Nobody should be surprised that the criminals who did the former deals are committing the same crimes today again. Iran-Contra:

involved several members of the Reagan Administration who in 1986 helped to illegally sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the proceeds to fund, also illegally, the Contras, a right-wing guerrilla organization in Nicaragua.

Hey, they got pardoned once, so why not try a similar crime again today?

Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

…

The rest of the linked NYT piece is filled with insane citings of one jobless John Bolton … I’ll skip those …

Lets read reporters:

The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.
…
A Christian-led nation in sub-Saharan Africa, surrounded almost entirely by Muslim states, Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in U.S. military aid since late 2002. That’s more than any country in the region except Djibouti.
…

The U.S. and Ethiopian militaries have "a close working relationship," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter said. The ties include intelligence sharing, arms aid and training that gives the Ethiopians "the capacity to defend their borders and intercept terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said.

$20 million is certainly not the price the North Koreans asked for and not what the Ethiopian dictator spends on current attacks in Somalia. Now let’s guess where the money for these weapons and other things delivered to and by the Ethiopians has come from:

When challenged by a BBC journalist about the consequences of the disappearance without trace of billions of dollars, he pointed out that it was irrelevant where the money had gone because it was Iraqi funds, not U.S. taxpayers’ money. The $12 billion came from Iraqi assets seized after the first Gulf War, from the sale of Iraqi oil, and from surplus payments from the UN oil-for-food program. The $12 billion is not included in the $400 billion spent by the U.S. in Iraq since March 2003.

Money vanishes in one place and weapons are bought in another place with unknown funds – both places under the same White House supervised CentCom control – guess what …