American USSR

An Extensive Archive of America's Hundreds of Lies, Treacheries, Wars, False Operations, Torture, and Murders


ATF CONSPIRACY AGAINST 2ND AMENDMENT

ATF SMUGGLED ARMS TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS

PLANNED TO BLAME AMERICAN ARMS SOLD IN MEXICO ON NRA MEMBERS
IN FEDERAL ATTEMPT TO OVERTURN 2ND AMENDMENT & GUN RIGHTS

GUN RIGHTS THREATENED BY ATF

FOX NEWS PANEL REPORTS MEXICO FURIOUS OVER FEDERAL FALSE FLAG

WHEN DOES THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GET PRISON TERMS FOR ITS CRIMES?

Does the U.S.A. Sell Guns to the Mexican Drug Cartel?
U.S. Border Guard Killed Using AK-47 Sold to Mexican Cartel in ATF False Flag
ATF Guns to Mexico Scandal Sizzles in Arizona Press

Obama Sold, Tracked, Same Guns to Cartels he hoped to Ban
TREASON AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

 

 

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.]
 


 

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