Stars and Stripes
Three senior Navy civilian officials testified Monday that they never authorized $1.6 million for a secret operation to buy hundreds of rifle silencers for the Navy SEALs and were instead told the money would be used to pay for intelligence studies and consultants.
The testimony, in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, came on the opening day of the trial of Lee M. Hall, a civilian intelligence director for the Navy who is charged with theft and conspiracy in one of the more bizarre contracting scandals to emerge from the Pentagon in recent years.
Prosecutors argued that Hall and his boss, David Landersman, who led an obscure intelligence office for the Navy, bilked the government by persuading Navy officials to set aside more than $1.6 million in excess funds and then creating a sweetheart classified contract for Landersman's brother, a recently bankrupt California auto mechanic.
In exchange, the mechanic, who is scheduled to go on trial next week, delivered 349 homemade silencers designed to fit AK-47-style automatic rifles — although the suppressors cost him only about $10,000 in parts and labor to manufacture, according to court documents and testimony. Even worse, prosecutors said, the silencers didn't work.
A couple of things, a M41A is not a "AK-47 style" rifle. Also a "silencer" AKA suppressor never works like the uninformed believe they do. They only reduce the report at the shooters position to prevent ear damage. The projectile still leaves the barrel at super sonic speeds so the crack in the air is still very loud. Suppressors or "silencers" work better as a flash hider to help hide the shooters position in the dark. In fact some standard off the shelf flash hiders do almost as well as a suppressor in dampening the report at the shooters position but doesn't do as good a job as a suppressor does in hiding the flash.
ReplyDeleteSounds as tho someone got duped.
Silencers are actually commonly available and easy to scquire in that bastion of gun control, England. For some reason, what is encouraged in the UK for health reasons, is commonly labeled an implement of criminals here.
ReplyDelete"Police forces usually approve applications for a suppressor for hunting and target shooters, as the risks of litigation for personal injury, especially high-tone deafness resulting from shooting-induced hearing loss, are significant; and noise pollution in general is a problem for shooting sports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor#Europe
Not sure how the workings of the silencer has to do with the fraud. The things didn't work anyways. What's informative, but not surprising, is how easily our people in the services are conned.
ReplyDelete