Former President Joe Biden’s last-minute clemency decisions included pardoning his son Hunter, Joe Biden’s siblings and their spouses, and commuting the capital sentences of almost every federal prisoner on death row. They have drawn a boatload of public attention and justified criticism. Indeed, some will likely cost people their lives.
That is clear in the pardon Biden issued to arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Last October, The Wall Street Journal reported that, in August 2024, the Houthis in Yemen sent emissaries to Moscow to purchase $10 million in automatic weapons. There, according to the WSJ’s sources (which included a European security official), the Houthi agents met Viktor Bout, an infamous arms trafficker responsible for perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Bout once was the Number 2 person on America’s Most Wanted List, right after Osama bin Laden, to whom Bout had sold weapons. As Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun explained in their book Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible, Bout was a former Soviet Air Force lieutenant colonel.
After the Soviet Union fell, he made a career out of selling military-grade weapons such as disassembled attack helicopters, tanks, surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, artillery rounds, AK-47 automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and night-vision equipment. He became “the preeminent figure atop the world’s multibillion-dollar contraband weapons sale, an underground commerce that is outpaced in illicit profits only by global narcotics sales.”
Bout sold weapons to any despot with cash. He “was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him,” Yahoo News Senior Correspondent Michael Weiss wrote.
In Sierra Leone, for example, Bout supplied the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with weapons that enabled RUF fighters “to carry out campaigns that were as chilling and destructive as their names: ‘Operation No Living Thing’ and ‘Operation Pay Yourself.’” Those were led by commanders who “dubbed themselves with equally mordant nicknames: Kill Me Quick, Superman, Poison, Mosquito, and Mosquito Killer.” Thousands of “survivors” were maimed by the RUF, which “often mocked their victims before amputating their limbs” by “asking them if they wanted to be ‘short-sleeved’ or ‘long-sleeved.’”
Bout eventually was arrested for offering to sell 700–800 surface-to-air missiles and 20,000–30,000 automatic weapons to undercover federal agents posing as Colombian guerillas. Convicted of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, and of conspiring to support a terrorist organization, Bout was sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
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