But because the intelligence reports indicated that the cargo was likely to have included tank parts, some Pentagon officials described the shipment as an unambiguous Security Council violation.
In November of that year the C.I.A. became involved in the shipping of arms to Iran, but it was said that Colonel North, the National Security Council staff member, had described the shipment as oil-industry equipment.
Although the Nicaraguan Government refused to confirm the episode, senior Sandinista officials described the shipment as an attempt to gain leverage over the United States by creating a sharp new threat to American interests in El Salvador that could be used as a bargaining chip in talks with the Bush Administration.
The Army Corps study said that in 2008 cargo shipments — which it describes as "flat or declining" since 1994 — were about 26 percent coal, 18 percent aggregates like sand and crushed rock, 17 percent material related to the iron and steel industries and the rest other commodites like fuel, chemicals and minerals.
Prosecutors described some shipments as intentionally mislabelled to pass inspection.
But one senior American official described the shipments as "a maturing of the opposition's logistical pipeline".
A Chinese embargo on rare earth metal shipments in 2010 was described by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, as a "wake-up call" for the world to find new resources.
As revealed by the Guardian on Monday, an illegal shipment of unlicensed veterinary products, described as "potentially toxic and dangerous to horses", was seized by UK Border Force and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate at Stansted on 3 May after arriving from Dubai.
But last week, the company described Intel's shipments as "severely constrained, spotty and unreliable".
His spokeswoman said that there appeared to have been systematic flouting of EU waste-shipment laws on what she described as a huge scale.
