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Obama's Mexicogate?
A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels — overseen by U.S. government agents — threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration.
The operation, called “Fast and Furious,” was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.
But once across the border, the agency seemed to lose track of the weapons. Hundreds of AK-47s and Barrett .50 caliber rifles — favorites of warring drug cartels —made it easily into the hands of some of Mexico’s most ruthless crime organizations.
Gunwalking
In arms trafficking parlance, knowingly allowing smugglers to go about their business is called “gunwalking.” According to ATF whistleblowers, the agency stood by and watched as buyers purchased up to 20 weapons at a time and quickly passed them off to smugglers in nearby parking lots. The hope was to trace the guns into Mexico and bust a major cartel.
In December 2010 “walked” guns were identified as the murder weapons in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry by drug cartels. An anguished ATF agent made the decision to expose the gunwalking operation, after the bureau ignored months of complaints.
Agent John Dodson blew the whistle on Fast and Furious in an interview with CBS News on Mar. 3. Dodson had been concerned about the operation since well before the Terry murder. As large numbers of guns freely crossed the border during the early part of 2010, he and other ATF agents noted with alarm the rise in violent crime south of the border. He said he told his supervisors, “The more our guys buy, the more violence we’re having down there.”
Dodson reports that his supervisor replied, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’re going to scramble some eggs.”
Even some of the gun shop owners expressed discomfort with the number of weapons they were selling to shady customers, but were reportedly told to continue the operation.
Soon after the Dodson interview, the director of the ATF Mexico office, Darren Gil, told CBS that he began to receive disturbing reports of an unusually high number of Phoenix-area guns showing up in Mexican cartel violence. When he began asking questions, Gil discovered that his team had been blocked from computer access to information on Fast and Furious.
Gil questioned officials at U.S. headquarters who told him they were under direct orders from the Department of Justice and that he should say nothing to the Mexican government about the program.
Gil resigned in disgust in December 2010 after watching “seizure after seizure after seizure” of walked guns turned up at violent crime scenes in Mexico.
Congress Steps In
In early 2011, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) requested an ATF briefing. The agency refused. Congress has now issued a subpoena summoning ATF to report on the Fast and Furious program.
Meanwhile, U.S. government officials are attempting to deny being involved without actually confirming that the operation took place. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano did not deny allegations concerning the program, but claimed she found out about the operation only after Agent Terry’s murder and had no information regarding the participation of Customs agents.
In the hot seat, Attorney General Eric Holder assigned an inspector general to investigate. President Obama defended Holder twice — on Univision and CNN — stating that neither he nor Holder knew about the operation.
The investigation will result in one of two conclusions, neither positive for the attorney general. The first is that Holder authorized an operation that likely violated U.S., Mexican, and international law and armed dangerous drug traffickers.
The second is that the head of the Justice Department is presiding over rogue staff that decided not to tell their boss about an operation that poses major legal, ethical and diplomatic breaches.
Holder recently issued a memo to Southwest border attorneys ordering them not to permit arms trafficking to Mexican cartels. The memo states, “We should not design or conduct undercover operations which include guns crossing the border.” Logically, a memo advising justice officials not to engage in illegal gunwalking would be unnecessary were it not for a precedent to the contrary.
Some ATF officials have justified the program by claiming the operation could result in prosecutions of individuals higher up the smuggling chain. The ATF issued a press release the day of Dodson’s interview announcing a decision to “review the bureau’s current firearms trafficking strategies…”
Mexican Response
Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his cabinet have been remarkably sanguine about the possibility that guns were trafficked to the archenemy with the encouragement of a foreign government. National Security spokesperson Alejandro Poire refused to accept that the operation existed and reserved comment until after the results of the pending U.S. investigation are released.
Calderon appears unwilling to risk jeopardizing the U.S. government’s political and financial support for his war on drugs by complaining too loudly. His counternarcotics strategy has come under heavy criticism in his country in the last few months due to sharply increasing violence and corruption.
