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Inside the World’s Largest Illegal Arms Network

Export To Outlook

Event Date

  • 1/9/2008   6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
    Please arrive early for registration

Location

  • World Affairs Council Auditorium

Address

  • 312 Sutter Street
    Second Floor
    San Francisco, California 94108
Speaker(s)
Stephen Braun, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times

Stephen Braun is a national correspondent based in Washington DC for the Los Angeles Times. He shared in the Times' 1991 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Los Angeles riots and a 2002 Overseas Press Club international reporting award for "Inside al Qaeda," a series of stories about the rise of the terror group. His reportage has ranged from national politics and investigations to foreign and domestic terrorism, and he has covered many landmark American news stories of the past two decades, including the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina and five presidential elections.

A Times national correspondent since 1993, he previously covered the Midwest from Chicago and earlier worked as an editor and staff writer in Los Angeles. He also reported at the Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Daily News and Baltimore News American, where he was a Pulitzer finalist in 1981. A 1975 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has written for Foreign Policy, Men's Vogue, Rolling Stone, the Washington Monthly and Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Event Details

Before 9/11, Viktor Bout was America’s number two transnational threat priority behind Osama bin Laden. Bout’s vast enterprise of guns, planes, and money has fueled violence in Africa and aided both militants in Afghanistan and the American military in Iraq. While the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Bout—and those like him—quietly built up a new, complex, and international arms network. With weapons factories starved for customers, Soviet-era transports lying idle and rusting, and dictators, warlords and insurgents throughout the world clamoring for arms, entrepreneurs, and organized criminals, such as Viktor Bout, saw fortunes to be made. In Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible, co-author Stephen Braun details how a small circle of US officials and international investigators have had little success in dismantling this transnational network which, he argues, has provided essential support to despots, insurgents, and terrorists around the world.

This event is co-sponsored by the Marines' Memorial Association.

To watch or listen to this program, please click here or visit our online archive for other recordings.