ATF CONSPIRACY AGAINST 2ND AMENDMENTATF SMUGGLED ARMS TO
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
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Federal government provides guns for Mexico
Looks like Arizona isn't the
only state from which the ATF is smuggling guns into Mexico.
While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is scrambling to
find excuses for the illegal conduct of its agency in selling
firearms to Mexican drug cartels and the Department of Justice
appears equally culpable in "Operation Fast and Furious" there now
comes another report that the Tampa, Fla., ATF office was also
running guns into Mexico via Honduras by applying similar techniques
and tactics that were used in Arizona.
Perhaps one of the reasons the two operations are nearly identical
is the fact that the ATF special agent in charge of the Tampa Field
Division was previously the special agent in charge of the Phoenix
Field Division.
Known as "Operation Castaway," Virginia O'Brien, ATF officer in
charge of the Tampa office, conducted an operation that allowed the
transporting of guns into and through Honduras with Mexico being the
eventual destination. As in Arizona, thousands of weapons were sold
by legitimate gun dealers to straw buyers, who then walked them into
Mexico and into the waiting arms of the drug gangs. All of this
unlawful activity was financed and conducted under the guidance of
the ATF.
Predictably, two U.S. federal agents were later murdered by Mexican
gangs using the very same guns sold in Arizona.
Two questions immediately arise — How high does this scandal go into
the Obama Administration, and how many more ATF field offices are
conducting similar activities?
A
congressional investigation is presently underway to ferret out the
misconduct of the ATF and to determine who authorized such rogue
behavior. Thanks to several ATF whistleblowers, at least five
accusations have been leveled against the ATF and Department of
Justice, and those follow:
1. That they instructed U.S. gun dealers to proceed with
questionable and illegal sales of firearms to suspected gunrunners.
2. That they allowed or even actively assisted in moving guns across
the U.S. border into Mexico to "boost the numbers" of American
civilian market firearms seized in Mexico and thereby providing the
justification for more stringent Second Amendment restrictions on
American citizens, which would result in additional power, control
and money for the ATF.
3. That they intentionally kept Mexican authorities in the dark
about the operation, even over objections of their own agents.
4. That the weapons ATF let "walk" into Mexico were involved in the
deaths of Border Patrol Officer Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime
Zapata, as well as at least hundreds of Mexican citizens.
5. That since the death of Brian Terry on Dec. 14, 2010, the Obama
administration has purposely been engaged in a full-press cover-up
of the facts behind what has come to be known as the "Gunwalker
Scandal."
Also, it has recently been discovered that over $50 million of
taxpayer "stimulus" money has been provided to the ATF the past few
years to help fund these schemes. As a result, it probably will not
be very difficult for Congress to follow the money to see where it
leads and who approved what and when.
Interestingly, most of the media has been reluctant to report this
information, instead beating the familiar drum that the guns going
into Mexico are being provided by legitimate American retail gun
dealers, NRA members and lawful private gun owners and completely
ignoring the fact most American gun owners do not own military
assault rifles and auto pistols, the favored weapons of the Mexican
crime organizations.
As more facts are disclosed, it is becoming increasingly apparent
that the attitude of the ATF and DOJ to "break the law in order to
enforce the law" will eventually have serious consequences and could
even further damage a presidency that is already under siege from
several fronts.
Enemy of the State
by A.W.R. Hawkins
08/01/2011, Human Events
Within months after Barack Obama became President, a covert
operation was launched to allow gun sales to people with ties to the
Mexican drug cartels, ostensibly in hopes that those guns would lead
agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
(ATF) to cartel members in Mexico. The name of the operation was
“Project Gunrunner,” and the details of it included allowing straw
purchasers to buy not hundreds but thousands of guns, approximately
2,500, which they were then to walk into Mexico while having their
movements traced by the ATF. The problem is that the ATF was not
able to keep track of the weapons, and to date only 1,300 of the
approximate 2,500 have been recovered.
An even bigger problem is that at least one federal officer, Border
Patrol Agent Brian Terry, lost his life in a shootout with an
individual armed with a weapon sold during Gunrunner, and violence
in Mexico jumped exponentially when the weapons made their way into
that country. For example, 958 people were killed in Mexico during
the month of March 2010 alone, and at least 150 Mexican law
enforcement officers have been killed since early 2009. (A
little-known fact is that many of the guns sold during Gunrunner
were assault rifles and similar weapons that are easily converted
from semiautomatic to full-auto. In other words, our ATF looked the
other way while men with criminal ties entered gun stores in Arizona
and purchased weapons that are now de facto machine guns on the
streets of Mexico and the U.S. Southern border.)
At the outset it is important to note that as this operation moved
from one of overseeing the selling and subsequent international
transport of weapons, to one in which law enforcement was supposed
to trace the guns back to cartel members and make arrests, its name
changed from Gunrunner to "Fast and Furious.” Yet they are not so
much two separate operations as they are two parts of one large
covert action. Thus it’s not uncommon to hear people use the labels
Gunrunner and Fast and Furious interchangeably.
The beginnings of Gunrunner can at least be traced back as far as
Feb. 15, 2009, when President Obama authorized $10 million for it
via the stimulus package. His signature on that document renders his
subsequent denials of any knowledge of Gunrunner questionable at
best. And on April 2, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a
speech at the Mexico/United States Arms Trafficking Conference in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he boasted of overseeing the
implementation of Gunrunner.
