According to US and Jordanian officials, the CIA effort to smuggle weapons to the Syrian rebels hit a major snag in Jordan, where the arms have been systematically stolen by Jordanian spies and sold on the black market in the nation.
Officials went on to say that a shooting by a Jordanian police captain, which killed two Americans along with several other people linked to DynCorp International, was carried out with stolen weapons that the captain got on the black market.
The thefts involved “millions of dollars” worth of equipment, and went on for months, until the US and Saudi governments started complaining to Jordan, and the thefts stopped. Still, that they continued sending weapons for months without noticing the rebels weren’t getting most of them once again speaks to how reckless such smuggling has been.
It’s become Jordan’s problem too, with reports that their intelligence agents stole so many arms and sold them at such increasingly low prices to the arms dealers that the country’s black market is awash in high-powered weaponry, meaning militant groups with an axe to grind against the Hashemite Kingdom can readily get their gear on the cheap now.
No surprise. WE always do the wrong thing in the ME.
But, but, that’s the American way!! I used to think it was just a case, well, many cases, of plain incompetence. I now believe that it wasn’t incompetence but intentional. What TPTB say and what they do where no one can see are 2 entirely different things. They actually don’t mind being called incompetent by the masses – it serves the purpose of masking what they’re really doing. Case in point: running guns from Libya to Syria. The upside: arming uncontrollable radical Islamists. The downside: getting an Ambassador and security team killed. Ooops. Oh well, it gave the idiots in Congress a boogeyman to “investigate” for a while.
You are quite correct. The actual institutional imperatives of the MIC are as follows:
1) profits for arms manufacturers and other military contractors, 2) career enhancement for military brass, civilian employees of the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and militarist thinktanks, 3) attendant high paying jobs guaranteed by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) for “US persons” that keep those employees loyal to the system, 4) pork for politicians and 5) blockbuster movies and sensational headlines to sell media (and also to contribute to the necessary fear and jingoism).
The incompetence is a convenient smokescreen for the above, and not that the thefts being talked about here have no bearing on the success of the operation as measured against the above imperatives. Once Browning, Remington or Colt sells the arms to the CIA, the operation is instantly a success even if the CIA drops them out of a helicopter into the ocean. So much the better if they arm an insurrection against Hashemite rule, because such instability also furthers the institutional imperatives.
06/23/16 – America’s One-Party Government
Today’s United States is a more realistic version of the type of society that George Orwell fictionally described in his allegorical novel 1984.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2016/06/23/america-s-one-party-government#more43550