Thailand Refuses to Extradite Viktor Bout

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While this decision will be immediately appealed, in what was a proxy power fight, Thailand has refused to extradite Viktor Bout to the United States to be tried on charges of trafficking arms to terrorists–Colombia’s FARC.

The DEA maintains that Mr Bout agreed to supply ground-to-air missiles that could have been used to target agency operatives assisting Colombia’s attempts to wipe out cocaine crops.

But on Tuesday the court found in favour of Mr Bout.

“The US charges are not applicable under Thai law,” said the judge delivering the hour-long verdict at Bangkok’s Criminal Court. “This is a political case. The Farc is fighting for a political cause and is not a criminal gang. Thailand does not recognise the Farc as a terrorist group.”

The court “does not have the authority to punish actions done by foreigners against other foreigners in another country”, the judge said.

The FT goes on to describe allegations of attempts, by both the Americans and Russians, to bribe the judges in this case. Who knows the relative truth to that claim? But the decision is interesting because the Thais have thus far refused to follow US bidding in what is undoubtedly an attempt to shut down a horrible arms trafficker (though one we have used in the past), but is also an attempt to shut down a challenge to US influence in developing nations around the world.

And yes, I do find it ironic that Thailand–the country that hosted Abu Zubaydah’s torturers–has refused to accept our representations about who is, and who is not, a terrorist.

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24 replies
  1. bobschacht says:

    Are the chickens starting to come home to roost?

    BTW, you must be writing from P-Burgh, aren’t you? The home of that highly visible beacon that is supposed to spell Pittsburgh, but actually spells some unpronounceable gobbledygook? For the Netroots conference, right? Wish I could be there! Maybe next year.

    Bob in HI

  3. FormerFed says:

    One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Interesting that the Thais have their own view of the world.

    • freepatriot says:

      Interesting that the Thais have their own view of the world.

      who told them they could do that ???

    • MrWhy says:

      Nelson Mandela and the ANC were officially on the US terror watch list until July 2008. Indeed, one country’s freedom fighter is another country’s terrorist.

  4. MsAnnaNOLA says:

    I think we should stop using the word terrorist. It will soon cease to have any meaning anyway.

    It is a loaded word and also at the same time a word that is not at all specific.

  5. mafr says:

    Viktor Bout !

    People should take a little time and read the book about him “Merchant of Death” by Farrah. a bizarre, fascinating tale, and a well written book.

    You said that the USA used him in the past.

    According to this book, not that long ago; The authors say that his fleet of Russian military cargo planes were hired by the USA to supply troops in Iraq, even though the authorities were aware of his illegal arms dealings in Africa etc.

    The descriptions of his crews of Russian pilots, (laid off military) hardcore mercenaries, sleeping in hammocks slung from the airplanes, and downing vodka, taking their old rattletrap planes where no-one else will go, are very interesting.

    I am startled that so far, the Thai authorities haven’t handed him over to someone or other. I thought for sure they would sell him to Russia. Maybe holding out for a better offer.

    • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

      Jesus… I only got part way through “McMafia” and then had to put it down; will get back to it later, but the bits about Victor Bout were ominous:
      – nice lifestyle in S. Africa (tie-in with Abramoff, who has connections to S. Africa?);
      – African wars in the 80s (almost certain tie-in with Abramoff if Thomas Frank’s reporting about the roots of the GOP Rightwing Crime Family are accurate); and
      – ‘international business man’ (tie-in with employed Russian and Eastern European mercenaries, pilots, ’skilled labor’ ripe for globalized, neo-Feudalist employment).

      Quite the networker, is Mr. Bout; can’t wait to learn how much of his money was being laundered through AIG-FP in London, or through one or another of Madoff’s feeder funds.

      Which makes this news about the Thai’s not handing him over very ominous, IMHO.

      Wonder whether Putini has some kind of blackmail mojo on some Thai’s? While I agree that one person’s ‘freedom fighter’ is another person’s ‘terrorist’, these global, neo-Feudalist enabling shills have become too costly to civil society everywhere.

      This shouldn’t be a US vs Thai issue; at the level of Victor Bout (and Dusty Foggo, and Abramoff), it’s more an issue of whether or not we can keep a structure of international finance and laws that isn’t in the stranglehold of an international mafia. Or at least, that’s as close as I can figure it out…

    • shootthatarrow says:

      The Kingdom of Thailand has political features that entail a revered monarchy,a aristocracy,the military,the police and a parliamentary democracy form of national government that functions on pure and not so pure money politics,play for keeps,settle scores always and loyalty is a matter of expediency–no more–no less–no matter what–rules.