Holder said: "Last week, our administration launched a major new
effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is
committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next
100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding
16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams,
and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on
kidnapping and extortion.
At the time of Holder’s speech, the mention of the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) and the FBI seemed to slip right past the news
commentary, so that even as reporters and bloggers began focusing
attention on Gunrunner and Fast and Furious in the spring of 2011,
they referenced them solely in relation to the ATF. But in testimony
before Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley
(R.-Iowa) over the Fourth of July holiday (2011), Kenneth Melson,
acting ATF director, broke ranks with Obama and Holder and talked at
length about how Gunrunner and Fast and Furious were interagency
operations to a certain degree. In particular, Melson testified to
how the involvement of so many different agencies at so many
different levels mangled an already wounded plan, resulting in the
fact that some of the cartel members being sought via Gunrunner and
Fast and Furious turned out to be paid informants for one federal
agency or another.
After hearing Melson’s testimony, Issa and Grassley fired off a
letter to Holder that contained the following paragraph:
"When confronted with information about serious issues involving
lack of information sharing by other agencies, which [our] Committee
staff had originally learned from other witnesses, Mr. Melson's
responses tended to corroborate what others had said. Specifically,
we have very real indications from several sources that some of the
gun trafficking 'higher-ups' that the ATF sought to identify were
already known to other agencies and may even have been paid as
informants."
Moreover, as Issa and Grassley connected the dots, it increasingly
seemed like U.S. taxpayer funds had been used not only to help
purchase the weapons, but also to pay for the cost of smuggling them
across an international border:
"The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility
that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle
weapons, but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have
financed those engaging in such activities. While this is
preliminary information, we must find out if there is any truth to
it."
As the investigation continued, Issa and Grassley uncovered a “cheat
sheet” of sorts that was being made available for any ATF agents who
might be called to testify before a congressional committee.
According to Issa and Grassley, this cheat sheet was a document
cache accessible through “a shared drive on [the ATF] computer
system replete with pertinent investigative documents, including
official ATF e-mails.” The existence of this shared drive and what
appears to be an attempt to coach people to give certain answers
when interviewed or cross-examined squares perfectly with Melson’s
testimony that when he realized what was going on and began
reassigning ATF agents associated with Gunrunner and Fast and
Furious to other operations, the “Justice Department directed him
and other ATF officials to not communicate to Congress the reasoning
behind the reassignments.”
More Gun Control
One of the worst remaining aspects of Gunrunner and Fast and Furious
is that both appear to have been carried out with the intention of
increasing border crime and chaos to levels sufficient to persuade
Americans to embrace more gun control. If such a presumption seems
like a stretch, then consider that to date, the Justice Department’s
only response to the myriad Fast and Furious allegations has been to
mandate a new law requiring gun stores in Arizona, California, Texas
and New Mexico to make a special report to the ATF when an
individual makes multiple long-gun purchases over a five-day period,
the only caveat being that the guns have to be greater than
.22-caliber and capable of using a detachable clip.
Upon announcing these new gun control measures on July 11, 2011,
Deputy Attorney General James Cole actually tried to justify them by
pointing out that such weapons “are highly sought after by dangerous
drug trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent
crime scenes near the Southwest border.” (No mention was made of the
fact that hundreds upon hundreds of these same weapons were sold to
would-be criminals with ATF and Justice Department approval during
Gunrunner, then smuggled across the border.
Another reason it appears the passage of more gun control was the
goal all along is found in e-mails between Mark Chait, ATF’s
assistant director of field operations, and William Newell, special
agent in charge in Phoenix during Fast and Furious. In one such
e-mail, sent during July 2010, Chait asked Newell to pay special
attention to multiple long-gun sales at gun stores because the ATF
was, at that time, already “looking at anecdotal cases to support a
demand letter on long-gun multiple sales.” (In other words, the
requirement for a special form on multiple long-gun sales to
law-abiding Americans was already in the works.)
Ironically, in testimony before the congressional committee on July
26, 2011, Newell insisted the alleged gun sales-to-gun walking
scenario associated with Gunrunner and Fast and Furious didn’t
happen, despite the existence of facts to the contrary “clearly
showing they did, [and that] he knew it and approved it time and
time again.” During those same testimonies, Darren Gil, former ATF
attaché in Mexico, told lawmakers how dangerous things became in
Mexico in 2010, and how overwhelmed he felt when he learned of the
existence of Gunrunner and Fast and Furious. Gil said, "Never in my
wildest dreams, ever, would I have thought of [gun walking] as an
[investigative] technique. Never. Ever. It was just inconceivable to
me."
The problem, of course, is that the operations weren’t that
far-fetched to the decision makers above Gil: Thus Obama provided
money for them and Holder, by his own admission, handled their
earliest logistics (remember his speech from April 2, 2009).
Therefore, even as Issa and Grassley continue to investigate this
mess, other legislators should begin taking the proper steps to
remove Holder from office. If they don’t remove him, it appears
rank-and-file ATF agents will take the fall for both Gunrunner and
Fast and Furious, although those same agents have testified numerous
times that they only allowed guns to move across the border because
their supervisors ordered them not to intervene.
If Holder isn’t removed from office, we at least owe Richard Nixon
an apology.
[This article was originally published as the cover story in the
August 1st issue of Human Events newspaper.]