Opposition members of the Mexican Congress, media, and public have ordered an investigation and called the operation a violation of international law and even an act of war. The outrage increased when William Brownfield, the State Department’s head of International Narcotics, praised the program to the Mexican press and confirmed it was “ongoing.” The former ambassador to Colombia and long-time promoter of the drug war scoffed at criticisms, stating that the number of arms that have passed to “uncontrolled destinations” was “limited.”
But for many U.S. and Mexican legislators and citizens even a single weapon allowed to fall into the hands of brutal cartels is one too many. The gunwalking program has increased public skepticism toward the “shared responsibility” that Obama and Calderon have tried to sell in numerous public statements, and fueled the growing popular protests within Mexico that reject the violent drug war model for dealing with illicit narcotics trafficking and consumption.
Major Scandal?
With evasive responses from government agencies, major international implications, and persistent questions of “who knew what, and when,” the Fast and Furious operation could develop into a major scandal for the Obama administration. That will depend on the administration’s response. .
The Obama administration faces a tough choice: either orchestrate a cover-up, as the ATF appears to be doing, or open up the case and accept the consequences.
The gunwalking case tests the integrity of the Obama government. It also further weakens support for a failing drug war strategy. The administration is currently seeking millions more dollars in security aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative.
The best path forward is to fully investigate the operation and punish those responsible — no matter how high up the blame goes. It is also time to end support for a war on drugs that becomes more entrenched and more violent every day.
34 Comments so far
Show AllFairness demands that the WOD be enforced retroactively and that former (?) drug users Clinton, Bush and Obama be put in a private prison run by that crazy Arizona Sheriff Arpaio
Looks like the Republicrooks have a duty to Impeach Barry over this. Then maybe someone to the left of Reagan (there aren't many left in the Dim Party) can run against and defeat Biden in the primaries in 2012. And maybe pigs will fly out of ...
Holder will have someone thrown under the bus once the Inspector General determines who is the easiest one to push. Then the media will forget about it.
"Agent John Dodson blew the whistle on ..."
And right after they set up a low level fall guy to take the blame, you can be sure that they will go after Mr. Dodson, the whistle blower, like a pack of rabid hyenas.
Change you can believe in.
I'm glad you pointed that out -- the worst administration ever on low-level whistleblowers and, flip-side, the worst administration ever on forgiving truly appalling mass-scale crimes against Americans and the people of the world.
The most corrupt Government in the World. This just another example. Remember this the next time a "cache of weapons" supplied by "Iran/North Korea/Venezuela" or plug in latest bad guy here used to justify another invasion of another nation by the US Military.
Who is the moron that thought of this plan?
Sorry, but this story doesn't fly for me. My bullshit detector has been seriously roused.
For one, nobody is going to tell me Obaba didn't know anything about this.
Truly Reaganesque, ain't it? Same with DHS Janet not knowing. Bullshit.
Second, how long did it take before cartel lords found out what these idiots were up to at ATF? A week or two?
And third, how long has ATF been at it? Where are the results? How many drug lords have they arrested with this moronic plan?
I'd bet everything I have that hundreds of innocent people have been murdered with these guns against maybe one of two arrests if any at all.
This is how they're spending our money, folks. Our lawless government tramples the world at the behest of Obama.
Myfreep -
Maybe you, or maybe me, should pause briefly to recalibrate our bullshit detectors.
Personally, I find it very plausible that President Barack Obama, Homeland Security head Janet Neapolitano, and Attorney General Eric Holder had no clue whatsoever what a cabal of undercover cowboys in the back room of the Phoenix, Arizona office of Bureau of Alcohol, Narcotics, and Firearms were up to. This is not exactly the sort of thing that crops up routinely on the Oval Office agenda for Cabinet level discussion.
Also, I find it curious that these three particular political figures are instantly identified as the most deserving to be targeted and mortally wounded by what this article is already beating the war drum to brand name "the Mexicogate scandal." What a coincidental, absolute windfall such a scandal would be, in terms of a wedge issue with legs for Latino voters to focus upon during the upcoming months.
