The only thing missing is a pile of dead bodies. Or maybe, some smoke coming out of the barrel.
This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.
Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.
Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy four Draco pistols for cash and even got a letter from his supervisor, David Voth, authorizing a federally licensed gun dealer to sell him the guns without bothering about the necessary paperwork.
“Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62×39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson,” read the June 1, 2010, letter. “These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of performance of his official duties.”
On orders, Dodson then sold the guns to known criminals, who first stashed them away and then — deliberately unhindered by the ATF or any other agency — whisked them off to Mexico.
They were selling them, but they weren’t tracking them — which was supposed to be the whole point, right? We’ve seen in recent weeks just how easy it is to track stuff. GM has been using its OnStar to track drivers, even down to second-hand owners who never even subscribed to OnStar. Apple and Google both used their phones to track cell users. Facebook has been tracking us all over the place. Heck, anybody who’s ever watched a Discovery Channel doc has probably seen the neighborhood oceanographic institute track dolphins by attaching little GPS tags to them. If these private companies can do this, surely the brains at the ATF and DOJ could have embedded GPS locators into the guns they were selling to the drug cartels. If that’s what they wanted to do. But all indications are that they didn’t do that. They violated Mexican sovereignty, ran guns to a known drug cartel on the American taxpayer’s dime, and roughly 200 people and counting are dead.
And Eric Holder just keeps locking in the silencer.
And yet Congress has still failed to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute this whole mess.
Any program that involves this many agencies (BATFE, FBI, Border Patrol, DEA, State) has to be approved at Cabinet or oval office levels. This isn’t just a bunch of rogue agents. If Holder at least, didn’t know about and approve of this operation, he is incompetent and shouldn’t be sitting in a cabinet level position. If he did know about and approve of this clusterf#$k, he should be charged with the murder of that border patrol agent and prosecuted.
don’t take the lack of a special prosecutor to be an indication that this investigation is being half-a$$ed. once a special prosecutor is appointed, the oversight investigation has to cease. issa and grassley want to make sure they squeeze every bit of evidence out of this before the have to back off. this way they’ll be in a position to monitor the special prosecutor and ensure the doj doesn’t sandbag
Katie Pavlich at one point picked up some lame excuse from ATF that the weapons had GPS tracking devices, but the batteries were defective and they ran down, so ATF lost track of them. This silliness sank beneath the waves of revelations long ago, and has never resurfaced. So I’m assuming they never tried tracking them by GPS, because they never wanted to track them. Apparently, just having them show up by-the-by at some crime scene was good enough.
If you want to tag a weapon and track it (a valid intelligence technique that the USG knows well how to execute) , you only need one or two weapons. 2000 plus weapons can’t be anything but a lame “under the radar” attack on the Second Amendment. I can’t believe these jack-wagon, amateurs managed to absolutely butcher a covert operation to the degree that they did. I mean besides being evil and treasonous, it looks like they were too stupid for words.
I fully believe Sate had to be aware and complicit. Hillary was one of the first to harp on the 90% figure and I would not imagine that ATF would conduct cross border ops no mater how ill conceived without bringing State Dept. into the loop.
I agree. If DoD floated the idea of running an operation like this in a friendly country, even for a good reason, heads would explode at DoS. Last time I looked you can’t run an intelligence operation in a friendly foreign country, without informing the COM unless you are the CIA or getting green-light from the POTUS. If someone in the DoD suggested running this sort of thing without clearing it with DoS, the DoD lawyers would have puppies.
Hillary has been part of the trouble all along. In 1993, Hillary, Ira Magaziner, and Webster Hubbell convinced newcomer Jane Reno that the :babies are being abused” at Waco, so she set off to save (FBI burned0 them……..
Has there been any coverage of this malfeasance in the NYT or the WaPo or the big networks? I have watched my local rag closely and have seen zero reference. I have mentioned the subject to my Obama-hugging relatives and they stare at me blankly, and then say “Its just another lying smear because he’s black!.”
It is impossible to have discussion, meaningful or otherwise, with those who have no idea of what you are talking about
because the Pravda Press eliminates any honest reportage.
[quote]If these private companies can do this, surely the brains at the ATF and DOJ could have embedded GPS locators into the guns they were selling to the drug cartels.[/quote]
Brains? What brains?
Stuart, as far as I know, only Fox and CBS has done some pieces on this. That’s about it for the MSM. And, of course, O’s supporters would think you are lying, they wouldn’t be caught dead on a site like this and there is no where else they would see anything about it.
Yes, it does get covered in the Washington Post. It’s far too big a story to get buried.
The only plan they ever had to “track the guns” was to stick pins in a map whenever police recovered a weapon from a crime scene. It was like putting poisoned drugs on the street to see who dies. We have testimony of agents that ATF “higher ups” were “jubilant, almost giddy” when “our guns” began to turn up at crime scenes in Mexico. Obviously the plan was working to their complete satisfaction.