Les armes perdues des aventures américanistes

On sait que le GAO a déterminé que 62% des armes transférées par les USA vers les forces de sécurité irakiennes (dont 190.000 AK-47) ne sont plus retrouvées dans la comptabilité bureaucratique et sont probablement réparties vers d’autres horizons, dont sans doute des milices insurgées, des groupes de résistance irakiens, etc. (Voir notamment l’article de Jane’s du 9 août.) Mais cette affaire pourrait être assez classiquement, et malgré son énormité, une des parties imergés d'un iceberg considérable.

C’est ce que suggère David Isenberg, analyste bien informé des questions de transferts d’armement de l’organisation BASIC, dans un article qu’il met en ligne sur Atimes.com le 17 août. Après avoir étudié les conditions décrites par le GAO pour la “disparition” de ces armes destinées aux Irakiens, il poursuit:

«In fact, the problem could be considerably worse than the GAO report indicates.

»According to Amnesty International research, additional hundreds of thousands of US-approved arms transfers from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Iraq could also be missing. In a May 2006 report, Amnesty revealed that Taos Inc, a US company with multiple DOD contracts, subcontracted to a Moldovan/Ukrainian company called Aerocom to transport hundreds of thousands of arms, more than 90 tonnes of AK-47s, and other weapons from Bosnia to Iraq between July 31, 2004, and June 31, 2005, for Iraqi security forces.

»US military air-traffic controllers in Iraq, however, said Aerocom never requested landing slots to touch down in the country. Aerocom smuggled weapons to Liberia in 2002 and was operating without a valid license in 2004, according to the United Nations Security Council.

»As of August, Amnesty was still awaiting a reply from the Pentagon regarding its investigation into the Bosnia-to-Iraq weapons shipments.

»And, in a move that can only be likened to the fox guarding the hen-house, it turns out, as the Los Angeles Times reported on August 13, that there may have been another factor at work, namely the US government's use of Viktor Bout — a Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.

»When the US government needed to fly four planeloads of seized weapons from Bosnia to Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in August 2004, it used Aerocom. But Aerocom is tied to Bout's aviation empire. The problem is that the planes apparently never arrived. US officials admitted they had no record of the flights landing in Baghdad.

»Why the US government would have used Bout-controlled Aerocom — which had already been linked to supplying arms to Liberia when it was ruled by Charles Taylor and to drug traffickers in Belize — is a mystery in and of itself, considering that by 2004 Bout was very well known to the US government as a global gun-runner whom they wanted to put out of business.

»The latest development occurred this week when it was reported that that Italian anti-Mafia investigators had uncovered an alleged shipment of 105,000 rifles of which the US military command in Iraq was unaware. The Italian team, in an investigation code-named Operation Parabellum, stopped the $40 million sale and made four arrests. The consignment appears to have been ordered by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The US high command in Baghdad admitted it had no knowledge of any such order, even though the ministry is supposed to inform the US before purchasing arms.

»An Iraqi Interior Ministry official insisted the weapons were mostly for Iraqi police in al-Anbar province. But given the close relationship between the Shi'ite-led government and Shi'ite militias and the irregular nature of the arms order, the disclosure prompted suspicion that the eventual destination could have been the militias, or police units close to them.»

Il semble qu’on puisse proposer des réponses aux interrogations d’Isenberg. On parle de ses supputations sur les raisons pour lesquelles les Américains, notamment sous le contrôle des services de renseignement qui supervisent ces transferts d’armes prises sur place dans des territoires instables comme la Bosnie, passent des contrats avec des personnages et des organisations douteuses comme Bout et Aerocom. On peut avancer que de telles transactions sont le résultat de la privatisation intense des services de renseignement telle que la journaliste Hillhouse l’a mise en évidence. Plus aucun contrôle efficace de la part de la bureaucratie du gouvernement n’est exercé sur ces opérations parallèles, impliquant la manipulation d’armes d’occasion, d’armes saisies, d’armes manipulées par divers trafiquants. Le secteur privé US est impliqué d’une façon massive dans toutes ces opérations et oriente les services de sécurité nationale US qu’il a fortement pénétrés dans le sens de ses intérêts. Le résultat est l’entretien constant des capacités de combat des divers théâtres d’opération anti-américanistes dans le monde.

Mis en ligne le 16 août 2007 à 15H58