I entirely agree with you (see my post below) that whoever thought this plan to ship more guns into Mexico is a moron. However, now that the staggering stupidity of this sting operation has made it into the public domain, I certainly wouldn't find it surprising that a yahoo or two who are on the spot for their own embarassing SNAFU would try to pass the buck as far up the bureaucratic chain of command as they possibly could - for very self-serving reasons which have a lot more to do with politics than with ferreting out the truth about what really happened. Right wingers, too, know how to make lemons into at least palatable lemonade.
Maybe Barack, Eric, and Janet did huddle in a corner somewhere and sign off on this wacky gunwalking sting. Maybe not. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that south of the border some black ops shenanigans with federal executive branch fingerprints on it embarassed the current Commander-in-Chief. The coup in Honduras, for instance.
Me, I got no problem telling you that Obama probably didn't know. He may well also be oblivious to how he's being finessed into a crossfire once again. And there's nothing Reaganesque about it at all.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill
Your point is well taken. It's very possible for some cowboy ATF boys to go half cocked on their own, and then blame the bigger fish.
But in this case I don't think so and here's why. Stories of US guns flooding into the hands of Mexican drug cartels has been in the news for months and months. The US knew gun shops were selling quantity in a single sale, but did nothing.
After reading this, I don't feel it's a leap to assume Obama was on board with the plan.
And FYI: my reference to Obama being Reaganesque was in reference to another secret gun smuggling plan and the president claims ignorance. .
Either way, like everything else it's very unlikely we'll learn the truth.
I'm right there with you in your initial assessment. Who stands to financially benefit most from amped up bloodshed on the border? DEA, Arizona, Texas. Once again, their gunned-up racism is running circles around DOJ and the presidency in denial of our country's entrenched systems of oppression.
Who can blame the president for wanting to focus on the nice squeaky clean Bernankes and Immelts? Fine, well-educated men.
We have, ladies and gentlemen, a president marketing the idea that all is "pacifico" and that his presence isn't "darkening" the White House, isn't triggering insane backwards whitey culture warriors to burst forth with their heinous selves. He prefers to have a beer summit and shove under the rug our institutional racism and migrant slavery and corrections system tortures and hells. He prefers to ignore screaching and legislating anti-Sharia law and showing papers -- both of his and other darkies' birth certificates.
Perhaps this is to try to demonstrate that our country can hang with the rest of the darker skinned brainiac peoples of the world who are kicking our economic and search for happiness butts. Perhaps it is to lure darker skinned, resource cursed nations into thinking "trading" with America would be a positive experience.
My bet is he covers this up and saves those thugs who are earning off other people's murders and suffering. He'll perform the magician's legerdemain, perhaps even well this time. He's had so much practice.
He may not have caused the scandal, but his policies have done nothing to prevent such things from occurring and doing so on a grand scale.
tiddas -
You have an interesting take on Obama's ability to "perform the magician's legerdemain, perhaps even well this time. He's had so much practice." I have my doubts.
What is inherently awkward about pinning this emerging "Mexicogate scandal" on Barack, Janet N, and Eric Holder personally is it's inevitable partisan downside. If you knew, signed off, and authorized it, you officially unleashed the gringo law and order vigilantes inside the ATF, DEA, Homeland Security, and DOJ heirarchies to run amok and stir the pot in the Mexican cartel wars, killing lots of wholly innocent Hispanic civilians in the crossfire. On the other hand, if you did not know, sign off, or authorize the sting, then you are an utterly incompetent top executive official unable to control the dangerous, reckless underlings on your watch.
So which do you prefer - to be branded actively complicit in the murder of Mexicans, or merely asleep at the switch while the law enforcement officers under your control fuel the Mexican crime wave and call it breaking eggs for an omelet? Damned if you did, damned if you didn't.
