---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven L. Robinson <srobin21@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM
Subject: [bangla-vision] Obama Administration eager to arm Gadhafi
Libya army transport deal frozen after US approval
The Associated Press
March 7, 2011
WASHINGTON — In the months before Libyans revolted and President Barack
Obama told leader Moammar Gadhafi to go, the U.S. government was moving
to do business with his regime on an increasing scale by quietly
approving a $77 million dollar deal to deliver at least 50 refurbished
armored troop carriers to the dictator's military.
Congress balked, concerned the deal would improve Libyan army mobility
and questioning the Obama administration's support for the agreement,
which would have benefited British defense company BAE. The
congressional concerns effectively stalled the deal until the turmoil in
the country scuttled the sale. Earlier last week, after all military
exports to the Gadhafi regime were suspended, the State Department's
Directorate of Defense Trade Controls informed Capitol Hill that the
deal had been returned without action — effectively off the table,
according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to
describe the deal's sensitive details.
State Department spokesman Mark C. Toner said the proposed license was
suspended along with the rest of "what limited defense trade we had with
Libya."
The Gadhafi regime's desire to upgrade its troop carriers was so intense
that a Libyan official told U.S. diplomats in Tripoli in
2009 that the dictator's sons, Khamis and Saif, both were demanding
swift action. Khamis, a commander whose army brigade reportedly attacked
the opposition-held town of Zawiya with armored units and pickup trucks,
expressed a "personal interest" in modernizing the armored transports,
according to a December
2009 diplomatic message disclosed by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website.
The administration's own interest in the deal amounted to a first
cautious step toward allowing a major arms purchase by Gadhafi's regime
even as U.S. officials waved off other Libyan approaches for weapons
systems and military aid.
Toner said senior diplomats had repeatedly warned the Gadhafi regime
that "we would not discuss the possibility of lethal U.S. arms sales
until Libya made significant progress on human rights issues, visas and
other areas of bilateral relationship."
The old M113 troop transports are typically outfitted with a single
machine gun. U.S. officials said the now-scuttled deal would not have
added new cannons or other guns because of strict rules that all defense
sales to Libya had to be "non-lethal" defense products.
But despite the "non-lethal" restrictions, some defense industry experts
said the proposal should have never gotten off the ground.
"This deal should have been a red flag," said William D. Hartung,
director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America
Foundation, a non-partisan Washington think tank. "Anything that makes
troop transports more useable allows them to be applied to offensive
purposes, even if you don't add guns."
On the whole, U.S. defense shipments to Libya under the Obama and Bush
administrations have been tightly screened in recent years. U.S. sales
were dwarfed by a tide of arms sold by European allies. European Union
nations approved sales of $470 million in weapons to Gadhafi's military
in 2009 alone — a rush of Italian military aircraft, Maltese small arms
and British munitions, according to a January EU arms control report.
By comparison, the U.S. peak was $46 million in approved defense sales
in the final year of the Bush administration in 2008 — up from $5
million in Libyan defense sales the year before. The $46 million
included $1 million in explosives and incendiary agents, and Toner said
the State Department approved shipments of blasting cartridges used in
oil exploration. Other U.S. officials cited concerns that such explosive
agents could be converted to crude battlefield munitions.
Bush-era officials said the slight increase in Libya defense sales was
worth it in return for the dismantling of the rogue nation's atomic
weapons program. "We were careful and measured in what we allowed
Gadhafi to get," said former ambassador Robert Joseph, who coordinated
the 2003 nuclear agreement.
The Obama administration has lagged in providing figures for its recent
defense sales, prompting pressure for more specifics from Congress as
well as a request late last month for more details on Libyan licenses.
One official familiar with defense issues said total military sales to
Libya in the Obama administration's first year in 2009 dropped to $17
million — but would have ballooned in
2010 had the $77 million armored car deal gone through.
Instead, the transaction ran headlong into congressional worries about
the Gadhafi regime's plans for the armored vehicles. The concerns came
from both the Senate and House foreign relations committees, officials
said.
"Congress doesn't usually step in to stop these deals, so they clearly
must have had serious reservations that the administration didn't
share," said William Lowell, a veteran defense industry consultant who
headed the State Department's defense trade agency in the 1990s.
