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A brewing scandal at the Department of Justice involving an illegal scheme to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico threatens to erupt as U.S. Senator Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee begins an investigation. ATF agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives a DOJ agency allegedly smuggled U.S. guns into Mexico in order to bolster the Departments disputed contention that Mexican drug cartels are armed primarily with U.S. guns. Whistleblowers within the ATF contend that one of these guns was used to kill Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry in December of 2010.
SCANDAL: ATF Gives Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels to Undermine Second Amendment
When your theory stands on more than the allegations of "moonbattery", lemme know.
Rather than launch an internal investigation into the murder and the illegal scheme, the Department of Justice under Eric Holder, according to ATF whistleblowers, instead attempted a coverup. …
Denials are now part of standard operating procedure at the DOJ as the news media and Senator Grassley close in. Grassley's inquiries have been met with stonewalling. But it appears that Grassley's office so far isn't buying DOJ denials.
A gun sold in Texas was used during last month's slaying of a US special agent in Mexico, officials said Tuesday, a revelation that is shifting scrutiny in the case away from Mexico's weak rule of law to America's gun laws. One of three guns fired in the Feb. 15 killing of Immigration and Customs (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata was traced to a man arrested Monday in Lancaster, Texas, the US Justice Department said in a statement Tuesday. The attack was the most high-profile killing of a US agent in Mexico in 25 years. "It illustrates this interaction and interdependence between what happens in Mexico and what happens in the United States,” Undersecretary for North America Julian Ventura told reporters Tuesday in a briefing about President Felipe Calderón’s trip Thursday to the White House in which he is expected to discuss the case with President Obama.
The discovery seems to underscore what Mexico has been complaining about for years: that American gun shops are the candy store for ruthless drug traffickers. Mexican cartels get more American guns from Texas than from any other state, many through straw purchases, US officials have said. Records in the case show the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) tracked the Romarm-Cugir model Draco 7.62 pistol to Otilio Osorio, who was arrested Monday along with his brother, Ranferi, for possessing firearms with obliterated serial numbers. Court affidavits filed by ATF agents, and obtained by the Monitor, identify the Texas gun shop that sold the weapon and say an ATF informant within the Zetas gang apparently bought guns from the Osorio brothers.
The irony that the gun used in Mr. Zapata’s shooting came from his own state – he’s from Brownsville – was not lost on Mexican officials or local newspapers. “The US is suffering firsthand what Mexicans suffer every day as a consequence … of a system of firearms distribution that – protected by supposed civil liberties – covers up a black market that supplies pistols and rifles to the drug cartels,” read an editorial Tuesday in Mexican daily El Universal. The killing came five weeks after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona with a gun obtained in a state with some of the least restrictive gun laws nationwide, and also amid continued debate over whether the ATF should be allowed to track multiple purchases of some semiautomatic rifles in border states. Earlier this year Congress denied federal funding for the program requested by the ATF.
Mexican and US officials say about 90 percent of guns seized from cartels come from the US. Recent independent reports question that figure, saying it is 90 percent of only the small number of guns for which Mexico requests ATF tracking, and not all guns seized. The Feb. 15 highway shooting in the north-central state of San Luis Potosi also wounded ICE agent Victor Avila, who is recovering. Mexico has since arrested about a dozen suspects from the Zetas gang, who claim that they mistakenly thought the agents' dark SUV was the vehicle of a rival group. The attack occurred just as ICE started its largest raid on drug gangs with connections to traffickers – primarily those in Mexico – netting close to 700 suspects during the past two weeks.
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A chilling reminder of the ever-present danger in the war on drugs unfolded in northern Mexico on February 15, when two U.S. immigration and customs agents were shot by gunmen while driving through northern Mexico. One agent died, the other was wounded. That attack came during a recent surge in the violence among Mexico's rival drug gangs and is the latest incident adding to tensions between U.S. and Mexican officials. In a recent interview in the Mexican newspaper El Universal, Mexican President Felipe Calderon again blamed the United States for not doing more to reduce the demand for drugs, or the flow of guns into Mexico.