      Thailand has been chasing it’s ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra for sometime now but just can’t “catch” him despite surely knowing lots about where he is much of the time. He has been wheeling and dealing quite well despite being a convicted felon/fugitive and seems quite able to secure passports,fly in and out of countries and remains fully engaged in Thai politics,media and currently is gaming the Thai people to get a royal pardon from HM the King of Thailand.

      This Russian has landed in a land where money talks and mai pai ren walks.

      WashingtonDC surely knows this to be so too. Very likely the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing here which may be a feature–not a bug. CIA fingerprints on any of this? More likely than not. Thailand is also denying it had anything to do with WashingtonDC doing torture yet it is very likely someone like ex-Thai PM Thaksin would have signed off on that kind of thing. This is a Thai PM who had over 2,500(3,000?) Thais killed on a summary execution/extra-judicial basis for just maybe being drug dealers or users.

  6. Mary says:

    Remember in another thread, the discussion of whether you could so have the left and right hands of two govt agencies not knowing what the others were doing so that, for example, CIA might be running a covert op re: Turkish interests and FBI might pick it up without knowing it was an approved covert op?

    Viktor Bout was kind of our guy on the CIA front from time to time on getting weapons deliveries done, wasn’t he? I thought the FT article was interesting in how it emphasized that the DEA sting and whole operation expressly excluded CIA.

    SO Bout didn’t really do anything contrary to Thai law in his arms supplying – does make you wonder what Zubaydah did, by running arms training camps that were not al-Qaeda camps, to justify Thai cooperation with his torture.

    • emptywheel says:

      I strongly suspect the CIA had infiltrated the FARC group they got the French woman out of, and that that’s where they got the evidence against Bout if not (more likely) set him up in a sting.

      • Mary says:

        That could be in connection with the release of the hostage in particular, but everything being released on this has made it an all DEA deal from the get go, Smulian as the DEA leverage point. But then again, especially with the murky waters of CIA having used Bout for their own purposes elsewhere, if the confidential sources making the sham FARC deal with Smulian and Bout where CIA sourced, it’s not likely to be acknowledged. And might even warrant an odd belts and suspenders reference in a story about him that the CIA was NOT involved. Especially with Putin flexing his spy games muscles lately.

        I thought this piece last winter by The Economist was one of the better ones I’ve seen:

        http://www.economist.com/world…..d=12795502

        The Americans had played a clever game. In January they duped a close collaborator of Mr Bout’s, Andrew Smulian, a Briton, into believing that three DEA agents, whom he met in Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, were really from the FARC. They handed Mr Smulian $5,000 for expenses and told him that they wanted millions of dollars’ worth of weapons.

        They gave him a mobile telephone which they claimed could not be monitored (it was, naturally). He rushed off to Moscow to discuss the deal. Mr Bout was cautious, asking Mr Smulian to pick out his contacts from photos of known FARC leaders, but even so he was somehow persuaded.

        “Even so” – imagine that. *g*

        [ Edited to add – we have Smulian, btw.
        http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…..in_america ]

        And just because it seems like it should go here, a link to one of several recent stories on how the Columbian deals with the US on air bases are generating frowny faces in Latin America
        http://www.latimes.com/news/op…..9568.story

        More in the same vein from a couple of days earlier
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..03431.html

    • robspierre says:

      If Viktor Bout didn’t exist, one or more of the governments and international bodies would have to invent him. He is that useful. The Thai attitude is not just unsurprising–it is typical of every encounter Bout has had with what passes for law in our world. Governments and organizations invariably weigh Bout’s criminal past against what he has or can do for them. Then they use the complexity of his businesses as their excuse for dealing with a notorious criminal.

      Bout is indeed an arms dealer and smuggler (as well as a player in the blood diamond trade). But he is not just about weapons. He also has a whole fleet of shady airlines. The CIA has used his aircraft (planes and helicopters) in Afghanistan. The various mercenary outfits (Blackwater, CACI) and contractors have used them extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Defense and State Department people probably flew with Bout’s aircraft and pilots pretty regularly over the last few years. Aid agencies charter his aircraft to fly maize in Africa. The UN probably hires him to carry peace keepers into conflict zones where he sells weapons.

