Univision report connects Operation Fast and Furious scandal to murders of Mexican teenagers

The Spanish language television news network Univision unleashed a bombshell investigative report on Operation Fast and Furious Sunday evening, finding that in January 2010 drug cartel hit men slaughtered students with weapons the United States government allowed to flow to them across the Mexican border.

“On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,” according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website.

“Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.”

Citing a Mexican Army document it obtained and published, Univision reported that “[t]hree of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).”

The “massacre,” as Univision described it, was not the only bombshell the network unveiled in its Sunday evening report.

“Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre,” the Univision report reads.

The network also uncovered another Fast and Furious weapons “massacre.” On September 2, 2009, 18 young men were killed at “El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez,” according to the report.

Univision found many of these victims through “access to the list of serial numbers for weapons used in Fast and Furious” and the “list of guns seized in Mexico,” according to English subtitles on the Spanish-language video.

“After cross-referencing them both lists, it became clear that a least a hundred of them were used in crimes of all kinds,” the subtitles read. “We found 57 weapons that were not mentioned in [the U.S.] Congress’ investigation.”

Though Univision tracked many more victims down, it said that “the death toll that this free flow of weapons authorized by ATF had in Mexico has not been tallied.”

Univision held nothing back in its broadcast, airing images and video of bloodied, dead bodies. The network showed the faces of the dead and walked viewers through how cartel operatives hunted their victims down with the weapons President Barack Obama’s administration allowed straw buyers to traffick to them.

One photo, for instance, showed pools of blood in the streets of a Mexican town after a “massacre” committed by murderers armed with Fast and Furious weapons. Video footage showed where some of the victims were killed and how the cartels chased their helpless victims to their deaths.

The Univision broadcast implicitly suggested that Americans have no regard for the victims of violence American policy helps fuel — that is, until one of those victims ends up being an American.

It wasn’t until U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder prompted whistle-blowers to come forward to Congress to publicly voice concerns about ]he program that the Obama administration stopped allowing firearms to flow into Mexico.

One victim’s father, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, told Univision he thinks “Americans are not often moved by the pain of those outside [their country].”

Univision says the Obama administration’s actions “inadvertently” helped fuel violence and a war between the cartels.

“In Mexico, the timing of the operation coincided with an upsurge of violence in the war among the country’s strongest cartels,” according to Univision.

“In 2009, the northern Mexican states served as a battlefield for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug trafficking organizations, and as expansion territory for the increasingly powerful Zetas. According to documents obtained by Univision News, from October of that year to the end of 2010, nearly 175 weapons from Operation Fast and Furious inadvertently armed the various warring factions across northern Mexico.”

An English-subtitled translation of one expert’s comments indicated that the weapons the Obama administration allowed to flow to the cartels through Fast and Furious were “capable of not only penetrating an armored vehicle but also a whole house from wall to wall.”

According to the Univision report, it wasn’t weak gun laws that made Fast and Furious possible, as some liberal commentators have suggested.

“If up to this point drug dealers could easily obtain and smuggle guns, the United States government made it easier,” English subtitles on one part of the report read.

“When Fast and Furious began in 2009, the ATF and Arizona prosecutors told [gun] store owners to sell weapons without restrictions to suspicious buyers.”

Univision also said that it was Phoenix ATF office leader Bill Newell who ultimately concluded that “the only way to track the guns was to wait for weapons to be recovered in crime scenes in Mexico.”

That charge, if true, would mean the Obama administration decided to allow cartel operatives to kill and injure people with the weapons it gave them, and to recover the guns only after criminals ditched them at brutal — often deadly — crime scenes.

Univision also found additional details about other gunwalking operations the Obama administration undertook.

“In Florida, the weapons from Operation Castaway ended up in the hands of criminals in Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela, the lead informant in the case told Univision News in a prison interview,” the network reported. The informant Unvision interviewed was “Vietnam veteran-turned-arms-trafficker” Hugh Crumpler.

“When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels,” Crumpler said. “The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening.”

Secret Fast and Furious Tapes Spring a Watergate-Sized Leak

9-21-2011

When the Watergate break-ins took place in 1972, President Richard Nixon knew nothing about them. But once he found out, he acted quickly to keep them secret, and it was his role in the cover-up that eventually led to his resignation in August 1974. Excerpts of recorded conversations between figures in the Operation Fast and Furious U.S.-Mexico gunrunning scheme are becoming ominously reminiscent of the 1970s watershed event in American politics.

