Project GunWalker: ATF "Encourages" Dealers to Arm Mexican Cartels

[Molon Labe]

I don't usually start these threads, but here goes...

Original Source: Open letter by Senator Grassley to AG Holder.

It is has been over a month since I first contacted Acting Director Melson about serious whistleblower allegations related to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) operation called “Fast and Furious”—part of the broader “Project Gunrunner” initiative. Several agents alleged that ATF leadership encouraged cooperating gun dealers to engage in sales of multiple assault weapons to individuals suspected of illegally purchasing for resale to Mexican cartels. These agents were motivated to come forward after federal authorities recovered two of the Operation Fast and Furious guns at the scene where a Customs and Border Patrol Agent named Brian Terry was killed.

* * *

My office continues to receive mounting evidence in support of the whistleblower allegations. For example, attached are detailed accounts of three specific instances where ATF allowed firearms to “walk.”2 In all three instances, the suspect asks a cooperating defendant to purchase firearms at a gun dealer who was also cooperating with the ATF. So, two of the three participants in the transactions were acting in concert with the ATF.

CBS report(video)
(text)

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.

* * *

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."

* * *

On Dec. 14, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down. Dodson got the bad news from a colleague.
According to Dodson, "They said, 'Did you hear about the border patrol agent?' And I said, 'Yeah.' And they said 'Well it was one of the Fast and Furious guns.' There's not really much you can say after that."
Two assault rifles ATF had let go nearly a year before were found at Terry's murder.

When this story was being discussed before the whistleblower went public, the motivation wasn't a sting, but to pad the statistics (you may recall there was a debate about whether Cartel guns were coming from the US or from elsewhere). Now they say it's a sting.... but this "sting" never led to any arrests, just lots of innocent people being killed--including a US Border Patrol agent. And it was done without the knowledge and approval of Mexican authorities... how can you run a sting op in a foreign country, especially one that involves arming the most violent armed gangs in history? It has to be criminal.

[TorpX]

I just heard about this today on the radio. As you say it isn't in the pattern of a legitimate 'sting', as they are simply letting the weapons flow into Mexico, without the ability to track them. Nor does the U.S. have jurisdiction in Mexico.

It is shocking, but perhaps it shouldn't be. We have such an incompetent and radical regime in power, that almost anything is possible.

[Molon Labe]

This from WaPo:

In a meeting with editors and reporters of The Post, Mr. Calderon spelled out some of those failures. In four years, Mexico has confiscated 110,000 weapons, including more than 50,000 assault rifles, 11,000 grenades and more than 150 high-powered sniper rifles, as well as 10 million rounds of ammunition. Eighty-five percent of this vast arsenal has been smuggled in from the United States - thanks to Congress's refusal to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and the failure to adequately police the thousands of gun merchants in border states. One of those smuggled weapons, obtained at a gun show in Texas, was used in the killing of a U.S. special agent in Mexico last month.

No mention at all of the ATF, and another example of the corruption of the press in this country. No, WaPo, that gun wasn't "smuggled", it was transferred willingly by the ATF, as were thousands of others.

At least Dallas News gets it.

[Molon Labe]

This is still getting worse!

So, the ATF didn't just set up the transactions. They did the actual smuggling, too!

At the hearing on Friday, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), showed a video that supports the charges against the three suspects. The video was captured last November 9 with a hidden camera he was carrying the confidential informant who came to pick up a shipment of 40 guns, which was delivered by the Osorio brothers in the parking lot of a Walmart store in southern Dallas.
The informant recorded the 15 minutes it took to speak with Osorio, while they proceed to transfer the bags containing the weapons from his vehicle to the cabin of the trailer in which the employee of the ATF came to pick them up.

[em2nought]

The New York City mayor ought to get in on this action.

[Molon Labe]

I'm going to Necro this thread because there are going to be hearings in Congress next week (Wednesday 15 JUN, 1000 Eastern). I'll be watching live of course.

Fox News has been surprisingly slow picking up this story, but they are the ones with the latest:

Officials at the Department of Justice are in "panic mode," according to multiple sources, as word spreads that congressional testimony next week will paint a bleak and humiliating picture of Operation Fast and Furious, the botched undercover operation that left a trail of blood from Mexico to Washington, D.C.

The operation was supposed to stem the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico by allowing so-called straw buyers to purchase guns legally in the U.S. and later sell them in Mexico, usually to drug cartels.

Instead, ATF documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly and deliberately flooded Mexico with assault rifles. Their intent was to expose the entire smuggling organization, from top to bottom, but the operation spun out of control and supervisors refused pleas from field agents to stop it.

Only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died did ATF Agent John Dodson blow the whistle and expose the scandal.
"What people don't understand is how long we will be dealing with this," Dodson told Fox News back in March. "Those guns are gone. You can't just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many crimes will be committed before we retrieve them."

But now the casualties are coming in.
Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.

A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.
The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.

It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF's own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.
Arizona gun store owners say they were explicitly told by the ATF to sell the guns, sometimes 20, 30, even up to 40 in a single day to single person.
And those orders, from at least one ATF case agent, are on audio recording.
"We would say, 'Do you (the ATF) want us to stop selling, is there something we should do here?'" Brad DeSayes, owner of J&G Gun Sales in Prescott, said. "And they would say, 'No, no, no, keep selling - just tell us after the fact.'"
Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, holds a hearing Wednesday into Operation Fast and Furious.
The hearing is billed as "Reckless Decisions, Tragic Outcomes," and the following are among the details expected in testimony:
- The ATF allowed and encouraged five Arizona gun store owners to sell some 1,800 weapons to buyers known to them as gun smugglers.
- It installed cameras inside the gun stores to record purchases made by those smugglers.
- It hid GPS trackers inside gun stocks and watched the weapons go south on computer screens.
- It obtained surveillance video from parking lots and helicopters showing straw buyers transferring their guns from one car to another.
- It learned guns sold in Phoenix were recovered only when Mexico police requested "trace data," which is obtained from their serial number.
The first witness in Wednesday's hearing is Sen. Charles Grassley, who will describe what his investigative team learned from four months of interviews and thousands of documents. He will be followed by three members of Brian Terry's family, three ATF agents and Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, who only months ago insisted the agency did not let guns go south to Mexico, a claim contradicted by field agents in Group 7, the actual agents who ran the operation in Phoenix.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011...#ixzz1OqnayFSy

Heads are going to roll for this one, the only question is how high up does it go? I don't see how AG Holder can't be responsible, but will he turn out to be the telfon don?

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

...how can you run a sting op in a foreign country, especially one that involves arming the most violent armed gangs in history? It has to be criminal.

Where is Jack Ryan when you need him?

[Gerald]

Ya, tell me

[Herr-Berbunch]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

...how can you run a sting op in a foreign country, especially one that involves arming the most violent armed gangs in history?.

Because the US thinks it can do pretty much what it wants on the world stage, let alone on it's doorstep to it's hispanic step-child.

Or maybe it's a cunning plan to increase another countries gun-crime rate to make it's own look a little better!

[Molon Labe]

I didn't believe it at first, because I try to explain things by incompetence before looking to malice, but as this story has developed it seems more and more likely that the purpose of this operation was to manufacture a crisis that would drive legislation here in the US. (See post #3, elements in the press are part of the team)

There is also anecdotal evidence that this has been going on in US cities, not just the border. But nobody's done the research on that to know for sure.