Today’s Must Read

Your typical wartime logistics operation: from supplier to vendor to transport to customer… oh, and corrupt warehouser who’ll sell your weaponry to the insurgency while U.S. military officers look the other way.

Welcome to the operation to get guns to the Iraqi security services, circa 2004-2005. According to Government Accountability Office investigations — and at least one criminal investigation — over 190,000 weapons sent to Iraq for the Iraqi security forces disappeared almost as soon as they got off the C-17s. General Petraeus, who was in charge of the effort at the time, commented recently that he thought expeditious delivery of weapons was more important than proper bookkeeping. The New York Times details that his men truly internalized that message — even to the point of opting not to notice when Iraqi warehousers would turn contractor-run armories into a private, for-profit arms dealership.

Two Army majors, John Isgrigg III and Timmy W. Cox, assigned to the equipping mission told the Times about racing against other military units to claim palletized guns off the planes delivering them. They and their colleagues are open about how they didn’t care about keeping proper records of their cargo, claiming that fastidiousness in a complex procurement operation is a hindrance to the mission:

“We had folks getting killed because equipment wasn’t moving,” said Col. Randy Hinton, the majors’ superior officer. “Were there times when all the right forms were not signed? Probably. But we had a mission to do, and we were going to do it the best way we could at that time.”

An interesting approach to following the law. The trouble is that their negligence, in part, led to an atmosphere of tolerance for weapons smuggling.

Thousands of Glocks, AK-47s, and machine guns delivered to Iraq were improperly catalogued in the name of efficiency. Serial numbers went unrecorded. And that meant the guns could simply disappear — fallen off the back of the truck — and the U.S. would have no way of tracking them. It was a system ripe for abuse. And an Iraqi warehouser named Kassim al-Saffar was just the man to abuse it.

Saffar managed the Baghdad Police Academy’s armory for American Logistics Services, an American contractor since banned from Iraq. (ALS, now Lee Dynamics International, paid bribes to military contracting officers to win its $11 million deals to manage five such warehouses, according to a subsequent Army investigation.) Seeing the deliberately lax oversight, Saffar turned the armory into a private arms dealership. He sold guns to anyone he could, and received payment openly: one officer recalled seeing Saffar keep a briefcase stuffed with $20 bills in his office. All this occurred under the watchful eye of U.S. military officers:

He sold guns from the black market and from captured stocks. “There wasn’t anybody there who didn’t know what he was doing,” said [Ted Nordgaarden, an Alaska state trooper who worked as the police academy’s supply chief].

[John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse,] said Mr. Saffar had a steady stream of customers, from Iraqis to South African private security contractors. “There were truckloads of stuff moving out of that armory without my authorization,” Mr. Tisdale said.

Mr. Tisdale said that he complained repeatedly to two top American Logistics executives, but they assured him that Mr. Saffar’s dealings were proper. The company has not responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Tisdale and other co-workers said they believed that an American military official, Lt. Col. Levonda Joey Selph, an Army officer who oversaw the warehouse contract and whose activities have been part of the investigation into American Logistics, also must have known about the arms dealings. Mr. Tisdale said the colonel regularly visited the armory and met with Mr. Saffar. Mr. Nordgaarden recalled seeing Colonel Selph at the warehouse 8 to 10 times over a year.

In an brief encounter outside her Northern Virginia home, Colonel Selph would say only that she was not guilty of any wrongdoing, and that she was under orders not to speak to the press. She would not say whose orders.

Tisdale, the retired Air Force master sergeant who managed a nearby armory, called Saffar’s operation “the craziest thing in the world.” But even crazier is an unanswered question: who was it that allowed the guns to be delivered to the warehouses without cataloging their serial numbers? Was that specified — or, perhaps, neglected — in ALS’s contract? If so, that would indicate that — at best — procurement officials were incompetent to the point of dereliction. At worst, those officials knew an opportunity for a payday when they saw it.

This looks like a job for the Senate’s newly-created wartime contracting commission.