Calderon also expressed anger about U.S. cables - leaked by the WikiLeaks website - in which U.S. diplomats gave unflattering assessments of the Mexican government's security efforts. He accused the diplomats of exaggerating their concerns to impress their bosses. U.S. office of National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske said the United States has two key goals in the cross-border war on drugs. "That goal of reducing violence is actually critical. The other goal that I would see as a marked measure of success would be to move away from the military doing policing and to have civilian policing that is not only able to handle the job, but civilian policing that is seen as trusted, professional and competent."
The Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute director, Andrew Selee, said the lack of credibility of police with the Mexican public is just one of several problems. "Secondly, prosecutions - prosecutors tend not to take most of the cases to court. There is limited ability to gather evidence in a way that allows credible prosecutions and there is a lot of corruption within prosecutors' offices and people get off pretty easily. And finally there is the judicial system itself. The court system itself is not terribly credible. There is huge weight given to the prosecutors when they do bring a case in. Judges rarely see the defendants and it is very easy in many cases to buy off the clerks of the court," said Selee.
Selee said Mexico has undertaken what he calls good constitutional reforms to bolster the rule of law. He added that the United States can provide assistance in key areas, including police forensics and advice from American judges and prosecutors. "I mean, a chance to have a dialogue with people to really help Mexican counterparts innovate in their job and develop the kind of pride in the work that they do - by working with their U.S. counterparts. And that is the kind of thing that is beyond what the U.S. federal government does. This is being done in many cases by local jurisdictions, by state prosecutors, by local prosecutors, by judges on their own initiative and it is a fabulous way for the two countries to work together on rule of law." That emphasis on rule of law cannot come quickly enough in Mexico. Since Felipe Calderon became President in 2006 and began his crackdown on drug cartels, more than 34,000 people have been killed in Mexico.
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A federal operation that allowed weapons from the U.S. to pass into the hands of suspected gun smugglers so they could be traced to the higher echelons of Mexican drug cartels has lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which have been linked to crimes, including the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent in December. The investigation, known as Operation Fast and Furious, was conducted even though U.S. authorities suspected that some of the weapons might be used in crimes, according to a variety of federal agents who voiced anguished objections to the operation.
Many of the weapons have spread across the most violence-torn states in Mexico, with at least 195 linked to some form of crime or law enforcement action, according to documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity and The Times. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which ran the operation, said that 1,765 guns were sold to suspected smugglers during a 15-month period of the investigation. Of those, 797 were recovered on both sides of the border, including 195 in Mexico after they were used in crimes, collected during arrests or intercepted through other law enforcement operations.
John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who worked on Operation Fast and Furious, said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, that he was still haunted by his participation in the investigation. "With the number of guns we let walk, we'll never know how many people were killed, raped, robbed," he said. "There is nothing we can do to round up those guns. They are gone." The ATF said agents took every possible precaution to assure that guns were recovered before crossing into Mexico.
Scot L. Thomasson, the ATF's public affairs chief in Washington, said the Fast and Furious strategy is still under evaluation. "It's always a good business practice to review any new strategy six or eight months after you've initiated it, to make sure it's working, that it's having the desired effect, and then make adjustments as you see fit to ensure it's successful," he said. But enough concern has been raised that some Washington officials have begun to dig deeper into the details of the operation.
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Federal agent John Dodson says what he was asked to do was beyond belief. He was intentionally letting guns go to Mexico? "Yes ma'am," Dodson told CBS News. "The agency was." An Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms senior agent assigned to the Phoenix office in 2010, Dodson's job is to stop gun trafficking across the border. Instead, he says he was ordered to sit by and watch it happen. Investigators call the tactic letting guns "walk." In this case, walking into the hands of criminals who would use them in Mexico and the United States.
