As the insurgency in Iraq escalated in the spring of 2004, American officials entrusted an Iraqi businessman with issuing weapons to Iraqi police cadets training to help quell the violence. Kassim al-Saffar, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand - Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.

"This was the craziest thing in the world," said John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse. "They were taking weapons away by the truckload."

Activities at that armory and other warehouses help explain how the American military lost track of some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraq's security forces in 2004 and 2005, as auditors discovered in the past year.

Article from the New York <Times.>