And of course if the White House, Homeland Security and the Justice Department back up their public denials by cracking down on the BATF guys who dreamed up this Keystone Kops gunwalk operation, it will be spun as yet further proof that Barack the neoliberal Neofascist is once again targeting the patriotic white guys in uniform who are out there on the front lines, bravely doing their best to keep the American homeland safe from the lurking, encroaching foreign hordes.
I see all downside and no upside, with little wiggle room. A marvelous wedge issue that a variety of constituencies are no doubt salivating to exploit.
Bill from Saginaw
TIDDAS: Excellent analysis.
No one has mentioned the astounding numbers of young women found murdered near the border, and the absolute lack of interest in finding--and holding to account--those responsible. All these new weapons pouring in will likely add to the death toll. But it's young Brown-skinned women, so who among largely male elites gives a damn?
It seems this story has not received much attention in the press. This is the first article I've seen about this. Hopefully this incident becomes publicized in Mexico. Perhaps it could be a catalyst for a Second Mexican revolution much as the Arizona Rangers' invasion of Mexico in 1906 to suppress the Cananea Mineworkers' strike incensed the Mexican people against Porfirio Diaz and his Yankee friends.
It's sad to see that Calderon can't speak up to the big boss at the White House for fear that aid monies will be curtailed. Like Bhopal or the Okinawa rape case this is but another example of a power imbalance between colonizer and colonized whatever the official relationship between countries may be.
Kudos to the author of this article for bringing this to light. God knows the US MSM is way too busy covering the white man's burden in Libya or Afghanistan or the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars.
Most Mexicans know and have known that the arms come from the States. Where else, really?
Most Mexicans would assume that the American government and their own government are involved in transporting the weapons.
If you look at the logistics, what else would you assume? Two very large, monied interests in Mexico want arms. No one imagines that they're going to write Santa Claus. Elements within and around the US government have been the primary gun runners or walkers for Latin thuggocracies for over a century. The so-called "war on drugs" has set up a profitable side-business for black ops shadow personnel and projects that the American executive wants to keep off the books.
Obviously, one does business with US government: they have an interest in such business, and they see anything of sufficient volume that happens in Mexico as being on their turf.
To speak very, very broadly, Mexicans have a lot fewer illusions about the good intentions of their officials than do US-Americans, and an awful lot fewer illusions about good intentions in Washington.
Calderon is probably just hoping his boys get their share of the guns.
The trouble is in many ways very much like that in Colombia or Afghanistan: it is very hard to assemble people for nonviolent action when a lot of bullets are flying around, and most of the time not even the yanquis know who's working for the yanquis.
Could it be that being a competent, much less law abiding, president of the US is more complicated that being Editor in Chief of the Harvard Law Review?
Who says that Obama's a competent, law-abiding president? I, for one, haven't seen a single bit of evidence pointing to that since he took office. He's a total fraud, who's screwed his voting base and this country over just as much as his predecessor(s). Don't kid yourself.
I don't get it.
BATF's Phoenix office authorizes and encourages licensed US firearms dealers to sell high calibre semi-automatic (fully automatic?) weapons in bulk to shady "straw men" buyers, the feds surreptiously surveilling the sales. The shady straw men are then watched transferring the weapons to suspected gun smugglers in parking lots near to the gun shops. Then the smugglers are surveilled to the Mexican border. It's a sting operation, supposedly.
"But once across the border, the agency seemed to lose track of the weapons."
"The hope was to trace the guns into Mexico, and then bust a major cartel."
Hope? What? What hope?
Rather than labeling this weirdo wannabe sting operation "Fast and Furious", it should have been dubbed "Fantasy and Farce" (at least on the US side of the border). Nobody gets busted in the parking lots. Nobody gets nailed in a traffic stop en route to Mexico. Nobody gets intercepted and taken into custody at the border. Then, suddenly "the agency seemed to lose track" of the guns and the gun smugglers, with predictably deadly consequences. South of the border, you end up with "Futile and Fatal."
