White Guns aka Fast and Furious II

Representative Issa's committee has uncovered another misadventure by the Obama Administration. This one called White Guns had the same goals, to entrap Mexican crime bosses, and was as successful(??) as Fast and Furious.

It is not a mistake to think that this is like the Keystone Cops! They seem to continue to make big mistakes in hopes of entrapping bad guys. Our concern is that the lawbreakers they want to catch are Americans and not the Mexicans.

The sooner we get this bunch out of control of government, the better it will be!

The article that follows from Human Events, details the misadventures known as White Guns.

Conservative Tom

Fast and Furious: Mystery of the White Guns

Has yet another "gun walking" operation been uncovered?

by John Hayward

01/13/2012

The House Oversight committee is looking into yet another Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms operation in which, as a source told the L.A. Times, “apparently guns got away again.”  Hopefully the Bureau doesn’t lose track of alcohol and tobacco as often as they let firearms “get away” from them, or we’ll be looking at the kind of public health crisis the White House actually cares about.

The operation currently on the desks of “gun walking” investigators Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) was called Operation White Gun.  Despite the odd code name, it had nothing to do with cracking down on heavily armed white supremacists.  It was all about arming the Sinaloa cartel, the same murderous Mexican gang who got all those guns from Operation Fast and Furious.

Operation White Gun was supposedly more like a normal sting operation, where Fast and Furious simply threw 1,700 American guns across the border, without any real attempt to track them.  As the L.A. Times recounts it:

According to documents that the ATF sent to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, an umbrella group of U.S. agencies that seeks to disrupt major drug trafficking and money laundering, White Gun targeted nine leaders of the Sinaloa cartel. The list included Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, who heads the cartel and is Mexico's most wanted drug suspect.

In ATF reports, MacAllister wrote that U.S. intelligence showed cartel members were setting up military-type training camps in the Sierra de Durango mountains, near Guzman's northern Mexico hide-out, and wanted to bolster their arsenal with grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns.

The agents focused first on Vicente Fernando Guzman Patino, a cartel insider who was identified as one of their weapons purchasers and who often used code words and phrases, saying "57" for "OK," for instance.

In fall 2009, the ATF team sent an undercover agent posing as an arms dealer to Guzman Patino. Photos of weapons, including a Dragon Fire 120-millimeter heavy mortar, were emailed to his "Superman6950" Hotmail account.

According to the ATF documents, Guzman Patino told the undercover agent that "if he would bring them a tank, they would buy it." He boasted he had "$15 million to spend on firearms and not to worry about the money." He wanted "the biggest and most extravagant firearms available."

Well of course you’re not going to get a tank, Mr. Patino.  U.S. politicians aren't interested in pushing any tank-control legislation.

The upshot of this little email exchange between the undercover ATF agent and the gun-happy Sinaloa quartermaster was a classic crime-drama meet outside a restaurant in Phoenix, where the ATF man popped open his trunk and showed the delighted Patino a stockpile of weapons, including “a Bushmaster rifle and a Ramo .50 heavy machine gun.”  And then…

… well, we don’t know what happened next.  The investigation suddenly ended.  No documentation unearthed so far confirms whether Patino got any White Gun weapons or not. 

Some lower-level stooges got busted by the same undercover agent after they tried to trade crystal meth for shoulder-launched missiles, but none of the cartel bigwigs targeted by White Gun seem to have been taken down in the operation. 

ATF agent Hope McAllister, a leader in the Operation Fast and Furious disaster, reportedly spent some time in Mexico during the summer of 2010 looking for White Gun weapons among the ordnance seized from cartel killers by the Mexican government.  That behavior is not consistent with a tightly-controlled sting operation run by people who know exactly where all the contraband merchandise went.  “Sooooo… you guys wouldn’t happen to have seized any of the guns on this list, would you?  No?  Oh, well, just thought I’d ask.  Adios!”

