Obama Adminstration Selling Guns to Mexican Drug Lords? REALLY???

This is an example of truth more fantastic than fiction...

The Obama Administration has sold thousands of fully automatic weapons to Mexican drug lords. ATF was ordered not to intervene. Frustrated ATF agents watched as the guns were sold and were told not to interfere.

The bullshit explanation was that the guns were going to be tracked to Mexico, except that no one tracked the guns into Mexico, and no one was tracking the guns in Mexico. The Mexican authorities didn't track the guns because they were not told that the Obama administration was selling Mexican murderers guns.

These guns were used to kill U.S. border patrol agents.

Feds sell thousands of guns to drug cartels then call for gun control

White House: No comment on ATF gun-walking controversy

Congress irate over ATF guns-to-Mexico program
"Issa pressed Weich (ATF. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich) on who in Washington authorized the program -- and received no answer."

You can't make this shit up.

SOMEBODY was paid off.

 

Looks more like gross incompetence to me. Even if the goal was to arm the cartels, they should have removed the serials from the weapons. Either way, they are incompetent. Incompetent at enforcing the law, or breaking it.

 

I think that first link (Examiner) is biased. You can tell it says "...stupid Federal employees thought up the idea that if they sold thousands of guns to the drug cartels they could somehow..." So, it's making a claim that the US government actually sold them the weaponry. Then, he immediately goes on to trash Obama on Obamacare, the economy, for his cat getting stuck in a tree...

So, "Obama Adminstration Selling Guns to Mexican Drug Lords? REALLY???"

Really? No, I don't think so. I think what happened is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was allowing weapons traffickers at times, to enter back into Mexico without intervention as part of the Operation Fast and Furious, where they may have intended to conduct surveillance (not sure). But, I haven't read any credible source saying the Feds actually sold them the weapons. According to a fair and balanced article on FOX news, Obama and the attorney general are stating they never authorized it.

 

Rebecca - there are some CBS links 2 .

 

I read them. I still dispute that the feds actually sold them the guns. What I think, is that they purchased the guns in the US. Then, they were allowed to cross back over to Mexico. But, I don't believe they bought the weapons from the feds themselves.

Here's another article from WSJ -

 

This is still ongoing but if it's true it will be a scandal of epic proportions .

 

No matter how you slice it, they "allowed" the guns to enter Mexico by design. Obama was probably not in the know, but this is somebody's cock up, and a serious one at that. Dems never seemed to have much problem letting Bush wear the blame for FEMA and Louisiana's incompetence for Katrina, so I suppose there is no harm in letting the buck stop with Obongo.

 

Ya Shawn but you'd think that in todays world one would not be stupid enough to arm his enemies .

 

The difference between tracking vs. providing the guns is an important distinction. Certainly, allowing a weapon trafficker over the border is bad. But, if the feds were to actually be selling weapons to drug cartels, much worse. While this is being politicized to make it Republicans vs. Democrats, that's not where I'm coming from.

 

I guess the Osama case is dead and gone now . He was a weapon that did his job and then went haywire and perhaps a lesson that should have been learned earlier .

As for Pakistan i can't say much . The funding going in there is significant but not major . Pakistan is a problem country that is corrupted and radicalized . If they would be left alone they would either collapse , join sides with China or just go ballistic against us . If funding should be cut is a tricky question , i guess it should be reduced to civilian level only the best alternative would be to have the funds injected by charity organizations .

 

Looks like an argument can be made that the USA is in the business of selling arms to the world, regardless of political ideology.

 

@Shawn/Rebecca: This became a big deal, and political, the minute some of the guns they were "tracking" were used to kill two US agents working in Mexico. At least selling arms to Iran to fund an anti-communist military organization had some noble goal attached. Whoever ran "Fast and Furious" is going to have to do some gymnastics to explain what the noble goal of letting assault rifles walk south might be.

[Edit] Not to mention an explanation for how they could give a government operation such a gay name ripped off from a horrible movie

 

Hey that movie was good . The operation is horrible

 

Obamanation, I agree. The objection I've had in this thread is with the claim : "Obama Adminstration Selling Guns to Mexican Drug Lords? REALLY???" Since, I haven't found any evidence to support the allegations of the feds actually supplying the weapons.

 

Corwin, are you sure Obama is responsible for the above??? - more fantastic than Fiction indeed.

The most accessible commodity on earth today are assault weapons, rifles the Cartels are able to purchase at will from any number of sources. The Gov'ts attempt was simply an avenue to infiltrate the organizations for intelligence purposes.

 

I've read a bit more about it...

It doesn't appear that Operation Fast and Furious infiltrated any organizations. It's primary intention was to identify (track) weapon purchases of certain known (or suspected) individuals called "straw purchasers", that have the right to purchase a weapon. This type of purchaser then turns around, and resells the gun to individuals, that offer them to criminals, smuggles them to Mexico... Fast and Furious was mainly concerned with the straw purchasers, with the intent of building a larger case. It doesn't sound like there was any significant tracking of the weapon once it left the hands of the straw purchaser. I think that was a really, really bad idea.

 

Rebecca, the problem with the official explanation is that while the ATF *claims* the purpose of Fast and Furious was to track the weapons, according to Congressional testimony there was no mechanism to track the weapons. THAT is the heart of the brewing scandal.

Let me think like a bureaucrat - How do you sit down at a program management meeting where a project to track these guns is proposed, and then when the question is asked as to HOW the guns are tracked, there is no answer? If procedure is followed, such a program would not be approved.

Look at this sentence in my OP:
"Issa pressed Weich (ATF. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich) on who in Washington authorized the program -- and received no answer."
Congressman Darrell Issa is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform. The ATF has denied the committee's requests for records as to WHO approved the operation, when it was approved, and who was involved in it. ATF is legally required to answer these questions.

Anderson Cooper wondered on CNN yesterday if the whole gun tracking explanation was just an excuse to cover up a scandal. Someone high up in Justice was possibly paid off.

 

I'm not sure what you consider the "official story" or how you define "tracking". From what I've read, this was a strategy by the DOJ in 2009. The idea, was rather than making arrests as quickly as possible (as was normal), they would stand back, observe, and see where the weapon ended up. It was intended to cast a wider net, for making increased arrests in trafficking networks, and it was justified, and based on an ATF order from 1989. The tracking was of the unique serial numbers of weapons, by working with gun shop owners. If the weapon was purchased by a known straw purchaser, surveillance may have followed, mainly to the point it was relinquished to the third party. If found later, at a crime scene, or in some other fashion, it could be traced by serial number. The weapons may not have all ended up in Mexico. Straw purchasers are motivated by money, and would probably sell to any criminals on the black market, that may otherwise have greater difficulty in obtaining weapons. The conspiracy theory doesn't make sense to me, as it suggests our department of justice wants weapons to get in the hands of unspecified criminals, as they wouldn't even know for sure exactly where the guns would end up. What I believe is they had the intention of "catching more bad guys", but as I mentioned before, was a really bad plan. Here's where I found a lot of this information:

You can read more here (this is a 51 page pdf file)

That pdf file was on Senator Grassley's site - he has many more articles here.