Rogue Planet

Russian Arms Exporter Sanctioned Over Iran

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2008; A12

The State Department has slapped financial sanctions on Russia's state arms exporter for its dealings with Iran, but in an unusual move, it granted the company a partial waiver to permit the sale of nearly two dozen Russian helicopters to Iraq, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The new sanctions -- required by U.S. law to thwart the sale of sensitive technology that could help Iran, North Korea and Syria develop weapons of mass destruction or missile systems -- were also imposed on 12 other companies or organizations based in China, Iran, North Korea, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced the sanctions on Russia's Rosoboronexport, and its subsidiaries, as illegal and unjust. The company had been sanctioned by the United States in 2006 but would have come off the list had the State Department determined that it had not made any suspect sales in the past two years.

"These new sanctions were introduced without any international legal foundation whatsoever," Lavrov said in Moscow. "Russia will of course take this into account in practical affairs and relations with the United States, such as in trade and economic and other spheres."

He added that Russia would not change its policies on Iran because of the sanctions. "All our trade and all of our military-technical cooperation with Iran is carried out in strict accordance with current international legal norms," he said. "There can be no other explanation here than the rather arrogant extra-territorial implementation of American laws."

Visiting Bannerman's Island

Jen Carlson

Oct. 14, 2008 -- What's more intriguing than an abandoned island with a rotting castle sitting just north of New York City? Bannerman's Island sits in the Hudson, just about 50 miles north of here, and American Heritage explains "this island fortress was once the private arsenal of the worlds largest arms dealer," Frank "Francis" Bannerman. Living in Brooklyn at the time of the Civil War, he purchased "government surplus equipment at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard" for the family business, and eventually Francis Bannerman Sons became the world's largest dealer in military goods, with the weapons exceeding the family's store space in Manhattan (occupying an entire block at 501 Broadway) and three huge Brooklyn warehouses. 

This is where the island comes in! He bought the island [6.5 acres] in December of 1900 for fifteen hundred dollars from a private owner and bought seven acres more of underwater land in front of the island from the state of New York. He ringed the submerged area with sunken canal boats, barges, and railroad floats to form a breakwater. On the island Bannerman built a huge arsenal styled after his idea of a Scottish castle. On a hill in the middle of the island he built a smaller castle as the Bannerman family home. And they lived happily ever after on a "virtual powder keg" (with just a few fatal live ammo accidents)! By the 1960s the castle was decaying, and in 1967 it was sold to New York's Taconic State Park Commission, with all remaining arms and munitions disposed of. Soon after a fire broke out and ruined the decaying structures even more. These days the Hudson River website warns: "Do not attempt to visit...it is a very treacherous combination of buried hazards and dangerous wall conditions." Tod Seelie recently braved the island, however, and came out of it safe and sound, and with these images. 

[gothamist.com]

The Arms Trade Booms Amid Global Economic Woes

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008

By Vivienne Walt / Paris

Need to start a war? No problem. While stock markets gyrate and financial institutions (and even whole countries, like Iceland) teeter on bankruptcy, one global industry is still drawing plenty of high-end trades and profits: weapons.

In a Paris courtroom last week, 42 officials went on trial for taking millions in kickbacks and organizing huge arms commissions from the Angolan government during the mid-1990s. In the dock were such big names as Charles Pasqua, a former French Interior Minister; Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the son of the late French President François Mitterrand; and Russian-Israeli billionaire Arkadi Gaydamak, who is currently a candidate for mayor of Jerusalem. The group is charged with having supplied almost $800 million worth of arms to Angolan President José Eduardo Dos Santos, including 12 helicopters, 6 naval vessels, 150,000 shells and 170,000 land mines.

The hardware came from the huge stockpiles of Soviet weapons left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Dos Santos wanted it in order to crush the U.S.-backed Unita rebels during Angola's devastating civil war. (Dos Santos, who is believed to have made millions off the trades, won the war and is still in power.) The French businessman Pierre Falcone allegedly plied Angolan officials with tens of millions of dollars — some of it stuffed in suitcases — and deposited other sums of money in offshore accounts. Actor Nicolas Cage's character in the 2005 movie Lord of War was partly modeled on the alleged actions of Gaydamak, although the character may also have been inspired by the powerful Russian arms trader Viktor Bout, who is currently in a Thai jail awaiting the outcome of a hearing on a U.S. extradition request.