Chicago Tribune: Saudi former BCCI director sues American author Rachel Ehrenfeld using British libel law for writing that he financed Osama bin Laden. Suit demands destruction of all unpublished copies of her books. Book was not released in UK but a dozen readers there purchased it through the Internet. (Plaintiff KbM is rather notorious among investigative journalists for this sort of action, and he has all the money in the world to fund armies of lawyers to engage in this sort of "libel tourism" as Ehrenfeld calls it. Nevertheless, and seriously, it's hard to understand why if and until Britain changes its libel laws, publishers and their armies of lawyers don't protect themselves by indicating their products with any sort of by-UK-standards-judged 'libelous' information cannot be sold or shipped to or downloaded in the UK. If people in the U.K. don't want the information by serious authors about who is allegedly funding al Qaeda for instance, they can accept having laws which prevent them from seeing it. But why should the rest of us be the victims of that sort of de facto censorship due to another government?)...
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/007177.html&
Bruce Falconer: "Viktor Bout's Last Deal: How an elite DEA unit brought down the world's most notorious arms dealer."
FOR VIKTOR BOUT, meeting clients in person—looking them in the eye, shaking their hands—was his preferred way of doing business, though it was not strictly necessary. As the fugitive leader of the world's largest and most lucrative illicit-arms-trafficking network, he had plenty of capable lieutenants to manage his affairs. But Bout, by all accounts, enjoyed his work and liked to be on location when deals were closed. So it was that on Thursday, March 6, he landed in Bangkok, Thailand, having flown all night from his home in Moscow. He had come to meet representatives of what he hoped would be his newest customer, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and to finalize an arrangement to deliver millions of dollars of military-grade weapons from Eastern European warehouses to the FARC's jungle outposts. <...>
THE CHAIN OF EVENTS that brought Viktor Bout to Bangkok that morning had played out like moves in a high-stakes poker game, albeit one rigged in favor of Bout's opponents. What follows is the story of how the "Merchant of Death," so named for his role in fueling Third World conflicts with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammunition, was brought down by a months-long international DEA sting operation. <...> ...
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/007179.html
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