Cowboy Confessional

“You’ve got people who are dead, you have weapons that are missing and you have an administration that doesn’t seem to want to take any accountability for it.”

When does a screw-up become a cover-up?  As the details concerning operation Fast and Furious unfold, we see sickening similarities with the most infamous of 20^th century scandals (no, not Billy Boy boinking bimbi).  Lesser crimes have brought down presidents.  The current White House occupant may be plunging in the same direction.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (which sounds like the entertainment committee for a Detroit Democrat fund raiser) launched a spectacularly stupid program to send guns to Mexican drug gangs.  The professed purpose was to trace trafficking routes and better understand if and how civilian firearms from America end up in Mexico (despite most drug cartel armament coming from Latin American Cold War surplus).  BATFE agents encouraged traffickers to buy firearms at American gun stores, the gun stores were told to allow these suspicious sales, and then the guns flowed over the Rio Grande.  Even if this were an intelligent project, the execution left everything to be desired:

• The Customs department, which regulates exports, was not informed.
• The Mexican government wasn’t informed.
• BATFE agents working with Mexican officials were not informed.
• There were no ground resources in Mexico to track the 2,500 smuggled guns.

Testimony from whistleblowers within the BATFE indicate that the people who incubated this intrigue knew there would be loss of human life – that the firearms would transfer from the criminals known as smugglers into the hands of criminals known as drug cartel enforcers.  BATFE leadership wanted the guns to end up in cartel hands and were “jovial, if not giddy” when the guns were later recovered in Mexico.

It is unclear if they were equally giddy when a U.S. Border Patrol officer was killed with one.

Agent Brian Terry died between the cacti in Arizona’s Peck Canyon.  He didn’t stand much of a chance, firing bean bags at people he thought were involved with illegal immigrants.  Two of the guns recovered at the site of Terry’s termination ended up in criminal hands courtesy of the BATFE project.  There is no body count for the number of Mexicans who have been killed with the other 2,499 firearms that were encouraged to emigrate.

Troubling as this is, the ongoing cover-up is worse.

The BATFE is within the Justice Department; an inappropriately named agency given its current helmsman Eric Holder.  Despite numerous requests for documents related to the BATFE smuggling operation, Holder and his subordinates held out.  As with Watergate, Holdergate started with stonewalling, which is obstruction of justice (and if the irony of the Justice Department obstructing justice doesn’t drive you to drink, then you are too sober to even be a judge).  Whereas Nixon sought the resignation of people attempting to investigate, Holder is reassigning the staff responsible for executing the ill-conceived idiocy.

So much for the most transparent administration in American history.

So, when does a screw-up become a cover-up?  Holdergate has already entered that state with delaying tactics.  As more whistleblower testimony emerges, the clarity of complicity does as well.  Already, both Holder and his boss Obama claim ignorance of the project, just as Nixon originally claimed ignorance about who conducted the Watergate break-in.

Suspicions are aroused because none of the process makes sense.

We know from a broad set of data that American guns entering Mexico are not a major factor in drug cartel violence.  Yet American and Mexican presidents, as well as a criminally insane senator have gone on record claiming that they do.  If there is a perceived problem concerning guns traveling south, then American law enforcement would naturally stop them from crossing the border.

Which happened in the same way as Obama’s spending stimulated the economy.

Supervisors in the BATFE ordered multiple agents to “stand down” when they complained about the program (in advance of Brian Terry’s death). Instead of stopping the export and arresting the smugglers in the United States, guns gravitated without any pre-planned means for tracking them and keeping them out of dangerous hands. In the absence of a proactive intervention plan (the MO for most law enforcement) and given obstruction of field agent requests to bust gun smugglers, a different set of priorities appears to be at play.  Cynical people suspect that the Obama administration needed to “prove” guns were getting into Mexico because statistics showed otherwise.

Cynics.  Realists.  The difference is vague.

Holder’s ham-handed refusal to proffer information raised even more suspicions. Thus we are going through the maturations of investigation, much as we did during Watergate. Since aiding and abetting criminal activity is a crime all its own, the supervisors who banned busting gun runners and knowingly allowed multiple criminal activities to occur may be guilty of several felonies. Once those decision makers are identified, they will likely be prosecuted, by an independent council if necessary.  Since no cop (or what the BATFE purports to be police) wants to be in the same prison as the people they arrested, these supervisors will buckle and drop dimes on everyone above who ordered the inane program. If anyone pegs Holder or Obama as instigators, the outcome will make Watergate look like a youthful indiscretion.

Nobody died during the break-in at the Watergate hotel.

Brian Terry wasn’t as lucky.

Update: According to one analysis, the plot gets sickeningly thicker.

On the surface it appears that someone in the government leaked Mexico gun tracing records (forbidden by law to provide) to the media that listed two border gun retailers as a primary source of civilian firearms delivered to Mexican drug cartels.  However, these two gun stores were cooperating with the BATFE in purposefully running guns into Mexcio. In short, they helped the Feds create a problem then got blamed for being the problem.

That is downright Machiavellian.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Gun control, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.