The Paris rifle serial number
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The Paris rifle serial number is a single case John Kiriakou cites to argue that there is effectively no accounting for the weapons the United States has supplied to Ukraine.

The case

A couple of weeks before he told the story, Kiriakou says, a policeman was shot and severely wounded in Paris. The weapon, an assault rifle, was confiscated by the police, and its serial number matched the serial number from a shipment of assault rifles the United States had sent to Ukraine about six months earlier.

His question is how such a rifle came into the possession of a criminal in Paris, and his answer is that it had been sold on the black market.

The oversight gap

Kiriakou uses the case to ask where the oversight is for the billions of dollars being turned over.

He grants that the mechanism has improved in one respect. The United States is no longer writing a cheque and sending cash; he says the lesson was learned in Iraq, where that was done. Instead the cheques go to the defence contractors, and the contractors send the equipment to Ukraine.

The equipment, he says, is then for sale on the black market for pennies on the dollar, and his objection is that this is permitted. He asks where the congressional oversight is, and, going further, where the inspectors general are at the Defense Department, the CIA and the other organisations active on the ground. He calls the situation a great vast disservice to the American people.

The complaint belongs to his broader argument about defence spending, developed in the permanent wartime economy and the secret Sahel appropriations.

See also

- Permanent wartime economy
- The Secret Sahel Appropriations
- Kiriakou's Ukraine settlement prediction
