1/2
1/2
Went looking for "Director of Strategy" based on an Anon's posting of Awan's business card. ( >>5378861 bread #6875)
Instead, fell into a rabbit hole. "Director of Strategy" landed me on a London embassy page from February 2014 and at the bottom of the page where all the
juicy bits are, was a notation on "Responses" to three Blue Lantern cases. Whutza Blue Lantern case?
Apparently there is a program in place to verify that supplies/equipment sold to other countries by the USG are being used appropriately and within established guidelines. IOW,
if we sell something to country "A", the item isn't supposed to be resold to country "B", especially when country "B" may be sanctioned. So I started
looking around for Blue Lantern OIG reports. Found a report from 2006 that included case studies, one (#7) for "unauthorized transfer" from an unnamed
middle eastern country to South America which went like this:
US sells helicopters to Middle East country's military. The ME military sold those helicopters to a private ME company who then sold them a private user
in South America who then sold them to a bank in a different South American country. (Reading this triggered thoughts of the brothers' Isaias banking
escapades.)
Then I found this article on the website "War is Boring":
by JOSEPH TREVITHICK & ROBERT BECKHUSEN
To save money and free up military choppers for combat operations, the U.S. military has paid contractors billions of dollars since 2008
to ferry soldiers and supplies around Afghanistan. But the Pentagon’s inspector general later discovered some exceedingly shady—and dangerous—behavior
on the part of the contractors, according to a 2014 report that War Is Boring obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
The investigators found that some of the private helicopters were in disrepair, and the contractors flew troops without armored plates.
The contractors painted their helicopters in military colors, against the Pentagon’s orders—potentially exposing their passengers to hostile fire.
And we learned that a Colombian military firm once investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration allegedly ripped off the U.S. military for
thousands of dollars—while its employees sat in on sensitive briefings without proper security clearances.
Further down the article is this little nugget:
The auditors determined one Colombian contractor — Vertical de Aviación — overcharged American authorities more than $140,000. The Pentagon’s watchdog "wasn’t
sure" whether this was the only instance when officials overpaid for private contractor flights.
We don’t know if the Pentagon’s investigators were aware of it, but they would have had good reason
to be wary of the Bogota-based contractor. In two January 2010 diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, U.S. federal law enforcement
agents suspected the company—formerly known as Helitaxi—and its owner of having ties with money launderers and drug traffickers.
"DEA confirms that the owner of Helitaxi, Byron Lopez Salazar, is a known money-launderer,” the U.S.
embassy in Bogota stated in a cable. “His name is indexed in 20 DEA case files."