We only get you when we want to, and we never get our own.
Hey, Puke-tray-us dumped unregistered guns out a helicopter, but he ain't an enemy gun-runner, so....
"For Balkan Shipping Agent, War Is Good for Business" by NICHOLAS WOOD
NIS, Serbia — For the past four years Tomislav Damnjanovic has played a crucial role in the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, he has delivered millions of rounds of ammunition, guns, grenades and mortars to the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, United Nations officials say, facts he does not dispute. His aircraft have even been used to shuttle supplies between American bases in Iraq, saving troops from having to make hazardous trips by land.
But it was not always so.
For Mr. Damnjanovic, the work has been an unexpected twist in a career dominated not by serving American interests, but by dodging law enforcement agencies, and by smuggling weapons to American opponents and countries under United Nations sanctions, like Libya, and to other parts of Africa.
He also admits to being a crucial part of a sophisticated cigarette-smuggling operation in Europe that was backed by the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, which cost European taxpayers millions of dollars in unpaid revenues.
The details of a career that goes back over 15 years have been slowly unfolding, as United Nations investigators and, most recently, a group of researchers financed by the United Nations in Belgrade have pieced together flight plans, manifests and bank accounts, as well as what they say are falsified documents.
Despite his bonanza with his newfound American partners, the investigators allege that Mr. Damnjanovic, who is based in Belgrade, has continued to flout United Nations sanctions, supplying weapons to an Islamist group in Somalia that the United States says is linked to Al Qaeda. As with all other accusations of illegal dealings, Mr. Damnjanovic denied any involvement.
The evidence is amassed in investigations led by the United Nations sanctions committee, as well as in a recently published report by the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, a research center supported by the United Nations and based in Belgrade. The information is being shared with customs and law enforcement agencies on a restricted basis.
The report, which focuses on Mr. Damnjanovic as one among others in the same trade, compares his operations with those of the well-known Russian arms trader Viktor Bout, saying the two have cooperated, though it says Mr. Damnjanovic has kept a far lower profile. In recent interviews in Belgrade, Mr. Damnjanovic seemed remarkably open in describing his career, and he defended it at length.
“You know how difficult it was to survive here” in the former Yugoslavia, he said in an office in a gated business park. Back in the 1990s when Mr. Milosevic was the Yugoslav president and the country was under sanctions, breaking the law was all but inevitable, he contended.
By his own estimate, the companies he ran flew more than 50 flights from Cyprus to Montenegro in the late 1990s carrying more than 1.5 million packs of cigarettes in a trade supported by Mr. Milosevic’s government and by the authorities in Montenegro. The cigarettes were then smuggled into Italy, European Union law enforcement officials said.
Mr. Damnjanovic said he had no involvement with the smuggling aspect of the operation. “My part was all official,” he said, But he added with a smile: “I think they had to go somewhere. I don’t think it was Montenegro. You should know.”
In 1996, a plane charted by Mr. Damnjanovic that was carrying spare parts for Libyan fighter jets crashed outside Belgrade. His main business partner was killed. Weapons exports to Libya were prohibited under United Nations sanctions at the time.
Over the past decade, weapons shipments have made up a vast majority of his business as he has worked through a series of companies, all based in Belgrade. His latest is named Tomisko, in recognition of his late business partner, Tomislav Miskovic.
Documents obtained by United Nations officials and the Belgrade research center, which were published in the center’s guide, show a continued pattern of companies managed by Mr. Damnjanovic that have flown weapons to regions under United Nations sanctions.
In 2002, Mr. Damnjanovic sent a consignment of weapons — including AK-47-type rifles, rocket launchers, antipersonnel mines and millions of rounds of ammunition — to Liberia, falsifying documents to make it appear that Nigeria was the destination, according to the new report.
Documents signed by Mr. Damnjanovic, and obtained and published by the research center, show that the weapons were flown to Liberia, which was then under United Nations sanctions as punishment for encouraging the civil war in Sierra Leone by supporting rebels there in a gems-for-arms trade deal.
In the same year, the report states, millions of rounds of ammunition shipped by Mr. Damnjanovic to Rwanda were probably intended for Congo.
“What I did was completely official,” Mr. Damnjanovic said in response to the documentation on the Rwanda shipment.
“What somebody else does with the weapons when they get there is up to them,” he said.
According to the report’s authors, despite evidence against Mr. Damnjanovic and other traffickers, they have come to be seen as an essential part of the supply chain for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Damnjanovic said all of his current contracts were commissioned by companies working for the Defense Department in Washington, and he now flies everything from construction material to cigarettes to Iraq for the Pentagon.
“One would have thought that businesses like this should not be rewarded with government contracts when we know what they were involved in in the past,” said Adrian Wilkinson, the team leader of the research center and an author of the report.
Hugh Griffiths, who wrote the report with Mr. Wilkinson, said that law enforcement agents did not have the mechanisms in place to track potential arms smugglers, and that they failed to communicate properly with one another.
“Neither defense contractors nor the military have a profiling system in place which would allow them to identify actors such as Damnjanovic and the others in these clandestine networks,” Mr. Griffiths said.
The United Nations investigators suggest that in 2006, at the same time he was supplying weapons for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Damnjanovic supplied 45 tons of weapons to the Islamic Courts Union forces in Somalia, which the United States says have links to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Damnjanovic said the flight was carrying clothes and shoes and was somehow confused with the arrival of a similar aircraft carrying weapons.
Throughout his career it has been a similar tale. No law enforcement agency has ever tried to bring charges against him, and he has seen his fortunes grow steadily, from being an employee of Yugoslavia’s national airline in the early 1990s to becoming the owner of his own company and an Ilyshin II-76, a super-size Russian freight carrier.
But now, perhaps, his past is catching up with him.
The Serbian government recently rescinded his airline’s license to carry arms shipments, thereby curtailing a substantial part of his work.
“Everybody wants to wash their hands of it,” he said, suggesting that the government knew all along of his activities.
And so, in late September, Mr. Damnjanovic gave a farewell party here in Nis for some of his crew and staff members. He told them he would restructure his company and try to compete in the European freight market — legitimately, he said."
Nice how war criminals AmeriKa uses never get punished, ain't it, shit-eating, dumb-fuck Amurkns?
Yeah, that's all right.
Go back to eating your government-issued bowl of shit!!!!!
Wouldn't want to trouble ya'!!
