Merchant of Death or the Flying Dutchman of U.S. national security? Part 2
25 September, 2008, 15:04
The current charges against Bout are based on a sting operation – a euphemism for a provocative action of law enforcement against a suspected criminal. Forbidden by law in many countries, it is widely used only by narcot
Let’s leave the extradition case with the Thai court which will continue the hearing on October 10, and wish it well in finding the Truth. I believe it will. But I also believe there is something else behind this whole deal. There must be something the U.S. side hasn’t made public yet. Victor Bout has spent the last seven to eight years nearly exclusively in Moscow, busy with his local projects, all of them as peaceful as they come. He was totally inactive in his former line of work which he calls air transportation business and the U.S. Justice Department and DEA insist on calling ‘arms trafficking’. This fact is hardly unknown to the U.S. government. So – Bout must be being punished for something in his past rather than his role in the Bangkok bust that was based entirely on a groundless provocation.
A series of new questions arise: how it all began? Why does the U.S. need Victor Bout so badly? What did he do? I started working on these questions in March, after having talked to Bout’s family and his closest associates at length in Moscow and days before I left for Bangkok to start talking to Bout himself. I worked on them in Bangkok on my spare time from being an expert on the Thai language for Bout’s defense team.
Considering the above I have to say that I cannot be absolutely objective in the case of a man I got to know and learned to respect in the past seven months. But as a professional journalist with 20-years experience under my belt, I am trying my very best. If you can live with that, please follow me to the end of this lengthy narrative. If not – you are free to stop reading right here and now.
For starters, I will stop calling our protagonist Victor Bout. Because this was the way his name looked like on a passport that expired years ago. Russian passports are issued for five years. In the past fifteen years the Russian Foreign Ministry has changed the regulation spelling of Russian names by Latin characters three times. The oldest system was based loosely on French spelling, that is why it spells ‘Bout’ when pronounced like ‘Boot’. Later systems are all anglicized (to an extent), therefore there used to be such spellings as Butt and varieties of that. At the moment his passport reads ‘Viktor But’. You know, we Russians have our own language and we are very proud of it. And we don’t use the Latin script, for those who don’t know yet… So – there goes myth number one in the case of Viktor But: the chain of aliases the DEA attached to his person is very long but the only name absent from it is the current correct spelling, ‘But’. All the older spellings are there, and that is OK – they are not aliases: they come from his passports used consecutively not simultaneously.
So, what is Viktor But? Why does the DEA go to the extreme of dressing its agents up like Colombian guerillas, recruiting a former associate Viktor hasn’t seen in ten years, sending him to Moscow and other places around the World on a chain of ‘clandestine’ meetings? (the recruiting part is my own speculation but it does ring true when you consider that even the affidavits in the U.S. extradition package show that very associate, a Briton named Andrew Smulian, doing all the traveling and negotiating and handling of "special’ cell phones, pictures of SAM Igla while Viktor pronounces two or three words unrelated to arms or even trafficking)?
The question seems simple enough to answer: Victor Bout is the biggest illegal arms trafficker in the World, the Lord of War and Merchant of Death who doesn’t have any principles and who is known to have sold arms to both sides of the same conflict in more than one case. Go to Wikipedia and you will find just that. Read the book by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, ‘Merchant of Death’, and you… Well, it depends on how attentively you read it and how much of independently acquired information you possess to cross-check the facts in the book.
To be continued…
Evgeny Belenkiy, RT
Bangkok – Moscow