Sunday, August 17, 2003

Arms Trafficking

The NY Times magazine has a profile of the world's most notorious arms dealer. Included is this chilling paragraph:
In late September 2001, two weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, a Hungarian trading company in Budapest filed a request to ship Ukrainian cargo to an American firm based in Macon, Ga. No one had ever heard of the Ukrainian company with the vanilla name -- ERI Trading and Investment Company -- and for good reason. A Hungarian bureaucrat making a random inspection of the cargo discovered that the shipment included 300 Ukrainian surface-to-air (SAM) missiles and 100 launchers. SAM's are light, mobile and easily hidden, and American agents later feared that they were going to be distributed to terrorists near America's major airports. (The cargo wasn't permitted to take off; the American buyer was arrested in June.)
300 SAMs. Headed for America. Found only because a Hungarian bureaucrat randomly happened across them.

I'm thinking it might be a good time to start buying stock in Greyhound Bus Lines.

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