After the murderous attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya, All the President’s Men insisted the gunmen were protestors gone wild. They weren’t. A State Department briefing last night—ahead of today’s noontime Congressional hearing The Security Failures of Benghazi—makes that perfectly clear. Click here for a minute-by-minute account of the terrorist assault. Meanwhile, the high-profile kerfuffle over Operation Fast and Furious has faded. This even as new evidence emerges that Uncle Sam’s gun-running op was not a botched sting but part of a concerted effort to support the Sinaloa drug cartel . . .
businessinsider.com has extracted the info from emails revealed in the recent STRATFOR hack:
Many people have doubted the quality of Stratfor’s intelligence, but the information from MX1—a Mexican foreign service officer who doubled as a confidential source for Stratfor—seems to corroborate recent claims about U.S. involvement in the drug war in Mexico.
Most notably, the reports from MX1 line up with assertions by a Sinaloa cartel insider that cartel boss Joaquin Guzman is a U.S. informant, the Sinaloa cartel was “given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago,” and Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels.
Smoking gun or theory? In 2010, before drug thugs gunned down U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry with firearms enabled by the ATF, MX-1 sent an email to STRATFOR vice president of intelligence Fred Burton suggesting that “the US sent a signal that could be construed as follows”:
“To the [Juárez] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the Juárez cartel]. Also note that [Ciudad Juárez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either [the Juárez cartel] gets in line or we will mess you up.”
In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner, and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis.
More damningly . . .
“The email went on to say that “the major routes and methods for bulk shipping into the US” from Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, “have already been negotiated with US authorities” and that large shipments of drugs from the Sinaloa cartel “are OK with the Americans.”
With so little time before the presidential election, with the Oversight Committee’s attention focused on the low-hanging fruit of the Benghazi fiasco and cover-up, it’s unlikely Congress will lift the veil of Executive Privilege drawn over Operation Fast and Furious—at least not before the national vote.
The truth about the Obama administration’s conspiracy to aid and abet an international criminal enterprise will have to wait. Or . . . not. Watch this space.