our arms -- being used to kill our troops -- sold to the insurgents, under our own nose -- november 10-11, 2007

we give "old media" a fair
portion of grief around here, so
it is quite satisfying to be able
to toot their horn, for them, when
they get it dead-on right.

and this post is one of those.

tomorrow's dead-tree-edition
new york times -- on sunday -- will
carry a rather alarming story of
awful, slithering, lawless gun-running
in iraq -- right under the eyes
of our people, and in some cases,
right inside our own armories,
and by our contractors. . .

click the nyt masthead below
for the full story -- but this is
simply stunning -- our own troops
are likely being fired on, by our
own weapons -- weapons sold to in-
surgents by our own people. sh!t.

take a look:

. . .By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.

“This was the craziest thing in the world,” said John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse. “They were taking weapons away by the truckload.”

Activities at that armory and other warehouses help explain how the American military lost track of some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraq’s security forces in 2004 and 2005, as auditors discovered in the past year. . .

disgusting.