Bush's Pentagon give $300 MILLION ammunition contract to 22-year-oldwho knows nothing about ammo

A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon

gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide

ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old,

substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting

on the front lines of the war on terror.

Following publication of a lengthy New York Times article, the House

Oversight Committee announced it would investigate AEY Inc., a

fledgling company that thrived after 2003 as the US government began

handing out billions of dollars to private defense contractors.

Chairman Henry Waxman invited company officials as well as

representatives of the State and Defense departments to testify at a

hearing next month, according to a news release.

The results of that investigation, which sent seven reporters across

three continents, were published Thursday.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the

American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling

company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed

masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as

nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an

unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions

to Afghanistan's army and police forces. Since then, the company has

provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing

packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New

York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of

the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist

bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have

determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of

dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has

also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of

entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

The company's president was 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli, who ran

the company with a 25-year-old from Miami Beach, Florida. Waxman has

requested that Diveroli testify, along with company vice president

David M. Packouz and Levi Meyer its general manager.

On his MySpace page, Diveroli claims that "problems in high school"

forced him to work through most of his teenage years, but that "of

course im (sic) a super nice guy!!!"

"I finally got a decent apartment and im (sic) content for the

moment," he writes on the page, "however i (sic) definately (sic) have

the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up

alot (sic) of my time.