So ATF agent Dodson blows the whistle on the sting operation gone terribly awry to CBS. He relates that when he warned his supervisor, the response was "If you're going to make an omelet, you're going to scramble some eggs."
What on earth is this federal law enforcement agent and ostensible public servant talking about?
How was facilitating a controlled shipment of 2,500 more illegal firearms into Mexico supposedly going to eventually "bust a major cartel"?
Were the good guys hoping to run a ballistics trace from the next wave of corpses found south of the Rio Grande backwards to catch the shooter/culprits?
Was the pipe dream to swoop in like Rambo and bust everybody and their grandmother at the moment the smugglers handed the guns off to the cartel kingpins?
Was the first installment of this gunwalking charade just intended to be a set up, with the shady straw men and the smugglers and the cartel overlords all to be busted a month or two later when they came back to the US for another shipment?
Or were these details simply handed off to Mexican law enforcement authorities for them to decide with their half of the drug war partnership, once the deadly weapons cache was no longer on American soil?
I just don't get it. Whether somebody dropped the ball badly, or somebody betrayed somebody, to me isn't the question.
I can't figure out how this was supposed to work in the first place, if everything had gone perfectly according to the Bureau's own omelet-making recipe.
Bill from Saginaw
Totally. It does seem a bit harebrained to think that they would find the kingpins of these drug running operations after allowing the weapons to pass through all the places where they could have been realistically intercepted. If its all a cover-up for some other purpose, it's hard to think what that other purpose would be.
"What Hope"? You ask. Indeed. Like throwing a coin in the fountain and hoping you get your wish. Helluva plan.
And how about "What Cartel"? The cartel here seems to be the ATF itself. Sanctioning sales to criminals, escorting the bad guys to the border and then waving goodbye and good luck, with no mention of where the money went.
And we end with a joke: "The gunwalking case tests the integrity of the Obama government. " Ha ha ha. Integrity of the Obama government. Whoeee. That's a good one...
i smell a rat. I don't believe for a second that some BATF moron cooked up something as seemingly coo-coo-counterproductive as this. That's just the story for the gullible. If caught, the government would much rather have the public think that it is merely stupid -- well intentioned, mind you, but stupid -- rather than evil. I suspect that the real story is considerably more nefarious. The CIA has long been involved in drug running to fund covert operations. Might want to check out these two articles:
Plan Mexico: Cocaine and the CIA http://www.aztlan.net/plan_mexico.htm
Is Calderon Protecting CIA Drug Cartel? http://www.aztlan.net/is_calderon_protecting_the_cia.htm
RAMA: "And for effective insider commentary, let's ask Oliver North for his take on this matter?" (My idea of a good TV interview, or potential political satire.)
Like the awesome writer Charles Bowden says in his book about Ciudad Juarez and the cartels, Murder City: There is no such thing as a "war against drugs"; what we have is a war FOR drugs, namely for the limitless profits that illegal drugs represent. Remember Alfred McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia"? How the CIA would periodically scoop poor Vietnamese out of Saigon jails for use as slave labor in the poppy fields of Laos? Remember Eugene Hasenfus, Adolfo Calero, the CIA and the Contras, and their wide-body jets flying loads of coke up from Colombia to Nicaragua, and on to US territory? And what are the virtuous US "anti-drug" warriors doing today, if not more of the same?
Bowden spent years talking to countless people from every demographic south of the Border. He concluded that at least 85% of the cops in every single city, municipal, state, and federal police agency in Mexico were working for the cartels.
The US Congressional report for 2010 reported that the counter-narcotics Merida Initiative budget for Mexico last year was $210.3 million dollars: and everybody, but everybody, knows it's not "working"; of course, that's not the point. It's working exactly as the political leadership class in the US wants it to work.
Canadian reporters with Real TV on the ground in Mexico have reported that there is evidence that Mexican president Felipe Calderon has chosen sides in the "drug war", and that the Mexican Army is nothing but an armed wing of the Sinaloa cartel.
