Language

Reporter's Notebook: Stephen Peacock

More Submachine Guns, Grenade Launchers En Route to Colombia

Posted by Stephen Peacock - September 13, 2006 at 7:43 am
An additional 481 grenade launchers, 420 M1 carbines, and 50 MP5K submachine guns are about to make their way into the arsenal of the Colombian National Police (CNP), which currently possesses such weaponry but soon will have more, courtesy of the U.S. State Dept. NAS intends to award sole-source contract to Colt Defense LLC for the grenade launchers, carbines and related ammunition, and a separate sole-source contract to Heckler & Koch Defense to provide the submachine guns.

State says the no-bid contracts are justified, since the CNP currently use and "are trained in using and maintaining these weapons" and therefore, these contractors are "the only responsible source that can immediately satisfy the Government's requirement and has the qualifications to justify the exception to full and open competition" under federal law.

The contracting documents were discovered during a routine search of the FedBizOpps procurement database.

Correspondingly, State's Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) also is seeking to deploy a Deputy Aerial Eradication Program Advisor to El Dorado Airport in Bogota. The selected candidate will help NAS and the American Embassy more effectively monitor contractors who provide goods and services to State specific to aerial eradication of poppy and coca crops.

About Stephen Peacock

Biography
I'm a former Washington, DC, journalist (1998-2003) who most recently worked for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily (WID), investigative newsletters that cover the telecommunications, broadcast and Internet industries. Following the 9/11 attacks, my news beat expanded beyond Capitol Hill telecom/TV/IT policy and began to include technology-policy coverage at the Pentagon and Dept. of Homeland Security. I've written over a thousand articles about government and industry affairs, and I'm pleased to say that I was the reporter who broke the story about the Total Information Awareness surveillance/data-collection initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I've written articles for publications including NACLA Report on the Americas, Drug Enforcement Report, Corrections Journal, SoJo Mail (Sojourners), and the Tampa Tribune. I've also written a memoir about my former career as a plainclothes security officer of the Helmsley Palace hotel in New York City, Hotel Dick: Harlots, Starlets, Thieves & Sleaze. I look forward to contributing to the fine work being done here at NarcoSphere.

Latest Notebook Entries

more

Add comment

Our Policy on Comment Submissions: Co-publishers of Narco News (which includes The Narcosphere and The Field) may post comments without moderation. All co-publishers comment under their real name, have contributed resources or volunteer labor to this project, have filled out this application and agreed to some simple guidelines about commenting.

Narco News has recently opened its comments section for submissions to moderated comments (that’s this box, here) by everybody else. More than 95 percent of all submitted comments are typically approved, because they are on-topic, coherent, don’t spread false claims or rumors, don’t gratuitously insult other commenters, and don’t engage in commerce, spam or otherwise hijack the thread. Narco News reserves the right to reject any comment for any reason, so, especially if you choose to comment anonymously, the burden is on you to make your comment interesting and relevant. That said, as you can see, hundreds of comments are approved each week here. Good luck in your comment submission!

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

User login

Reporters' Notebooks