Air charter firm, client both deny role in alleged shipment of arms to Venezuela

[Fulcrum]

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article226011940.html

Media bias fact check
LEFT-CENTER BIAS
Factual Reporting: HIGH

The reporter who broke this is Tim Johnson if anyone want's to go down the route of attacking his credibility rather than his work.

A Boeing 767 operated by 21 Air, which maintains an operating facility at MIA, delivered cargo earlier this week that included 19 assault rifles, telescopic sights, radio antenna and other materiel to the international airport in Valencia, according to a Bolivarian National Guard general, Endes Palencia.
The charge drew sharp denials both from the Greensboro, North Carolina-based air cargo company and a second company that arranged the shipment.
“All of the cargo on board our aircraft was from the GPS-Air, who chartered the aircraft,” Moris said. The Transportation Security Administration “is going to investigate the party responsible for the cargo,” he added.
“GPS-Air has been the only company that has chartered it for the last few weeks to Valencia, Venezuela,” Moris added.
“The cargo doesn’t belong to 21 Air and it doesn’t belong to GPS-Air,” Meneses said.
...
The denials only added to the mystery of the alleged shipment — a mystery compounded by perhaps coincidental ties between the chairman and a key employee of 21 Air with a company that Amnesty International says once took part in a CIA program to whisk suspected terrorists to “black site” jails around the world, a procedure known as rendition.
The chairman and majority owner of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, has set up or registered at least 14 other companies in Florida over the past two decades. Among the people brought on to 21 Air when it formed in 2014 was Michael Steinke, its director of quality control.
Both men appear to have either coincidental or direct ties to Gemini Air Cargo, a company that Amnesty International described in a 2006 report as being among more than 30 air charter services believed to have taken part in a CIA program of rendition in which suspected terrorists were abducted abroad and taken to third-country secret “black sites” for interrogation.
...
For his part, Moreno registered two businesses at an address in northwest Miami that was later used by a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo.
The two businesses were Airline Management Group, incorporated in 1987, and Florida Franchise Development, set up in 2001, both listing their addresses as 1750 NW 66th Ave. in Miami. In 2005, Gemini Cargo Logistics Inc., which Bloomberg lists as a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo, registered to that address. The timeline of when the businesses used the address was not clear.
...
Experts in global arms trafficking said several aspects of the alleged weapons shipment were puzzling, and don’t fit in a pattern that would suggest U.S. government involvement.
“If the government was doing it, it would make more sense to drop guns that the Venezuelans use. Not only for plausible deniability, but for the ability to use captured ammo,” said Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical analysis at StratFor, an Austin, Texas, geopolitical intelligence firm.
Stewart said the assorted weapons appeared to be more of the type that someone could buy at a Florida gun show rather than the standard weapons a government might want its allied forces to have.

Interview with McClatchy reporter Tim Johnson and more details here (mixed reporting but it's literally a transcript from the reporter in first article)

"Well, as you mentioned, this air charter company, 21 Air, went repeatedly to places in Venezuela and Colombia starting January 11th. Prior to that, it had largely operated domestically, and suddenly it began to change its patterns. And often there would be even two flights a day between Miami and places in Colombia or Venezuela."
"If you look on social media and dig into the backgrounds of employees of 21 Air and associated companies, you see that there are many accounts of employees who follow the Venezuelan opposition, and opposition accounts that follow them, as well. So, there’s certainly some sympathy from employees within the company to the opposition to Maduro in Venezuela."
"Well, Adolfo Moreno is a 75 percent owner of 21 Air, and he’s got many other companies, but he’s been involved out of Miami. I don’t know — while the company is registered in North Carolina, the operations really are out of Miami, as far as I can tell. That’s where many of the flights have been operated. They have a huge operation center at Miami International Airport.
A curious secondary aspect of this story is that the company that consigned the cargo also has tangential links to, you know, this historical — the Iran-Contra affair. The head of GPS Air is a man named José Manuel Calvo, and he, like Moreno, has many companies. And one of those companies, with the partner that he used to create this company, is a company called Heavylift Air. And that company has a subsidiary out of the UAE that is controlled by in Iranian American named Farhad Azima, who also had a role in Iran-Contra. So there’s all these circumstantial things, but there’s really no smoking gun, that I could tell. You know, this may be just circumstantial."
" Well, yes, there’s a lot of these coincidental links, and it’s worth paying quite close attention to. Again, I use “coincidental” only because we don’t really know. You know, other people point out to me that there are many people that could have a vested interest in this, whether the arms were really aboard that plane. Or, is it possible that this was something that was ginned up by the Venezuelan government to rally support for Maduro? I don’t know. I just — we haven’t been able to determine for a fact that those weapons were loaded aboard that 767 in Miami, that somehow they passed through the normally rigorous screening by TSA for air cargo. These are things that are just yet to be investigated.

Sadly no rock hard evidence of anything thought clearly lots of work has gone into ensuring there is no evidence or at least plausible deniability "we didn't know there were guns in there!" such that any evidence wouldn't be strong enough to make concrete claims.

Those 2 guys linked to 21 air have been used by the CIA in the past and they've suddenly started running planes to and from Venezuela/Colombia recently? I strongly suspect this is regime change in action. Hopefully the reporter and his team (and hopefully other reporters) can build upon this and undercover more information.