Does this surprise anybody? Not me. I just wonder what percentages of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, DEA, ICE, the state and federal judiciary, and city, county, state, and other federal law "enforcement" agencies in the US are the cartel's bought puppets, and how high has the infection spread?
Well, I think the cat's out of the bag after WAMU laundered 400 million USD worth of Mexican drug money and nobody was indicted.
MOJADA: Great post, and thank you (and Bill from Saginaw, too) for remembering the dead... the border has become a zone of angry ghosts.
Good post. Another take is the late John Ross':
"[T]hese are hot-button issues in the US press—immigration and drugs. Washington uses these issues to pressure Mexico, to win concessions, and they’re not necessarily concessions in terms of the drug war or immigration at all. They look at security, and they look at economy, and basically energy, you know? Washington wants to see Mexico privatize its oil industry, PEMEX. And so, they utilize this pressure that comes from immigration, comes from the drug war, in order to win those concessions.
...So those are the two aims of Washington at this point: to gain control over the Mexican security apparatus and the privatization of PEMEX. And all of this Mexico bashing that comes out of immigration and comes out of the drug war is really directed at that. And that’s how the White House has operated in Mexico as long as I’ve been there and much longer than I’ve been there."
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/27/john_ross_on_el_monstruo_dread
~~~~~
So, extending Ross' analysis, exacerbating the "War on Drugs" would advance the imperial goals of the US.
Billions get lost in the deserts of the Middle East, and now the ATF "appears to have lost track of the guns." It used to drive me crazy that people weren't absolutely livid about those billions -- but it didn't happen. Let's see if this lights a bit of a spark. I wish, but I doubt it.
The ATF should be held responsible and accountable for the slaughter of so many people in Mexico, but probably won't. Obama should be outraged and following up on the ATF but he doesn't appear he is. Calderon lack of response indicates he won't call for an extradition of US officials. How come? This is a tragedy that M$M is ignoring and it appears M$M is more interested in another British royal wedding. How convenient for the US government (or is it complicity by M$M?).
So actually the real 'mexicogate' seems to be that the Obama administration is afraid to officially now label Mexico a Narco-state. And label its presidente a pawn of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Sadly, Mexico now has become a narco-state, thanks to the Unfettered Capitalism and Glorious Free Market... of the Drug Trade. The Trade is, as well, totally Unsullied by 'government handouts'. How proud and envious the Right-wingers must be, seeing in Mexico what greedy and enterprising, no-use-for-government, anything-for-money men can do to a nation. And for themselves.
What a shining example of Pure Capitalism in action, taken to its logical extension. Just as Detroit is another stellar example of Capitalism, and about what even three of the biggest corporations in the world will do to their own city, much less to individuals. Private enterprise in action: wonderful Detroit, Home of the Big Three... will work for food.
Yay, capitalism, the vampire that sucks the blood of the people to live, and leaves behind a corpse.
Oh, and getting back to Mexico, the drug trade thrives also thanks to the need for money and jobs and safety that a rotten and corrupt government of oligarchs does not provide for its people.
And the real clincher is that the Rightwingers, the Teabaggers and the Republicans really now want the US to emulate that very Capitalist country to the south (with the richest guy in the world as one of its citizens), and re-form the US into a version of its oligarchy-serfdom, dog-eat-dog, on-your-own society model. Yes, turn the US into another nation of either rich or poor, either winner or loser; that's the Rightwing and Republican goal.
By the way, the Barrett is quite the sniper weapon. It costs $12,000 new, and it has a kill shot radius of over a mile. Its bullet rounds are about as big as your hand. Closer in, it will literally blow a head clean off, leaving a stump at the neck. But it is a cannon, it's very clumsy, and it absolutely cannot be discreet. Why are cartels buying these? Maybe they just want to hunt them up some quail, like Cheney.
Or is someone else taking delivery?