How much better the man who doesn’t struggle, ineptly:posted by nasreddin at 6:43 PM on March 21, 2011 [24 favorites]
‘Tell me, Muse, of that man, who after the fall of Troy
Had sight of the manners and cities of many peoples.’
He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke,
So as then to reveal striking and marvellous things,
Antiphates, Charybdis and Scylla, the Cyclops.
He doesn’t start Diomede’s return from Troy with his
Uncle Meleager’s death, or the War with two eggs:
He always hastens the outcome, and snatches the reader
Into the midst of the action, as if all were known,
Leaves what he despairs of improving by handling,
Yet so deceptive, in blending fact with fiction,
The middle agrees with the start, the end with the middle.
These guys are still millionaires? Legally?That's a good question. Presumably, they'd be entitled to keep all the money they made from their non-illegal deals, unless some fines were levvied.
I found the article a good read, but was a bit non-plussed at the end. The entrapment angle sucks, but the scale of what went on just adds to the banality of the end result.I'm not sure if he was actually entrapped (or rather, I don't think the trap actually worked). He didn't agree to sell guns, and he didn't have his own gun. Was it illegal for him to shoot someone else's gun?
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.posted by russilwvong at 9:54 AM on March 22, 2011
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
... problems with the ammunition were evident last fall in places like Nawa, Afghanistan, an outpost near the Pakistani border, where an Afghan lieutenant colonel surveyed the rifle cartridges on his police station’s dirty floor. Soon after arriving there, the cardboard boxes had split open and their contents spilled out, revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966.
“This is what they give us for the fighting,” said the colonel, Amanuddin, who like many Afghans has only one name. “It makes us worried, because too much of it is junk.” Ammunition as it ages over decades often becomes less powerful, reliable and accurate.
In reality, the Pentagon had good reason to disqualify AEY from even vying for the contract. The company and Diveroli had both been placed on the State Department "watch list" for importing illegal firearms. But the Pentagon failed to check the list. It also ignored the fact that AEY had defaulted on prior contracts. Initially rated as "unsatisfactory" by the contracting office, AEY was upgraded to "good" and then "excellent"How comes someone in the contracting offices upgraded the ratings? And what were the criteria used to assess and to revise the ratings? I wouldn't be much surprised to discover the contracting officiers knew all too well what was going on, and they were bought, possibily for a pittance.
There was only one explanation for the meteoric rise: Diveroli had radically underbid the competition. In private conversations, the Army's contracting officers let AEY know that its bid was at least $50 million less than its nearest rival.
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posted by absalom at 6:01 PM on March 21, 2011 [1 favorite]