Enormously Important Gunrunner Arrest: Viktor Bout, Gunrunner to the stars!

The stars being, allegedly, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and FARC. I think we need a "BIG FISH" graphic for this. Hmm...do I have a big fish graphic....

That'll do. Anyway, if Keyser Soze and a Bond villain had a kid, he'd be Viktor Bout.

The NY Times hints that this may be yet more juicy intel pulled from that FARC laptop. The timing makes sense, although we've been chasing this guy for years. The FARC quote is interesting because he didn't just take cash:

The arms reached the FARC via Paraguay, then through Argentina and Uruguay, said Mr. Johnson-Thomas, who returned recently from a research trip to South America. Mr. Bout’s planes “don’t return empty,” he said. They return to Africa loaded with drugs, which are then shipped into Europe. "It’s guns in, drugs out," he said.

I wonder if FARC looked this guy up after their last gun guy got busted.

Ought to be a serious blogswarm on this, because the guy has had a finger in every pie in the world.

(Rank speculation alert: I wouldn't be surprised to learn he had a hand in arming the Mexican cartels as well, though I don't have any evidence of that at hand. It certainly makes more sense than claiming they're getting hundreds of full-auto AK's at American gun shows.)