“Justice Department officials were relieved on Aug. 20 when a Thai appeals court approved the extradition” of Russian Viktor Bout, who is accused of “a 15-year run as one of the world’s biggest arms traffickers,” reports Scott Shane in the New York Times. They seek to tap into “his vast insider’s knowledge of. . . . the trade and the transport that fuel drug cartels, terrorism networks and insurgent movements from Colombia to Afghanistan, according to former officials who tracked him.”
Question: How does news of Bout’s extradition intersect with Fidel Castro surfacing to support Bilderberg alternate historians? (We decline to use the term “conspiracy theorists,” because, no matter how wild their formulations might seem, nobody deserves to be reflexively corralled and branded as unfit for public consumption.) Some background on the latter from the AP:
Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture. The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.
Estulin was actually photographed shaking hands with Castro. Turns out he also wrote a book in which key chapters cover the career of Bout. Before we explore Estulin’s findings, some of you may be familiar with Bout through the work of Wayne Madsen, another journalist who, like Estulin, is sometimes written off as a “conspiracy theorist.” For example, a year ago Madsen wrote . . .
On October 23, 2006, WMR [the Wayne Madsen Report] reported the following concerning Bout’s activities in Afghanistan on behalf of the U.S.-led NATO military force: “WMR has learned from an intelligence source in Afghanistan that the aircraft of the enigmatic Viktor Bout, who works as a Pentagon contractor, flew arms and passengers for the Taliban and ‘Al Qaeda,’ and maintains close links with the Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli criminal syndicates. [A few weeks later Madsen reported:] “A Ghanaian Boeing 707 [supposedly flying for Bout] was recently spotted off-loading 40 tons of ammunition at Mogadishu Airport in Somalia [for] the Union of Islamic Courts” [the precursor to al Shaabab that controlled much of the country at the time].
While I haven’t read the Daniel Estulin book that covers Bout titled Shadow Masters: An International Network of Governments and Secret-Service Agencies Working Together with Drugs Dealers and Terrorists for Mutual Benefit and Profit, a friend of mine has and provided some insights:
According to Estulin, Bout is basically just a fall guy, a low level arms dealer being used as a patsy in a Russian/US policy struggle. In Shadow Masters [Estulin] details the conversations he had with other writers (newspapers and magazines) who did stories on Bout. It was pretty funny seeing that the writers for Men’s Health and GQ straight-up fabricated information about Bout and got the rest off the internet.
The front man for the UN who has produced reports and “evidence” against Bout (actually pronounced Butt, Bout comes from an obsolete French-based translation model) is a guy named Peleman who has received millions of dollars in funding from the UN to write these reports. He has created a kind of flow chart which is cited as evidence by everyone else but there is apparently no tangible proof against Bout at all.
When the Thai judged asked the DEA agents present if they knew who Bout was they answered, “Yeah, we saw the movie” referring to the horrible Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War. . . .
Having read the Times article I’m more convinced then ever that Estulin is on the right track. The NYT [pulls] the same players out of the closet to compose their thesis on Bout. They quote [Douglas Farah, author of a 2007 book about Bout titled Merchant of Death, to the effect, “He knows a lot about Russian intelligence as it’s been restructured under Putin”] who has been discredited [doesn’t say why — RW]. They also quote a former DEA agent now working for Spectre Group International . . . which is another dubious organization.
My friend concludes:
This thing smells like a disinformation campaign which is about par for the course with the NYT [considering how they danced] to the CIA’s tune in regards to Vietnam and Guatemala.
Still, if Bout talks, the United States Justice Department will get a lot more than it bargained for.