"You've been putting it up your whole life, you just didn't know it...You stand to win everything."
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats.
The book and film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men ought to have scared the hell out of you.
If it didn’t, with all due respect, you just don’t get it.
The ruthless evil of the narcotraficantes that this story portrays is not just the fancy convention of an extremely talented writer. It is as close to real as you might get, short of submerging oneself in the hell of the real thing.
Cold-blooded killer Anton Chigurh, the role for which Javier Bardem won his Oscar, is as pure a distillation of evil as anything not capped off tightly in a vial behind the wires at Ft. Detrick, MD.
When you get the Chigurh bug, you’re dead.
Thailand About to Spring Merchant of Death Viktor Bout -- No Time for U.S. Diplomats to Equivocate
The movie’s infamous “call it” scene comes to mind today thinking about another pure distillation of evil, international arms merchant Viktor Bout.
Bout exploded out of the cold war as a well connected Merchant of Death. He played a pivotal role in the arming of children as warriors in Africa and the continuing agony of that continent. He was brought down by a sting, brilliantly engineered by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration super-agent Michael Braun.
Arrested in Thailand, Bout seemed to have been on the way to justice in the United States. But our “friends” in Russia leaned on the Thais, who now seem to be close to springing Bout.
Here is how the Russian news agency Novosti summed up the case last month:
Former Russian army officer Bout, 42, was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 during a sting operation led by U.S. agents.
The Bangkok Criminal Court refused in August to extradite Bout to the United States, where he is accused of conspiring with others to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), among other illegal arms deals, and “threatening the lives of U.S. citizens.”…
The Russian Foreign Ministry said it will give Viktor Bout all the support he needs. The ministry said it hoped Thailand would not reverse its initial decision of not extraditing Bout to the United States.
“All the support he needs” seems to be working. Thailand is about to unleash this evil upon the world again, Braun warned in today’s The Washington Times newspaper:
An appellate court in Thailand appears primed to uphold a recent lower court ruling that will unleash Viktor Bout, universally known as the “Merchant of Death,” back on the global community. To say that Bout is upset with the United States after spending more than a year in a Thai prison would be a gross understatement.
…
Bout exploded onto the international scene shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when he effectively leveraged his high-level former Soviet military and intelligence contacts and pounced on a capitalistic opportunity to sell a limitless assortment of Soviet arms that had been stockpiled during the Cold War. I’m talking about everything from AK-47 assault rifles by the millions to such advanced heavy weapons as Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, tanks and Igla surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles that can knock down commercial airliners as easily as a sawed-off shotgun could blast ducks in a barrel.
His clientele were the potpourri of modern-day scum: global terrorists, ruthless dictators, merciless drug kingpins and other transnational organized criminal groups. However, it is the mark that Bout left on Africa that qualifies him as the world’s deadliest “shadow facilitator.”
Bout flooded the continent with hundreds of thousands of AK-47s and other modern weaponry before his arrest. Those arms replaced machetes and other archaic weapons wielded by heavily exploited and drugged young boys, who made up the ranks of several insurgent groups, and instantly transformed them from random murderers into perverse, mindless killing machines operating with assembly-line efficiencies. A million or more innocent Africans were slaughtered.
Read the entire article here.
Braun’s article apparently caused a panic of puckered pants at the State Department. The Attorney General himself may have been galvanized into action.
Here’s the point: the Russians have tossed the coin and it’s up to the Obama administration to call it. Bout is not just some guy who sells guns. He is part of a chain of evil than spans the world: drug traffickers, terrorists, ruthless and heartless.
The question may be this for the Attorney General: Is letting Viktor Bout back into the world to sell more death and destruction to terrorist groups like the Colombian narcoteroristas FARC less important than getting admitted pervert and child abuser Roman Polanski back on our soil to serve his time?
When you stand to win everything, you also stand to lose everything.
"Call it!"
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