This is all very strange, because usually the Obama Justice Department is so meticulous with its paperwork, and so eager to show it off to congressional investigators and the public.  The L.A. Times’ source inside the investigation said of the White Guns, “How many got into Mexico?  Who knows?”  I’ll bet the answer to that question, at least initially, will not be “Attorney General Eric Holder.”

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John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently publishedDoctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email atjhayward@eaglepub.com.

ATF's Misdirected Gun Operation

The more I read about this dumb ATF operation "Fast and Furious", the more incensed I get.  Since when does the government become involved in illegal and immoral activities? Obviously there had to be an objective. The only one that I can imagine (in my not so subtle paranoid mind) is that it was an attempt to entrap gun shop owners and to blame them for the illegal weapons being sold to buyers who were gun runners in Mexico. The plan backfired when those who were being set up contacted the ATF and their representatives in Washington.  Now the government agency has to explain its behavior to Congress. As Ricky Ricardo used to say "Lucy you have some 'splainin to do!"

It is obvious that the plan was not thought out well. This could mean that the operation was done by underlings who wanted to be cowboys or it could point to the incompetency of those leading the agency.  Whatever the case, those in charge must answer a lot of questions.  When did they know and how long did they know it? Did they approve it or were they directed to do it?  If they were told to do it, who told them?

 Could this lead to the Oval Office? One would hope that the attempt to prove the current system is not working and that very strict gun control measures were needed  to be instituted was not the driving force.  Could this administration be so intent of changing the Second Amendment that they would "create" an emergency through illegal activities?  If so, what other fake emergencies have they created or are in the process of being instituted? 

Another consideration is that this operation effected not only American citizens doing a legal business but it resulted in Mexican citizens being killed as well an American Border Guard. Additionally, it damaged the relationship with the Mexican Government.  No longer could Mexico blame the gun runners getting the weapons from Americans, now it was the American Government itself that was supplying the guns.

This is not a victimless crime and for this, heads must fall.  If no one is punished for this act, it will unleash a cascade of similar actions by other agencies as they realize they can do anything and no one will be punished.  What if the EPA told car companies that if they did not pony up dollars, their cars would lose 5 miles per gallon on the fuel economy tests?  Or the FDA would allege that certain drugs were dangerous if contributions were not made to the agency? Or the Treasury telling banks that they had to participate in a bailout whether or not they needed the money? Oh, I forgot, that already has happened.

Government complicity in illegal activities or trying to manufacture situations that will create an outcome is not what we expect from our public servants. This must be stopped now before it gets worse.  What do you think?

The following article appeared in Human Events recently and gives more details on the operation.






From Human Events: http://tinyurl.com/3ut8g7y

By Roger Hedgecock
June 17, 2011

Did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), an agency of President Obama's Justice Department, operate a program that deliberately allowed some 3,500 guns bought in the U.S. to be "walked" across the Mexican border and into the waiting hands of the murderous Mexican drug cartels? At first, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder denied such a program existed.

Four ATF agents who worked in the program, called Operation Fast and Furious, however, answered yes this week in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.).

Special Agent John Dodson testified that he was assigned to the Phoenix office of ATF and specifically to Group VII, the designation of the Fast and Furious team. There Dodson found that ATF agents had been following 40 individuals who were known "straw purchasers" of guns for the cartels from federal government-licensed gun shops in the U.S. Gun shop owners who called the ATF with concerns, to report suspicious buyers, were told to complete the sales.

In 2009, Obama, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Dianne Feinstein had all charged that the increasing violence in Mexico was caused by guns purchased too easily in the U.S. They called on Congress to act to tighten gun control laws.

Obama specifically claimed 90% of the weapons in the cartels' hands were purchased in the U.S.--sheer nonsense. Of the 100,000 or so guns recovered by the Mexicans at crime scenes at the time, 18,000 were found to be manufactured, sold or imported from the U.S. Of those, 7,900 came from federally licensed gun shops. Of those, up to 3,500 came from Operation Fast and Furious.