      Bout’s aircraft–ex-Soviet military transports and airliners, with a smattering of older Western airliners–are ideal for third-world, clandestine, and criminal use. They are non-descript–old and commonplace enough to be unremarkable. They are mostly optimized for operation from rough fields and at high temperatures and altitudes. They are unsophisticated and easy to maintain. They are deniable.

      Bout’s services are cheap. As with most Russian oligarchs, it isn’t always clear how he got title to the former state assets that he holds–the ex-Soviet air force and Aerflot planes and helicopters. He probably paid little or nothing for them. The collapse of the Soviet Union left a surplus of unemployed pilots. So his prices cannot be beat.

      Bout can and will fly into places in the war-torn third world where nobody else will. Both his planes and his crews come so cheap as to be practically disposable.

      Finally, the sheer number of Bout’s ever-changing companies gives his government clients the fig leaf that they need when hiring an outlaw. The money that they give Viktor Bout the airline entrepreneur goes in different pockets from the money that he makes on weapons and diamond smuggling, so they act as if it is not going to the same person.

      I’m thus not surprised that the DoJ has not had much luck with the Thais, particularly since the rightist coup. The Thais know that we used Bout. Why shouldn’t the Thai generals stay on Bouts good side? They might find a use for him themselves, after all. Their Burmese counterparts are doing well out of the dope trade, and a discrete airline could become useful.

      FYI, Bout’s airline operations are not that hard to track. The plane spotter web sites–hobbyist sites that record the registration numbers and identifying features of transiting planes–make it possible to follow a surprising amount of his activities, just as they did with the Bush rendition flights. It seems to be very hard to operate aircraft without valid registrations and impossible to hide their origins and travels once they are registered.

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        Fascinating.
        And I thought Alaskan bush pilots and western states crop dusters were cowboys.

        Your point about the relative simplicity of the planes (and the relative simplicity of obtaining spare parts) is terrific. Especially if they’re flying around sand and grit. I have no concept how the US Air Force keeps its planes serviced; in fact, I don’t even want to think about it.

        Back in the late 80s or early 90s, the Christian Science Monitor did an article on former USSR military officers committing suicide because their pensions would at least support their families if they were dead. And that was several years after the CSM had reported about how, after years bogged down in Afghanistan, soldiers in the Soviet Army were so desperate to forget their lives and get high that they were painting bootblack on their toast; apparently the effect of the heat in the bootblack got them high.

        Around that time, or a bit earlier, I’d been in an Alaskan village where after a big storm several people were so desperate for alcohol that one overdosed from drinking over-the-counter cough syrup.

        I suppose those Russian pilots saw enough in Afghanistan to be impervious to bad weather, alcohol, and substance abuse. Which would probably be precisely the sort of ‘employee’ Bout prefers to hire.

  7. plunger says:

    Just Like Kobi Alexander of Comverse fame, the CIA and others have their own reasons for working through back channels to ensure that these apparent extradition requests are denied indefinitely.

    It’s all total bullshit. He’s our terrorist. Somebody at the FBI didn’t get the memo and arrested the guy, and now the shadow spooks are trying to figure out how to keep him off the witness stand in the US.

    They are so transparent. I mean they can render anyone from anywhere in the world if they want to badly enough. They’ve got a fleet of Gulfstreams at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport solely for that purpose.

    Like Namibia and Thailand are holding the US Justice Department hostage? Sure. Give me a break.

    Bout likely worked for the GHW division of the CIA.

  8. rapt says:

    One thing’s fr sure – although I know next to nothing about Viktor Bout himself – he knows many of the nasty details re CIA off-record ops and who is/was in charge of what war crime. Go ahead, put him on trial, I dare ya.

  9. texasaggie says:

    Well, the Bushies had no problem just sending in a kill team to capture “terrorists.” What is wrong with sending in a team to snatch this guy? He is worse than any terrorist ever thought of being if you count the number of dead people he is responsible for causing.

  11. Blub says:

    Having worked in southeast Asia quite a bit, I can’t view Thailand’s government’s actions here favorably without more information. It’s very possible that Bout knows somebody or paid somebody a lot of money to ensure their non-cooperation. By regional standards, there is quite a bit of corruption among kingdom officials in Bangkok. One should point out that the government’s human rights record on abuse of their own (Muslim) minorities is among the worst in the region, worse even than how places like China and Indonesia treat their minorities.

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