Word: middlemen
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...from ignorance of IAEA requirements and a desire to be "discreet" because of the threat of U.S. sanctions. More troubling, he said, the document does not resolve a key issue: how the centrifuges were contaminated. The ambassador insisted, as Iran has done for weeks, that the parts came from middlemen who got them in several countries, "but we do not know where." The IAEA must now attempt to determine whether this is a dodge...
...called themselves Abu Omar and Abu Mohammed. Their faces covered by red-and-white checkered scarves, they agreed to discuss their deadly vocation. They described how they form teams of four to work with antitank mines looted from Iraqi-army munition sites or bought from middlemen who steal them from unguarded dumps. They daisy-chain three or four together to spread out explosive power and set them along roads traveled by U.S. convoys. When the lead vehicle passes a marker, one of the men sets off the mines with a crank detonator connected to them by wires; the others provide...
...course, his chosen field is not without its risks. Middlemen and dealers, who receive a vastly larger share of the profits from stolen art, are rarely prosecuted for their crimes. But the authorities occasionally like to make an example of the lowly looters, who are easier to catch. Last year Chinese courts meted out death penalties to at least four tomb raiders. "I know someone who was executed for looting a tomb," says Feng. "He made 580 yuan [$70]. Now, I hear the tricolor female statue he dug up was recently resold in New York for 150,000 yuan...
...director Joel Schumacher, a Hollywood stalwart whose work ranges from grit (Tigerland) to glitz (Batman & Robin). Screenwriters Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donaghue are also Americans. Yet the film resists the tugs of Hollywood melodrama. It builds a pyramid of culpability--the street thugs who push the drugs; the middlemen who cover their malefactions with bluff charm ("We don't sell drugs," protests one, played by Ciaran Hinds, "we're just ordinary decent criminals"); and the top dog (Gerald McSorley, stern and scary as Gilligan), who comes out of hiding only to brutalize the innocent...
Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems--missiles, air defenses, radar--not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have...