The big news this week has been the foiling of a plot to smuggle ground-to-air missile from Russia into the United States. ABC News claims there’s “less in missile plot than meets the eye”:abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to finish, the plot was orchestrated as a sting operation by U.S. and Russian agents. The accused mastermind Hemant Lakhani had no Russian contacts and no history of arms smuggling. The ABC article paints him as a small-time black market importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of making easy money and paying off debts.
This doesn’t excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms seller. There was no terrorist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russian intelligence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit middleman who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani followed the bread crumbs of opportunity left for him by U.S. intelligence agencies. We now know there are people desparate enough to selll anything if the price is right (didn’t we already know that?) and that salesmen will talking trash about a potential buyer’s competitors to close a deal.
That there’s someone willing to sell missiles is indeed frightening, but it’s not worth this sort of media coverage. No terrorist was involved in all this and the only ones talking about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to wonder if this is the latest “threat” all “cooked up by some White House insider”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. “Lets pose as Al Qaeda, wave lots of money in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Quada plot foiled.”
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