Was Operation Fast and Furious an Obama program to create a self-fulfilling prophecy and accomplish a gun control objective? Again the agents' testimony was clear.

Over 10 months in 2009 and 2010, Dodson testified that on an almost daily basis, he was ordered to take notes, record conversations, videotape gun purchases, make reports and track the movements of these straw buyers but nothing more.

With everyone knowing the guns were headed for Mexico and the drug cartels, Dodson and his fellow agents were ordered to not stop or arrest the suspects or impede the flow of weapons.

When the straw buyers handed the guns off to third parties, ATF agents were told to follow the straw buyers, not the third parties who headed for the border with the guns. When the agents objected, they were told to "get with the program" and that "higher-ups" including "senior ATF officials" had sanctioned the operation.

Newell was asked whether ATF agents were ever ordered to allow guns to "walk" into Mexico. He answered, "Hell no!"

Leaked e-mail traffic from spring 2010 documents show that ATF management from Acting Director Kenneth Melson on down were personally briefed in Phoenix on Operation Fast and Furious by Newell.

One of these e-mails describes Melson's intense interest in the program, including getting the IP address for the hidden cameras located in a gun shop in Arizona so he could watch the straw buyer buy guns on a screen in his Washington, D.C., office.

Melson later said Fast and Furious was really a sting operation "gone wrong." The agents had been ordered not to stop the little fish (the straw buyers) so that the guns could be traced to the big fish (the cartel bosses).

This lame explanation ignored the fact that ATF agents were ordered to not follow the guns and that ATF had no jurisdiction to take down anyone in Mexico. In fact, no "sting" ever occurred, no arrests of cartel bosses ever happened. ATF made no effort to trace the guns after they crossed the border.

ATF agents feared that one day one of these guns would show up at a crime scene. That day came one night last December when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, armed with a bean bag gun, was killed by an AK-47 armed cartel bandito in the Arizona desert. The serial numbers on two AK-47s found at the site of the shooting identified them as coming from one of the straw purchases that the ATF agents had been tracking but were ordered not to stop.

The Mexican government has linked 150 of its police or military casualties to Fast and Furious guns. As Issa pointed out, referring to a State Department report, in the last year 111 Americans were killed in Mexico--victims of the drug war.

After bloggers started talking about what they called Project Gunwalker, CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson began a series of reports that blew the story wide open. On-air interviews with the ATF agents made Gunwalker a big story on both sides of the border.

At this point, Obama said neither he nor Holder had authorized the program, but admitted "mistakes had been made" and vowed to "hold the responsible parties accountable." Holder ordered an internal investigation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) repeatedly sent letters to Holder demanding information. In a February 4, 2011, response letter to Grassley, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Ron Weich described as "false" Grassley's assertion that ATF had knowingly allowed guns to be purchased and walked into Mexico.

Weich, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, told Grassley that "ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally, and prevent their transportation to Mexico." Challenged on the truth of this statement, the Justice Department says that because the straw buyers themselves did not cross the border but handed the weapons off to third parties, the statement was true. Huh?

In 2009-'10, the ATF agents were ordered to not arrest the "little fish." Following revelations of the Gunwalker program, the Justice Department indicted 20 of the straw buyers who were known to ATF before Fast and Furious began. Then Justice stonewalled answering any more letters seeking information on the program from Issa or from Grassley and refused to respond to Issa's committee subpoenas on the grounds that there was an ongoing criminal prosecution!

Rahm Emanuel, when he was Obama's chief of staff, famously said that no crisis should ever go to waste if it could advance the agenda. Did Obama go Rahm one better, advancing the gun-control agenda by manufacturing a crisis caused by gunrunning into Mexico, where one of the gunrunners was the U.S. government?

Members of the Mexican Congress think the answer is yes and have opened their own investigation. From the Mexican standpoint, Operation Fast and Furious was an act of war on Mexico.

For Americans of a certain age, the next question is, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"