The Center for Public Integrity

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma personally authorized the clandestine sale of $100-million worth of high-technology anti-aircraft radar systems to Iraq on July 10, 2000, in violation of United Nations sanctions.

Alleged Russian arms trafficker Victor Bout denied that he had any links to the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden and no role in shipping weapons to Afghanistan.

"In wartime," Winston Churchill once said, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld evoked Churchill’s words when asked for assurances that neither he nor his lieutenants would lie to the media as the United States pursued the war on terrorism and the bombing of Afghanistan. Though Rumsfeld quickly added that he could not envision a situation in which lying would be necessary, this is indeed a "different kind of war," and the always-present risk of disinformation is heightened precisely because of that.

Victor Bout, the Russian arms trafficker whose clandestine sales of weapons of war to some of the bloodiest regimes and rebels in Africa were exposed by the United Nations, had another secret client: he sold millions of dollars of arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity in 1993 concluded that the United States was ill-served by the nation's investment in biological warfare research. The report, the result of a year-long investigation, found a lack of accountability in the Pentagon's Biological Defense Research Program; it said that while hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent, the United States was failing to respond to the threat of attack by known agents, including anthrax.

On a cold winter night last January, on the outskirts of Milan, Italian anti-terrorist police intercepted a frantic call between two suspected Osama Bin Laden operatives. "They have arrested our brothers ... half of the group," the caller said. "They have found the arms warehouse in Germany." That call, monitored in a cell phone wiretap, and subsequent other intercepts led to the arrest three months later of Essid Sami Ben Khemais, a 33-year-old Tunisian, and five others in Italy on charges of conspiracy, trafficking in arms and explosives, and using false documents.

WASHINGTON, September 25, 2001 — Congress and the executive branch are reviewing the largely unregulated access to the nations 527 licensed flight simulators, and to the unknown number sold abroad, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Fort Detrick conducts research to defend the United States against some of the most deadly biological agents in the world. Special protection of the facility is emblematic of the longtime major concern by intelligence officials that biological weapons are potentially the most dangerous weapons that could be employed by terrorists.

June 28, 2001 — The Central Intelligence Agency gave ex-Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos at least $10 million in cash over the last decade, as well as high-tech surveillance equipment that he used against his political opponents, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

Pentagon officials, under pressure to investigate alleged links between elite U.S. military trainers and Colombian forces implicated in a 1997 civilian massacre, have confirmed that they trained soldiers commanded by the officer accused of masterminding the attack.