Libyan military officials long clamored to upgrade their old M113
transports. Despite a 1978 U.S. ban on weapons sales, Libya apparently
obtained its fleet of U.S-built, Vietnam-era transports around 1980,
according to a defense industry official familiar with the deal.
In 2007, Libyan army generals told a visiting American delegation they
wanted upgraded troop carriers as well as Chinook helicopters to speed
their military's transport, said a senior U.S. official familiar with
the request. European subsidiaries of major American defense firms were
soon shuttling into Tripoli. General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman were
among companies listed as attending the
2008 and 2010 Libya Defense and Security Exhibition in Tripoli.
At the same time, U.S. military officials talked up Libya as a new
client. Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, head of the Defense Security
Cooperation Agency, told a 2009 national security event in Washington
that the U.S. might supply Humvees to Libya as "non-lethal" aid. DSCA
spokesman Charles Taylor said last week that a Humvee sale never
materialized.
Momentum began bubbling for the troop transport deal in 2009 after a
U.S. military attaché in Tripoli told BAE officials about Libyan
interest, the defense industry official said. BAE had paired up with a
Turkish firm, NUROL Holding, in a joint venture to modernize old M113s
for other Mideast and Asian armies. The joint firm, FNSS Defense
Systems, submitted the $77 million Libyan proposal in September 2009 to
the State Department's defense trade agency, officials said.
BAE is a British firm with a major U.S. defense arm, BAE Systems, Inc.,
that was listed in 2010 as the nation's 12th largest government
contractor. Headquartered in Rockville, Md., the company's U.S. board is
chaired by former Gen. Anthony Zinni, who retired at the end of Clinton
administration; former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Obama foreign
policy mentor; and former Bush administration Homeland Security chief
Michael Chertoff.
Libyan officials wheedled for swift action. In a meeting with American
diplomats in Tripoli in late 2009, a senior aide to Gadhafi's son Saif
said that he and his brother Khamis wanted the U.S. to quickly approve
the armored transport upgrades. The aide "requested an update on the
status" of the joint venture, Ambassador Gene Cretz wrote on Dec. 14,
2009, in the cable published by WikiLeaks.
The Libyans' obsession with troop transport also showed in their
interest in Jordanian-built "Tiger" high-mobility vehicles and in MH-6
"Little Bird" helicopters previously denied by U.S. officials. Both
items could not be sold to Libya, U.S. officials repeated, according to
the memo.
The armored transport deal, though, sailed through. By late 2009, it was
green-lighted by the State Department's trade office, officials said.
Under rules governing defense trade, the deal still required
congressional oversight before it could be clinched — because of the
high cost involved and the fact that troop carriers were deemed major
military equipment.
But the deal soon bogged down in doubts. Officials noted that documents
cited differing numbers of troop transports, ranging from 40 to 60 —
raising alarm that the Libyans might be padding the figures to obtain
additional parts. The committees also pressed the State Department for a
clearer sense of how the Libyans would use the armored carriers, but
complained they did not get definitive answers.
There were also concerns about BAE's role. After months of negotiations
with the Justice Department, the parent firm of the British-owned
defense giant pleaded guilty in March 2010 to conspiracy and false
statements charges, agreeing to pay a $400 million fine in a case
involving questionable payments to a Saudi official and offshore shell
companies.
The State Department then placed a "temporary administrative hold" on
weapons export licenses sought by both BAE's British and U.S. entities.
The department also said it was considering debarring BAE, a move that
would limit the company's ability to export items with U.S.-made content.
The State Department has not debarred the defense firm, but BAE's
involvement added to uncertainty about the deal, officials said. "I'm a
little surprised the right hand at State didn't coordinate with what the
left hand at Justice was doing," said William Reinsch, president of the
National Foreign Trade Council and a former senior Commerce Department
official.
In a statement, BAE said that "responsible and ethical business conduct
is fundamental to the success of our company and is evident in every
aspect of our business, including in our participation in the Foreign
Military Sales Program and our compliance with defense export control
laws."
By summer 2010, the deal was effectively scuttled, stalled by too many
doubts.
"I think we should have been more careful," Hartung said. "If Gadhafi
wanted a quid pro quo, we should have given him oil equipment."
Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gwuLNqE2rj86RXryfwwnzve4C3oQ?docId=fcea6e0539e24e4dbd33392f20ada921
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-- From: Steven L. Robinson <srobin21@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM
Subject: [bangla-vision] Obama Administration eager to arm Gadhafi
Libya army transport deal frozen after US approval
The Associated Press
March 7, 2011
WASHINGTON — In the months before Libyans revolted and President Barack
Obama told leader Moammar Gadhafi to go, the U.S. government was moving
to do business with his regime on an increasing scale by quietly
approving a $77 million dollar deal to deliver at least 50 refurbished
armored troop carriers to the dictator's military.
Congress balked, concerned the deal would improve Libyan army mobility
and questioning the Obama administration's support for the agreement,
which would have benefited British defense company BAE. The
congressional concerns effectively stalled the deal until the turmoil in
the country scuttled the sale. Earlier last week, after all military
exports to the Gadhafi regime were suspended, the State Department's
Directorate of Defense Trade Controls informed Capitol Hill that the
deal had been returned without action — effectively off the table,
according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to
describe the deal's sensitive details.
State Department spokesman Mark C. Toner said the proposed license was
suspended along with the rest of "what limited defense trade we had with
Libya."
The Gadhafi regime's desire to upgrade its troop carriers was so intense
that a Libyan official told U.S. diplomats in Tripoli in
2009 that the dictator's sons, Khamis and Saif, both were demanding
swift action. Khamis, a commander whose army brigade reportedly attacked
the opposition-held town of Zawiya with armored units and pickup trucks,
expressed a "personal interest" in modernizing the armored transports,
according to a December
2009 diplomatic message disclosed by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website.
The administration's own interest in the deal amounted to a first
cautious step toward allowing a major arms purchase by Gadhafi's regime
even as U.S. officials waved off other Libyan approaches for weapons
systems and military aid.
Toner said senior diplomats had repeatedly warned the Gadhafi regime
that "we would not discuss the possibility of lethal U.S. arms sales
until Libya made significant progress on human rights issues, visas and
other areas of bilateral relationship."
The old M113 troop transports are typically outfitted with a single
machine gun. U.S. officials said the now-scuttled deal would not have
added new cannons or other guns because of strict rules that all defense
sales to Libya had to be "non-lethal" defense products.
But despite the "non-lethal" restrictions, some defense industry experts
said the proposal should have never gotten off the ground.
"This deal should have been a red flag," said William D. Hartung,
director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America
Foundation, a non-partisan Washington think tank. "Anything that makes
troop transports more useable allows them to be applied to offensive
purposes, even if you don't add guns."
On the whole, U.S. defense shipments to Libya under the Obama and Bush
administrations have been tightly screened in recent years. U.S. sales
were dwarfed by a tide of arms sold by European allies. European Union
nations approved sales of $470 million in weapons to Gadhafi's military
in 2009 alone — a rush of Italian military aircraft, Maltese small arms
and British munitions, according to a January EU arms control report.
By comparison, the U.S. peak was $46 million in approved defense sales
in the final year of the Bush administration in 2008 — up from $5
million in Libyan defense sales the year before. The $46 million
included $1 million in explosives and incendiary agents, and Toner said
the State Department approved shipments of blasting cartridges used in
oil exploration. Other U.S. officials cited concerns that such explosive
agents could be converted to crude battlefield munitions.
Bush-era officials said the slight increase in Libya defense sales was
worth it in return for the dismantling of the rogue nation's atomic
weapons program. "We were careful and measured in what we allowed
Gadhafi to get," said former ambassador Robert Joseph, who coordinated
the 2003 nuclear agreement.
The Obama administration has lagged in providing figures for its recent
defense sales, prompting pressure for more specifics from Congress as
well as a request late last month for more details on Libyan licenses.
One official familiar with defense issues said total military sales to
Libya in the Obama administration's first year in 2009 dropped to $17
million — but would have ballooned in
2010 had the $77 million armored car deal gone through.
Instead, the transaction ran headlong into congressional worries about
the Gadhafi regime's plans for the armored vehicles. The concerns came
from both the Senate and House foreign relations committees, officials
said.
"Congress doesn't usually step in to stop these deals, so they clearly
must have had serious reservations that the administration didn't
share," said William Lowell, a veteran defense industry consultant who
headed the State Department's defense trade agency in the 1990s.
Libyan military officials long clamored to upgrade their old M113
transports. Despite a 1978 U.S. ban on weapons sales, Libya apparently
obtained its fleet of U.S-built, Vietnam-era transports around 1980,
according to a defense industry official familiar with the deal.
