Posted on 07/08/2012 5:39:42 AM PDT by marktwain
The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama administration conventional-weapons proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Among these firearms, two AK-47s were found near Rio Rico, Arizona, where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010.
While Brian Terry epitomizes those whom Fast and Furious has harmed, he is not its sole casualty.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata, 32, was shot mortally in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Members of Los Zetas drug gang also ambushed ICE Agent Victor Avila, although not fatally. This Feb. 15, 2011 assault involved a rifle purchased in Dallas in another Obama administration “gunwalking” escapade.
Largely overlooked is this plan’s calamitous impact on Mexico, its people and U.S.-Mexican relations.
“Our federal government knowingly, willfully, purposefully gave the drug cartels nearly 2,000 weapons — mainly AK-47s — and allowed them to walk,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told NBC News. These arms were supposed to lead federal agents in Phoenix to the Mexican thugs who acquired them. Instead, Fast and Furious guns melted into Mexico.
Approximately 300 Mexicans have been killed or wounded by Fast and Furious guns, estimates former Mexican attorney general Victor Humberto Benitez Trevino. Relevant details are scarce. However, at least one case generated enormous headlines ... in Mexico. Here is what happened, according to a July 26, 2011 report by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).
On Oct. 21, 2010, Sinaloa drug cartel members kidnapped Mario Gonzalez, brother of Chihuahua state’s then-Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez. A video promptly emerged showing Mario in handcuffs, surrounded by five armed, masked captors. That Nov. 5, his tortured body was discovered in a shallow grave. Mexican police soon nabbed his suspected kidnappers in a shootout. Among 16 weapons seized along with eight of these hoodlums, serial numbers confirm that two were Fast and Furious guns. These also were tied to the kidnappings of two people.
Fast and Furious guns have befouled at least 200 crime scenes. Among them:
• Members of the La Familia drug gang fired at a Mexican Federal Police helicopter on May 24, 2011, wounding three officers and forcing an emergency landing in Michoacan, western Mexico. Five days later, four more helicopters attacked La Familia. They returned fire, striking all four choppers and injuring another two government agents. The police prevailed, killing 11 cartel members and arresting 36 — including those suspected of targeting the first chopper. Mexican authorities say La Familia possessed heavy-duty body armor and 70 rifles, including several Fast and Furious weapons.
• Two weapons purchased by Fast and Furious targets were recovered in Sonora on July 1, 2010 and tied to a “Homicide/Willful Kill — Gun,” the U.S. Justice Department declared last Sept. 9.
• Two Fast and Furious guns were linked to a February 2010 assassination conspiracy against Baja California’s then-Police Chief Julian Leyzaola.
• Four Fast and Furious guns were found on Jan. 8, 2010 and connected to a “kidnap/ransom.”
• Eleven Fast and Furious firearms were discovered in Atoyac de Alvarez after Mexican soldiers saved a kidnap victim on Nov. 14, 2009.
Team Obama’s defenders correctly argue that Bush administration investigators distributed some 450 guns in Mexico. But there are several key differences: No known deaths pertain to Operation Wide Receiver. Many of its weapons (unlike most Fast and Furious guns) featured radio-tracking devices. Also, Mexico’s government knew about and supported Wide Receiver.
In contrast, Issa and Grassley observed, “ATF and DOJ leadership kept their own personnel in Mexico and Mexican government officials totally in the dark about all aspects of Fast and Furious.”
“Fast and Furious has poisoned the well-spring of public opinion in Mexico as it relates to the cooperation and engagement with the United States,” Mexico’s envoy to America, Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, declared May 31.
Issa and Grassley concluded that 1,048 of these weapons “remain unaccounted for.” Unlike carrier pigeons, these Fast and Furious guns will not fly safely home. Instead, for years to come, they will keep drawing blood in Mexico — and points north.
Deroy Murdock is syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Gunwalker / Murdergate ping.
Was this program a vehicle to convince the public we need stricter gun laws or just plain incompetence?
We'll probably never know until we have full disclosure from the most honest and transparent administration in history.
Remember folks, Obama and Holder murdered American and Mexican citizens for a political agenda. Sorry but this is what it all comes down to. They drew blood in order to deprive American Citizens their Civil Rights.
They crossed the line and they must face punishment for doing so. The Government must also give up a lot of authority on controlling firearms to prevent this kind of thing in the future. Nothing less is acceptable.
If Congress fails to do it’s job and met out punishment, you and I know that someone in the American public will for them.
As for me, after F&F, I will not accept ANY new gun control. The Government has lost ALL legitimacy where firearms are concerned. They have no right to even be involved in gun control at all after what they have done.
To say that what has transpired with F&F disgusts me is quite the understatement.
So glad to see this well written article, by a credible journalist published in a main stream newspaper. The truth will out.
It was clearly the former. "Plain incompetence," though a hallmark of the Obama Administration, makes no sense here. "Incompetence" about what? If they had placed tracking devices on the weapons and the devices failed, or were easily removed, there might be a case for it. But since there were no tracking devices employed, and since the Mexican authorities were out of the loop, what motive remains?
Indisputably, the goal was to create chaos and mayhem that could be traced back to American-made weapons, to further the statists' anti-Second Amendment agenda. And since their "mission," insofar as the chaos and mayhem are concerned, was hugely successful, they must do everything possible, including being in contempt of Congress, to hide the facts from the American people.
The msm and left wing websites ala Huffpo and DailKos are now trying to turn this into another “birther” or “truther” deal. Nothing to see here, move along...only the right wing nutjobs at it again, to destroy the smartest guy ever...because HE'S BLACK and they are dumbo racists.
Every chance I get, I ask these brilliant folks why the guns were not fitted with tracking devices. I've never gotten a bite. Not even a squirrely try to answer that one.
I hope Issa doesn't give up. But I don't hold out much hope for anything these days.
Bump
There are zero links to this story from the Boston Herald’s home page.
Only 7 comments in 10 hours, and no left wing freak comments at all on a left wing freak newspaper.
This has been effectively buried by Boston Herald.
Backfires implys that it was a right. This was agenda driven against the gun owners of America and not what it was paraded around to be. These cretans have blood on thier hands American blood! The headlines should read “The boston herld wakes up from coma”
bfl
“Issa and Grassley concluded that 1,048 of these weapons ‘remain unaccounted for.’ Unlike carrier pigeons, these Fast and Furious guns will not fly safely home. Instead, for years to come, they will keep drawing blood in Mexico — and points north.”
IMHO the numbers are probably MUCH higher. We don’t know how many ops were running simultaneously or from how many different places. I think F&F is only the smallest tip of an iceberg the likes of which would shatter this Republic.
Even were the numbers as posted it’s a despicable plan, criminal and insane. Only those with contempt for America, its citizens, and its Constitution, would engage in such lunacy.
You are exactly right - for F & F to “work”, people had to die ..... and they have. I think the intent was for mostly Mexicans to die & then pressure from the Mexican government to stop the guns could be used to implement severe gun controls. They also HAD to know that the violence would cross the border & Americans would die. The lengths to which the Dems/Libs/Progs will go to disarm American now knows no bounds. I think what Holder/Obama are so desperate to cover up is that this was a known operation (before Terry was killed) at the highest levels i.e. the WH/Obama/Jarrett, etc. The highest levels of our government are complicit as accessories to murder if nothing else.
The enemy is at the helm of the ship of state and it is manned by his crew, my FRiend. Despicable and/or insane cannot adequately describe what these subhuman monsters are capable of.
That's the classic definition of a terrorist. If there is any justice in this world, Holder will be renditioned under NDAA. Hope he likes the weather in Guantanimo.
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