I am not, by nature, a tin hat wearing type. But I do shave with Occam’s razor: faced with multiple explanations for any given event, I reckon the least complex is the most likely to be true. Even if I didn’t have contacts feeding me info about Operation Fast and Furious, I’d still believe that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (and Really Big Fires) allowed guns to walk across into the arms of Mexican drug cartels as a direct and knowing participant in the U.S. government’s 2010 Arm the Sinaloas Tour. . .
The idea that the ATF kissed American guns goodbye at the border at the behest of White House gun grabbers to inflate Mexican confiscation numbers to get more juice for the ATF in Washington to get more money and power for the Bureau and anti-gun rights legislation/regulations strikes me as a needlessly complicated scheme. The ATF received plenty of extra Congressional funding before they let the guns walk. Why mess up a good thing?
Unless someone asked . . .
Ralph and I laid it out in an editorial in The Washington Times: the ATF green lighted gun sales to FBI informants (and known cartel associates) by complicit U.S. gun dealers, and then told ATF agents on the ground NOT to interdict the weapon as they flowed to Mexican drug cartels (the Sinaloas specifically) to suit the CIA and U.S. foreign policy. Gunwalker armed U.S. and Mexico’s favored cartel members with U.S. guns. The ends explain the means.
At the very least, this theory (backed-up by sources I can’t disclose) should trigger a press investigation into U.S. policy towards Mexico’s narco-terrorists and their supporters (e.g. the U.S. and Mexican governments). Nope. The mainstream media continues to paint the ATF operation as a simple screw-up. Oops! We did it again (Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.). Drug thugs used ATF-enabled weapons to kill, torture and terrorize hundreds of Mexicans and murder U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry—and the press treats it as nothing more than unintended consequences. Collateral damage.
As the Sipsey Street Irregulars have pointed out since the scandal first broke, the media’s disinterest in the ATF’s blood-soaked black bag job is nothing short of reprehensible. Not that they’d ever admit it. Last week, the Washington Post’s ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton argued his paper’s been right on top of this story, and never ever worked with the ATF to push their pro-gun control series The Secret Life of Guns. Which is about as credible as the ATF Acting Deputy Director William Hoover’s recent claim that he’d planned on shutting down Fast and Furious—but never quite got around to it.
Well then, what about the Mexican press? Given Operation Fast and Furious’s obvious and flagrant violation of Mexican sovereignty, given Uncle Sam’s collusion with Mexico’s narco-terrorists, given the New York Times‘ revelation that the CIA is sending more “assets” south of the border (including security contractors) to fight drug cartels (i.e. Los Zetas), you’d think the Mexican press would delve deeper into the ATF’s “disaster.”
Yes, well, maybe not. Clock this from today’s Borderland Beat:
After decades of poking around crime scenes, digging into conspiracies and hanging out with cops and politicians, columnist Miguel Ángel López Velasco had earned his stripes as journalistic alpha dog of the crime and corruption beat in this steamy Gulf of Mexico port.
But even Lopez might have found it hard to imagine the speed with which hit men would take his life and those of his wife and son.
It was 6 a.m. on a June day when two vehicles arrived at the journalist’s custard-yellow two-story home. Hit men with assault weapons poured out. One punched through the lock on the front door.
The squad rushed in and opened fire on the columnist – who was descending the stairs in his nightclothes – then climbed to the second floor to kill the others. Each victim was given a coup de grace in the forehead.
Do I need to mention that Mexican journalists are, like their fellow citizens, unarmed? Or that “Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 68 journalists were murdered in Mexico from 2000 to March of this year”? A list that doesn’t include the thousands of reporters who now report whatever they’re told to report, lest the drug cartels decapitate them and slaughter their families.
As I continue to investigate the ATF and its relations to the CIA, FBI, IRS (go figure), ICE, CPB, DHS, State Department, White House and Mexican government, as I look into the connection between official U.S. arms sales and the murderous mayhem south of our border, I implore my colleagues in the MSM to get involved with this story.
There is safety in numbers. And, of course, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. (Thank God.) The more I know about the truth about the ATF, the more nervous I become. The more the U.S. press and Congress needs to make them feel nervous, too.