Dodson's bosses say that never happened. Now, he's risking his job to go public. "I'm boots on the ground in Phoenix, telling you we've been doing it every day since I've been here," he said. "Here I am. Tell me I didn't do the things that I did. Tell me you didn't order me to do the things I did. Tell me it didn't happen. Now you have a name on it. You have a face to put with it. Here I am. Someone now, tell me it didn't happen." Agent Dodson and other sources say the gun walking strategy was approved all the way up to the Justice Department. The idea was to see where the guns ended up, build a big case and take down a cartel. And it was all kept secret from Mexico. ATF named the case "Fast and Furious."
Surveillance video obtained by CBS News shows suspected drug cartel suppliers carrying boxes of weapons to their cars at a Phoenix gun shop. The long boxes shown in the video being loaded in were AK-47-type assault rifles. So it turns out ATF not only allowed it - they videotaped it. Documents show the inevitable result: The guns that ATF let go began showing up at crime scenes in Mexico. And as ATF stood by watching thousands of weapons hit the streets... the Fast and Furious group supervisor noted the escalating Mexican violence. One e-mail noted, "958 killed in March 2010 ... most violent month since 2005." The same e-mail notes: "Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during March alone," including "numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles."
Dodson feels that ATF was partly to blame for the escalating violence in Mexico and on the border. "I even asked them if they could see the correlation between the two," he said. "The more our guys buy, the more violence we're having down there." Senior agents including Dodson told CBS News they confronted their supervisors over and over. Their answer, according to Dodson, was, "If you're going to make an omelette, you've got to break some eggs."
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Now, Desaye says, "the truth is coming out. It's becoming obvious the largest supplier to Mexican gun violence is ATF, not the dealers. And they are using us as scapegoats."
SCANDAL: ATF Gives Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels to Undermine Second Amendment
Hi Xsited:
SCANDAL: ATF Gives Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels to Undermine Second Amendment
Let me try to make this perfectly clear: All of this nonsense is disinformation propaganda from a bunch of idiots that think there is some way to take our guns. That is not going to happen. The right to keep and bear arms is an inalienable right granted by YOUR CREATOR and is only listed among our rights in the documentation. You can try all you want to take our guns, but you are going to take them from our cold dead hands once all the clips are empty and you can take that to the bank.
GL,
Terral
Mexico has long complained that drug gangs are terrorizing cities with high-powered weapons smuggled from the United States. But Mexican lawmakers are now up in arms over the recent revelation that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) purposefully allows some of these weapons to be smuggled south of the border so it can track them as part of "Operation Fast and Furious."
“[The operation] is a grave violation of international rights,” Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín, president of Mexico's lower house of Congress, said Tuesday. “What will happen if next time they’ll need to funnel in trained assassins, for example, or nuclear arms?” Fellow congressman Humberto Trevino claims that an estimated 150 shooting injuries or deaths have been linked to guns that were allowed by US agents to proceed into Mexico.
The legislators are calling for a joint US-Mexico working group to examine Operation Fast and Furious. Some also proposed sending a congressional delegation to Washington to press for more action against gun trafficking, which plays a crucial role in fueling a drug war that has killed 35,000 people here since December 2006. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday requested “detailed information” from US authorities about the operation.
How 'Fast and Furious' backfired
The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials at a Washington news conference. Holder said 35 people with links to the international criminal gang known as "Barrio Azteca" have been charged with various counts of murder, racketeering, drug trafficking and money laundering. The murder charges stem from last year's killing of a U.S. consulate employee and two other people, when gunmen opened fire in Juarez, Mexico as the victims left a birthday party. Holder said his office is working with Mexican officials to have those charged in Mexico extradited to the United States.
"Of the 35 defendants, 10 Mexican nationals were charged in last year's murders in Juarez, Mexico, of United States consulate employees Leslie Ann Enriquez Catton, her husband, Arthur Redelfs and Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the husband of another United States consulate employee," said Eric Holder. "Seven of the 10 defendants charged with these murders and two other indicted defendants are in custody in Mexico." Holder said 12 of those arrested were taken into custody on Wednesday by law enforcement agents in Texas and New Mexico.
FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry says the joint U.S.-Mexico crackdown targets an international criminal organization known for what U.S. officials call its "militaristic command structure." "This takedown is an important step in disrupting and dismantling one of the most powerful and brutal gangs operating along the U.S.-Mexico border," said Shawn Henry. "As the attorney general noted, the Barrio Azteca gang has transformed from a prison gang to a sophisticated transnational organized criminal enterprise. Its members have committed unspeakable acts of violence, terrorized communities on both sides of the border and murdered the innocent."
Mexico's deputy attorney general was on hand for the announcement at the Justice Department. Despite the ongoing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, Attorney General Holder said U.S. and Mexican officials are working more effectively than ever in the fight against criminal gangs.
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A US federal indictment said the defendants have engaged in a conspiracy based in Columbus, New Mexico to buy firearms since January last year. Law enforcement officers executed search warrants on Thursday at the Columbus Police Department, a gun shop and eight homes. The town is best known for a raid by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa nearly a century ago.
The indictment alleges the defendants purchased firearms favored by Mexican cartels, including AK-47-type pistols, weapons resembling AK-47 rifles but with shorter barrels and US Tactical 9mm caliber pistols. Authorities also said 12 firearms purchased by defendants were later found in Mexico. Columbus Mayor Eddie Espinoza, Police Chief Angelo Vega, and town Trustee Blas Gutierrez were among those accused of firearms and smuggling charges in the 84-count indictment unsealed on Thursday afternoon.
The defendants bought approximately 200 firearms during a 14-month period from Chaparral Guns in Chaparral, New Mexico, which is owned by defendant Ian Garland, authorities said. Theyre accused of falsely claiming they were buying the firearms for themselves when they were actually acting as straw purchasers buying firearms on behalf of others.
Border state gun shops are a chief source of weapons smuggling into Mexico and Mexican officials fighting that countrys increasingly violent drug cartels have complained to US officials about the flow of firearms. US authorities have, in turn, stepped up their scrutiny of travelers leaving US soil. The investigation began after a US Border Patrol agent found a large number of firearms in a vehicle, US Attorney Kenneth Gonzales said. The priority during the year-long probe was to keep firearms from reaching Mexico, he said.
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I started a thread on this a few days ago, but it didn't get much traction. Perhaps it was the title. Let's try this one more time.
A brewing scandal at the Department of Justice involving an illegal scheme to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico threatens to erupt as U.S. Senator Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee begins an investigation. ATF agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives a DOJ agency allegedly smuggled U.S. guns into Mexico in order to bolster the Departments disputed contention that Mexican drug cartels are armed primarily with U.S. guns. Whistleblowers within the ATF contend that one of these guns was used to kill Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry in December of 2010.
SCANDAL: ATF Gives Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels to Undermine Second Amendment
A journalist's guide to 'Project Gunwalker' - National gun rights | Examiner.com
With regard to the “Fast and Furious” operation, “there’s been one indictment at this time,” Scot Thomasson, the ATF's public affairs chief in Washington, D.C., told CNSNews.com. “We don’t speak to open investigations, especially investigations that are under indictment,” said Thomasson. “I can tell you that an indictment was announced on January 25 against 20 defendants.” A Mar. 9 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder signed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and 13 other members of that panel states, “Internal ATF documents show that ATF’s supervisors became increasingly concerned about the pace of the investigations” in connection with the “Fast and Furious” operation.
“There seems to have been little effective coordination between ATF and the [Justice] Department as a whole [in carrying out the operation],” states the letter. “While guns continued to cross the border, the Department was apparently slow to approve wiretaps and to bring prosecutions.” “It was only this January, 15 months after ATF initiated the program and a month after [Customs and Border Protection] agent [Brian] Terry’s murder, that the [Justice] Department finally issued its first indictment on evidence from the program,” said the letter. The ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program is based out of Phoenix, Ariz., and is part of the larger “Project Gunrunner.” The latter is being executed in an effort to stem the illegal flow of guns from the United States into Mexico.
GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee who sent the letter to Holder, who leads the Justice Department, demanded answers by March 18 to whistleblower allegations that the “Fast and Furious” operation “allowed straw buyers for criminal organizations to purchase thousands of guns so that ATF could track them across the border.” On Thursday, Mar. 10, Holder told the Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee that he has "made it clear to people in the [Justice] Department that letting guns 'walk,' I guess that's the term people use, is not something that is acceptable. We cannot have a situation where guns are allowed to walk, and I've made that clear to the U.S. attorney, as well as the agents in charge of various ATF offices."
Holder’s comments were in response to a request by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) for him to comment on “Project Gunrunner.” According to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), which first reported the whistleblower allegations on Mar. 3, the “Fast and Furious” operation started in October 2009. The CPI revealed that about 1,998 firearms are involved in the investigation, including 797 that “were eventually recovered as a result of criminal activity on both sides of the border — including 195 from inside Mexico — after they were used in crimes, collected during arrests, or interdicted through other law enforcement operations.”
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Prosecutors say Columbus Mayor Eddie Espinoza and town Trustee Blas Gutierrez purchased dozens of weapons that later turned up in a drug bust in Juarez, Mexico. Columbus Chief of Police Angelo Vega is charged with conspiracy to smuggle guns.
Nine other defendants were arraigned Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in Las Cruces. Two of them, the only females in the group, were released on $10,000 bond each. Another defendant postponed his detention hearing. The rest were denied bail.
The defendants were arrested Thursday as law enforcement officers raided the Police Department, a gun shop and eight homes in the town 70 miles west of El Paso, Texas.
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LaPierre has criticized Holder's handling of "Project Gunrunner." The program of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is intended to stop the flow of guns to criminals in Mexico, but whistleblowers claim the bureau actually encouraged the illegal sale of firearms to known criminals, then allowed those guns to be smuggled to Mexico and tracked.
The practice of knowingly allowing guns to "walk" -- or be sold to straw buyers and then transferred to criminal organizations -- is against ATF policy. However, at least 15 ATF whistleblowers claim the agency, with the approval of Holder's Department of Justice, encouraged gun stores to make sales to questionable buyers, then failed to interdict the weapons.
I started a thread on this a few days ago, but it didn't get much traction. Perhaps it was the title. Let's try this one more time.
A brewing scandal at the Department of Justice involving an illegal scheme to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico threatens to erupt as U.S. Senator Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee begins an investigation. ATF agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives a DOJ agency allegedly smuggled U.S. guns into Mexico in order to bolster the Departments disputed contention that Mexican drug cartels are armed primarily with U.S. guns. Whistleblowers within the ATF contend that one of these guns was used to kill Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry in December of 2010.
SCANDAL: ATF Gives Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels to Undermine Second Amendment
A journalist's guide to 'Project Gunwalker' - National gun rights | Examiner.com
When your theory stands on more than the allegations of "moonbattery", lemme know.
Now it's front-page news:
Obama Administration Under Mounting Pressure for Botched Gun Trafficking Investigation - FoxNews.com
I guess this story should no longer be in 'Conspiracy Theories'.
NRA to Call for Holder's Resignation Over 'Project Gunrunner' Allegations - FoxNews.com
LaPierre has criticized Holder's handling of "Project Gunrunner." The program of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is intended to stop the flow of guns to criminals in Mexico, but whistleblowers claim the bureau actually encouraged the illegal sale of firearms to known criminals, then allowed those guns to be smuggled to Mexico and tracked.
The practice of knowingly allowing guns to "walk" -- or be sold to straw buyers and then transferred to criminal organizations -- is against ATF policy. However, at least 15 ATF whistleblowers claim the agency, with the approval of Holder's Department of Justice, encouraged gun stores to make sales to questionable buyers, then failed to interdict the weapons.