In 2007, Libyan army generals told a visiting American delegation they
wanted upgraded troop carriers as well as Chinook helicopters to speed
their military's transport, said a senior U.S. official familiar with
the request. European subsidiaries of major American defense firms were
soon shuttling into Tripoli. General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman were
among companies listed as attending the
2008 and 2010 Libya Defense and Security Exhibition in Tripoli.
At the same time, U.S. military officials talked up Libya as a new
client. Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, head of the Defense Security
Cooperation Agency, told a 2009 national security event in Washington
that the U.S. might supply Humvees to Libya as "non-lethal" aid. DSCA
spokesman Charles Taylor said last week that a Humvee sale never
materialized.
Momentum began bubbling for the troop transport deal in 2009 after a
U.S. military attaché in Tripoli told BAE officials about Libyan
interest, the defense industry official said. BAE had paired up with a
Turkish firm, NUROL Holding, in a joint venture to modernize old M113s
for other Mideast and Asian armies. The joint firm, FNSS Defense
Systems, submitted the $77 million Libyan proposal in September 2009 to
the State Department's defense trade agency, officials said.
BAE is a British firm with a major U.S. defense arm, BAE Systems, Inc.,
that was listed in 2010 as the nation's 12th largest government
contractor. Headquartered in Rockville, Md., the company's U.S. board is
chaired by former Gen. Anthony Zinni, who retired at the end of Clinton
administration; former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Obama foreign
policy mentor; and former Bush administration Homeland Security chief
Michael Chertoff.
Libyan officials wheedled for swift action. In a meeting with American
diplomats in Tripoli in late 2009, a senior aide to Gadhafi's son Saif
said that he and his brother Khamis wanted the U.S. to quickly approve
the armored transport upgrades. The aide "requested an update on the
status" of the joint venture, Ambassador Gene Cretz wrote on Dec. 14,
2009, in the cable published by WikiLeaks.
The Libyans' obsession with troop transport also showed in their
interest in Jordanian-built "Tiger" high-mobility vehicles and in MH-6
"Little Bird" helicopters previously denied by U.S. officials. Both
items could not be sold to Libya, U.S. officials repeated, according to
the memo.
The armored transport deal, though, sailed through. By late 2009, it was
green-lighted by the State Department's trade office, officials said.
Under rules governing defense trade, the deal still required
congressional oversight before it could be clinched — because of the
high cost involved and the fact that troop carriers were deemed major
military equipment.
But the deal soon bogged down in doubts. Officials noted that documents
cited differing numbers of troop transports, ranging from 40 to 60 —
raising alarm that the Libyans might be padding the figures to obtain
additional parts. The committees also pressed the State Department for a
clearer sense of how the Libyans would use the armored carriers, but
complained they did not get definitive answers.
There were also concerns about BAE's role. After months of negotiations
with the Justice Department, the parent firm of the British-owned
defense giant pleaded guilty in March 2010 to conspiracy and false
statements charges, agreeing to pay a $400 million fine in a case
involving questionable payments to a Saudi official and offshore shell
companies.
The State Department then placed a "temporary administrative hold" on
weapons export licenses sought by both BAE's British and U.S. entities.
The department also said it was considering debarring BAE, a move that
would limit the company's ability to export items with U.S.-made content.
The State Department has not debarred the defense firm, but BAE's
involvement added to uncertainty about the deal, officials said. "I'm a
little surprised the right hand at State didn't coordinate with what the
left hand at Justice was doing," said William Reinsch, president of the
National Foreign Trade Council and a former senior Commerce Department
official.
In a statement, BAE said that "responsible and ethical business conduct
is fundamental to the success of our company and is evident in every
aspect of our business, including in our participation in the Foreign
Military Sales Program and our compliance with defense export control
laws."
By summer 2010, the deal was effectively scuttled, stalled by too many
doubts.
"I think we should have been more careful," Hartung said. "If Gadhafi
wanted a quid pro quo, we should have given him oil equipment."
Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gwuLNqE2rj86RXryfwwnzve4C3oQ?docId=fcea6e0539e24e4dbd33392f20ada921
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm
------------------------------------
Related links :
www.afterdowningstreet.org/bangladesh ;
www.mytown.ca/banglavision
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