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Title: How The Bush Administration Hired Two College Stoners To Buy $300 Million Worth Of Weapons For Them
Source:
Josh Spector
URL Source: http://joshspector.com/2011/03/25/h ... ion-worth-of-weapons-for-them/
Published: Mar 29, 2011
Author: Josh Spector
Post Date: 2011-03-29 04:12:00 by HAPPY2BME-4UM
Keywords: None
Views: 185
Comments: 1
I came across this Rolling Stone article today and was absolutely blown away. It’s a long one, but well worth the read. In case you don’t have the time to read it, here’s a quick summary of the story it tells. Apparently, two college-age stoners in Miami decided to start their own international arms dealing business back in the late years of the Bush administration. They managed to get very good at securing government contracts from the Pentagon and slowly worked their way up to bigger and bigger deals. Then, in 2007, they bid on a secret contract that was designed to be off the radar so that it somehow wouldn’t require Congressional approval of the funds. The contract was for about $300 million and the weapons that the government wanted to purchase for that money were to be sent to arm the Afghan army. Why so much? Because the Bush administration was worried that the Democrats were going to win the 2008 election, and they wanted to hurry up and get the Afghans enough weapons and ammunition to last them for a decade, in case the Republicans got run out of office and the new administration decided it wasn’t the best use of funds. In what seems almost unfathomable, these two 20-somethings wound up securing this huge contract from the government. How? Well, that’s too complicated for me to explain here, but in part it was because they specialized in securing crappy, rundown, and essentially illegal weapons from the international arms market and they were willing to charge the government a lot less than the big arms companies who also traffic in these same waters. Sure enough, the Pentagon went with the lowest price – convinced in part by the sales pitch that it didn’t matter if they were cheap weapons because “it’s not like they’re going to be used by American soldiers.” Apparently nobody in the government gave a second thought to the fact that they were dealing a couple of drugged-out college kids, so the deal went down. Predictably, things got really complicated as the kids had trouble delivering the weapons, wound up fighting with each other in a scenario reminiscent of the movie The Social Network, and things collapsed $100 million into the deal. In the end, the kids wound getting busted and prosecuted for various things, while all the government people who were hiring them and pulling the strings managed to avoid any kind of charges or even negative attention. It’s a really fascinating story and one which I’m barely doing justice with this write up. I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing here.
How The Bush Administration Hired Two College Stoners To Buy $300 Million Worth Of Weapons For Them
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#1. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#0)
Unbelievable!
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