“Keeping American weapons from getting into the hands of Mexican gangs is the goal of a program called ‘Project Gunrunner.’ But critics say it’s doing exactly the opposite. CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports on what she found.” What she found? How’s that for taking credit for the unwavering efforts of the gun bloggers at The Examiner and The Sipsey Street Irregulars? Never mind. CBS has moved the ball forward. “On the phone, one Project Gunrunner source (who didn’t want to be identified) told us just how many guns flooded the black market under ATF’s watchful eye. ‘The numbers are over 2,500 on that case by the way. That’s how many guns were sold – including some 50-calibers they let walk.” By the way? Well that confirms my earlier theory that the reason ATF-enabled guns ended-up in the hands of the killers of US. Customs and Border Protection agent Brian Terry is because there were so damn many of them. But wait! There’s more!
CBS News has been told at least 11 ATF agents and senior managers voiced fierce opposition to the strategy. “It got ugly…” said one. There was “screaming and yelling” says another. A third warned: “this is crazy, somebody is gonna to get killed.”
Sure enough, the weapons soon began surfacing at crime scenes in Mexico – dozens of them sources say – including shootouts with government officials.
One agent argued with a superior asking, “are you prepared to go to the funeral of a federal officer killed with one of these guns?” Another said every time there was a shooting near the border, “we would all hold our breath hoping it wasn’t one of ‘our’ guns.”
Until, of course, it was. As I said above, as can’t be said frequently enough, drug runners used two of the ATF-enabled guns to murder U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. And now for the cover-up . . .
In a letter, the Justice Department which oversees ATF says the agency has never knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to suspected gunrunners.
So . . . what? So the game’s afoot Watson. With a bit more prodding, the MSM will discover who knew what when, and told whom to STFU. This one’s got legs.
It will be an interesting few weeks seeing the fallout from this one. Can’t wait to hear from the Mexican government.
Contrary to their usual anti-gun position, CBS hit a home run on this one. The ATF ‘spin doctors’ will be getting a lot of overtime pay covering this up! But, we’ll probably see more lies, the guilty promoted, the innocent punished (maybe even fired – and then rehired), and it will be business as usual with ATF.
Remember Waco? 1994. Two ATF supervisory agents, Phillip J. Chojnacki and Charles D. Sarabyn, who were suspended for their roles in leading the botched raid and despite a Treasury Department report of gross negligence, were reinstated in December, 1994 with full back pay and benefits (with a demotion), and had the incident removed from their personnel files.
More “business as usual”.
I’ve seen one or two articles in Fox, nothing anywhere else. Of course the rest of the MSM treats Fox like the Drudge Report, until that blue dress turns up…
Thanks in part to the great work by those here at TTAG, as we all know, this has been smoldering for a while. I wonder if tonight it reached a flash point. Even something this explosive can get pushed aside by Libya and Wisconsin. We’ll see.
When combined with new data from the STRATFOR analysis of the “90 percent of Mexican crime guns come from the US” myth, it’s beginning to look as though virtually all of the weapons smuggled into Mexico were done under the explicit supervision of the ATF.
In other words, Project Gunrunner single handedly created the “guns flowing into Mexico from US border retail stores” problem so it could get Congressional funding to solve the problem.
You gotta love our government at work…
Just when I was beginning to think that the MSM would never cover Project Gunwalker, it pops up on CBS (of all places). The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Expolsives & Strippers may finally get a little comeuppance. There will probably be some cosmetic changes as a result, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for systemic changes. That’s not the way a self-perpetuating bureaucracy works. And to all the wingnut antis out there who called us paranoid, all I can say is — we told you so.
Give giving us articles and video clips, and we will keep plastering them all over facebook!