{"id":134703,"date":"2022-12-11T13:41:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=134703"},"modified":"2022-12-11T13:42:07","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:42:07","slug":"merchant-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=134703","title":{"rendered":"Merchant of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nViktor Bout<\/em><\/p>\n

We all know the Griner saga so I won’t belabor it here. But just what did the Biden Administration give up for her return? Meet Viktor Bout, the so-called Merchant of Death. Born in 1967 and a native of Tajikistan, he graduated from Moscow\u2019s Military Institute of Foreign Languages and is fluent in six. He is believed to have served in the Red Army as a translator in Angola. He started out in business when his regiment was disbanded during the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and he was able to establish working relationships with various African heads of state and rebel leaders in Liberia, Zair, Libya, and the Congo. <\/p>\n

His shell companies employed some 300 people and owned and operated up to 60 aircraft, including cargo planes. His maze of companies made his activities nearly impossible to trace. Dubbed \u201cthe merchant of death\u201d by a British government official, U.N. monitors have accused Bout of shipping contraband weapons to rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone and to the Taylor regime in Liberia. <\/p>\n

Bout has operated in Afghanistan, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Congo-Brazzaville, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, United Arab Emirates and Uganda.<\/p>\n

According to a Belgian intelligence document and first reported in January 2002, in the late 1990s Bout earned $50 million selling weapons to the Taliban. Another intelligence source independently verified the sales. Intelligence from an African country in which Bout operated claimed that he ran guns for the Taliban \u201con behalf of the Pakistan government.\u201d To his credit he denied any association with the Taliban or al Qaeda. This declaration is a bit diluted with his additional denial of any association with \u201carms traffickers and\/or trafficking or the sale of arms of kind [sic] anywhere in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bout was arrested in Thailand, extradited to the US, and convicted of conspiring with a terrorist organization and plotting to kill American civilians and officials. He was sentenced in 2011 to 25 years in prison. <\/p>\n

NY Post<\/a><\/p>\n

The current Administration’s priorities are quite clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Viktor Bout We all know the Griner saga so I won’t belabor it here. But just … Merchant of Death<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":657,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[185,238,15,384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-government-incompetence","category-legal","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/657"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}