In the historically monumental Watergate scandal, Nixon’s role in the cover-up was verified when he handed over personal tape recordings of conversations he’d had in the Oval Office on the subject.

That was 1974, and this is 2011, and in an eerie twist of fate, another batch of recordings has turned up that might reveal more about Fast and Furious than the current administration wants anyone to know: In fact, it might create more of a storm than Obama & Co. can weather.

The recordings, which seem to have been made in March 2011, are of conversations between Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Ariz., and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent Hope McAllister. Lone Wolf was one of the gun stores used for Fast and Furious sales to straw purchasers.

Although the recordings have been turned over to congressional investigators and the Inspector General, excerpts that were released to the public make it sound like the gun dealer was extremely concerned that news of Fast and Furious was going to reach a House member or senator who would take action on it.

Howard’s concern arose from a March 9 letter from Rep. Lamar Smith (R.-Tex.) and other members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder come clean about Fast and Furious. The House committee had been spurred into action by the testimony of ATF whistle-blower John Dodson.

Of the four excerpts released to the public, the first one best demonstrates the angst of those involved in the operation and the necessity for everyone, including Holder, to be sure their stories matched up:

HOWARD: “[Dodson’s] more toxic than you realize. I can tell you because I asked him, ‘How much of this f—–g file did you release?’ ”

McALLISTER: “Mmm hmm.”

HOWARD: “He said basically the underlying case file. I said, ‘Okay, who’d you release it to? F—–g [Sen.] Patrick Leahy!’ Okay? Wasn’t just [Sen. Chuck] Grassley, it was Leahy, alright? Leahy, as we both know, has adjourned this inquiry right now, okay, with no plans to reconvene it. So your people were successful to that end.” (Italics added.)

McALLISTER: “Right.”

HOWARD: “Obviously that’s good. However these idiots from …”

McALLISTER: “… The House?”

HOWARD: “Yeah, and that I don’t know. What is troublesome with this [is] I expected [Rep.] Darrell Issa’s signature to be on this [but] it wasn’t. He’s your biggest thorn. He hates Holder.”

McALLISTER: “Yeah. Where’s he out of?”

HOWARD: “Darrell Issa?”

McALLISTER: “California.”

HOWARD: “Lamar Smith, you know’s, out of Texas, I don’t know. Holder has to respond to this tomorrow.”

McALLISTER: “Yeah, he’s gonna respond.”

HOWARD: “I know he is. And I assure you the media isn’t gonna like his response, because basically it’s gonna mirror what he’s told Grassley.”

McALLISTER: “Yeah.”

HOWARD: “He can’t deviate.” (Italics added.)

McALLISTER: “Well if, I mean, I’ve seen a rough copy of what our U.S. attorney here has sent up. Whether or not he has the balls to actually use it or not, I doubt it. But I mean, it’s pretty aggressive. The way I see it, our local U.S. attorney is extremely aggressive. [But] when it gets to D.C. …”

HOWARD: “Who, [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Emory [Hurley]?”

McALLISTER: “No, the U.S. attorney.”

HOWARD: “Burke, yeah, used to work under Clinton. …Talking about [Dennis] Burke?”

McALLISTER: “Mmm hmm.”

HOWARD: “Yeah, well …”

McALLISTER: “But the problem is, once it gets to D.C., it just gets … well, you know.”

HOWARD: “Discombobulated—that’s a good term for it. Yeah, I get that.”

Even from a cold transcription, it’s evident that Howard is as nervous as a cat about Fast and Furious becoming public knowledge. It’s also evident that McAllister is confident of how U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke had handled things, but not very confident about how things will go once everything is shifted to D.C. It is important to note that Burke was the one who tried to cover up the ties between the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Fast and Furious. He retired last month without facing any criminal prosecution for his role in the mess.

Interesting too, is that as Howard wraps up the first excerpt of the recordings, it appears he understood how widespread the federal involvement in Fast and Furious had been. He knew that it wasn’t just the ATF, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI too:

HOWARD: “Let me tell you, you got more people out there now talking about this f—–g thing than anything I’ve ever seen. … People are not shutting the hell up … and that goes from DHS to f—–g FBI to everybody. I’m hearing it hypothetically on every fringe.”

Judging from the tenor of these recordings, particularly the consternation on the part of Howard, these excerpts may only scratch the surface of the immensity of the crimes hidden behind the door marked Fast and Furious.

http://www.humanevents.com/2011/09/21/secret-fast-and-furious-tapes-spring-a-watergatesized-leak/

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