In March 2011, I wrote,
"Having worked in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America, I can tell you the guns are not coming from the US . . . They come mostly from Asia, Eastern Europe--including Russia and Ukraine--and from stocks of older weapons held in Central America from years of warfare, and the overwhelming majority of those are of Soviet/Russian/Chinese design and fabrication."The DOJ IG report out today appears to contradict in a big way the Obama misadministration's whole story on guns to Mexico. We repeatedly have been told that the "drugs flow north, and the guns flow south." At State, we repeatedly were handed talking points and instructions to go forth and spread this story. A very small number of us, very small, flat out refused to utter this line. Something was wrong, and we knew it from years of working in the field in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. We had not seen the guns from the US that the State Department insisted were there; we had not seen reliable intel that pointed to smuggling routes siphoning guns south; and it simply made no sense for the drug cartels and others to make US gun stores their preferred source of weaponry, including for many weapons illegal in the US, or simply not available at gun stores or gun shows.
We kept hearing the magic number of 60 percent of all weapons in Mexico's drug violence as having come from the US--Secretary Clinton once even claimed 90 percent. That was a lie, yes, a lie. The actual percentage of weapons coming from US gun stores and gun shows was in the low single digits, and consisted overwhelmingly of handguns, shotguns, and sport rifles. I had a very public falling out with a State briefer one day at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I challenged her to buy the arms, e.g., anti-aircraft weapons, at the Dulles, Virginia gun show that she was showing us on her slides. She did not take up my challenge; I was chastised afterward for having embarrassed her. I hope to meet her again, and ask if she has changed her presentation.
Since the facts did not fit the desired narrative, the Obama misadministration did what it habitually does--in fact, what liberals constantly do: create its own facts. It is apparent that the ATF, with the knowledge of senior DOJ officials, started a gun smuggling operation to Mexico to "prove" that weapons could go to Mexico from US gun stores. I wrote about this and noted that it was bit like Thor Heyerdahl and his obsession that ancient Peruvians could have sailed across the Pacific to Polynesia. Well, my friends, just because they might have, does not mean they did. Same here. The DOJ and the ATF, under "Operation Fast and Furious," set up a smuggling network, forced reluctant and law abiding gun dealers to sell to the network, and allowed the guns to "walk" across the border. This proved, therefore, that the DOJ and the ATF could smuggle guns into Mexico as long as they had the cooperation of the DOJ and the ATF. Those guns killed hundreds of Mexicans and at least two US federal agents, and have appeared at numerous crime scenes on both sides of the border.
Obama's misadministration, I repeat, ran an undeclared war on the people of Mexico with "collateral damage" in the US.
The IG's report is very damning and shows that the DOJ was lying about its knowledge of the operation. It shows that knowledge of the operation went into the highest circles of the DOJ. The report refuses to pin-the-tail on the ultimate DOJ Democrat donkey, the reprehensible Eric Holder, but one can read between the lines.
The main failure of the report, at least in what I have quickly read, is that it does not address the real reason for the operation. It does not deal with the politics that drove it. The Obama misadministration wanted to show that US gun laws were too slack and needed to be tightened. It wanted to create an atmosphere, nationally and internationally, to crack down on gun ownership in the US. We see it with Operation Fast and Furious and we see it in the UN Small Arms Treaty, which the misadministration pushed until the election-year heat grew too intense.
Why has this horrid and sordid tale not raised more outrage in the Hispanic community? You and I know why. The media and the Hispanic leadership are so in bed with the Democrats that they have stifled this story.
Bottom line, the Obama misadministration has murdered hundreds of Mexicans to make a political point, and gotten away with it. Yes, the DOJ and the ATF have gotten away with mass murder in Mexico, and, by the way, Hillary Clinton has nothing to say in response.
Dip:
ReplyDeleteThanks for covering this. Fast and Furious is perhaps the most reprehensible act of this administration. Yet Holder is still AG, and one of Obama's last acts will be to pardon him so nothing will ever come of it.
And as for the IG's report not addressing the real reason for the operation, what did you expect from a report that was reviewed by the AG prior to release? Who will ever know what he cut out of it? F
I always wondered why with supposed US origin arms ending up in Mexico why the State's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls or Commerce's BIS for that matter, wasn't looking into the matter. They could have easily shut down a gun shop by simply showing they should have known the buyer was likely to illegally export the firearms. The lack of activity by the export control agencies was highly suspicious.
ReplyDeleteThat is an excellent point, and one I had not thought of.
DeleteI knew this the whole time. My liberal family and friends act they never heard of it. That is the liberal way out of it they just claim ignorance.
ReplyDeletefor a long time, the libs were proud of the fact that Obama lied but people didn't die, a la Bush. But now, we can say, "OBAMA LIED; PEOPLE DIED!"
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