be based in Kuwait remains the subject of negotiations, with an answer expected in coming days. Officers at the Central Command headquarters here declined to discuss specifics of the proposals, but it was clear that successful deployment plans from past decades could be incorporated into plans for a post-Iraq footprint in the region.

For example, in the time between the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States Army kept at least a combat battalion — and sometimes a full combat brigade — in Kuwait year-round, along with an enormous arsenal ready to be unpacked should even more troops have been called to the region.

“Back to the future” is how Maj. Gen. Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, described planning for a new posture in the Gulf. He said the command was focusing on smaller but highly capable deployments and training partnerships with regional militaries. “We are kind of thinking of going back to the way it was before we had a big ‘boots on the ground’ presence,” General Horst said. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical.”

Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.

During town-hall-style meetings with military personnel in Asia last week, the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, noted that the United States had 40,000 troops in the region, including 23,000 in Kuwait, though the bulk of those serve as logistical support for the forces in Iraq.

As they undertake this effort, the Pentagon and its Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, have begun a significant rearrangement of American forces, acutely aware of the political and budgetary constraints facing the United States, including at least $450 billion of cuts in military spending over the next decade as part of the agreement to reduce the budget deficit.

Officers at Central Command said that the post-Iraq era required them to seek more efficient ways to deploy forces and maximize cooperation with regional partners. One significant outcome of the coming cuts, officials said, could be a steep decrease in the number of intelligence analysts assigned to the region. At the same time, officers hope to expand security relationships in the region. General Horst said that training exercises were “a sign of commitment to presence, a sign of commitment of resources, and a sign of commitment in building partner capability and partner capacity.”

Col. John G. Worman, Central Command’s chief for exercises, noted a Persian Gulf milestone: For the first time, he said, the military of Iraq had been invited to participate in a regional exercise in Jordan next year, called Eager Lion 12, built around the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Another part of the administration’s post-Iraq planning involves the Gulf Cooperation Council, dominated by Saudi Arabia. It has increasingly sought to exert its diplomatic and military influence in the region and beyond. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for example, sent combat aircraft to the Mediterranean as part of the NATO-led intervention in Libya, while Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates each have forces in Afghanistan.

At the same time, however, the council sent a mostly Saudi ground force into Bahrain to support that government’s suppression of demonstrations this year, despite international criticism.

Despite such concerns, the administration has proposed establishing a stronger, multilateral security alliance with the six nations and the United States. Mr. Panetta and Mrs. Clinton outlined the proposal in an unusual joint meeting with the council on the sidelines of the United Nations in New York last month.

The proposal still requires the approval of the council, whose leaders will meet again in December in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and the kind of multilateral collaboration that the administration envisions must overcome rivalries among the six nations.

“It’s not going to be a NATO tomorrow,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations still under way, “but the idea is to move to a more integrated effort.”

Iran, as it has been for more than three decades, remains the most worrisome threat to many of those nations, as well as to Iraq itself, where it has re-established political, cultural and economic ties, even as it provided covert support for Shiite insurgents who have battled American forces.

“They’re worried that the American withdrawal will leave a vacuum, that their being close by will always make anyone think twice before taking any action,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said in an interview, referring to officials in the Persian Gulf region.

Sheik Khalid was in Washington last week for meetings with the administration and Congress. “There’s no doubt it will create a vacuum,” he said, “and it may invite regional powers to exert more overt action in Iraq.”

He added that the administration’s proposal to expand its security relationship with the Persian Gulf nations would not “replace what’s going on in Iraq” but was required in the wake of the withdrawal to demonstrate a unified defense in a dangerous region. “Now the game is different,” he said. “We’ll have to be partners in operations, in issues and in many ways that we should work together.”

At home, Iraq has long been a matter of intense dispute. Some foreign policy analysts and Democrats — and a few Republicans — say the United States has remained in Iraq for too long. Others, including many Republicans and military analysts, have criticized Mr. Obama’s announcement of a final withdrawal, expressing fear that Iraq remained too weak and unstable.

“The U.S. will have to come to terms with an Iraq that is unable to defend itself for at least a decade,” Adam Mausner and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote after the withdrawal announcement.

Twelve Republican Senators demanded hearings on the administration’s ending of negotiations with the Iraqis — for now at least — on the continuation of American training and on counterterrorism efforts in Iraq.

“As you know, the complete withdrawal of our forces from Iraq is likely to be viewed as a strategic victory by our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime,” the senators wrote Wednesday in a letter to the chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee.