The June 15 hearing held by the House Oversight Committee examining the ATF’s curious scheme of purposely allowing thousands of firearms to reach Mexican drug cartels did not crack the answer of who authorized the program and to what purpose, but did clarify how crazy evil it was. Chairman Darrell Issa says that high-level officials in the Justice Department knew about the program and did not object to the American government arming Mexican organized crime.
The testimony of the three ATF agents who appeared was striking. They painted a picture of pointless police work, where the agents were instructed by superiors to observe the purchase of weapons by illegal straw buyers, watch the guns handed off to the real buyer (a Mexican cartel rep) and then repeat. There was no follow-through of arrest and seizure of the firearms in order to build a case for trial, not to mention protect the public. What interested the bureaucrats was the pattern of purchases, or something like that.
ATF Agent Olino James Casa described his experience (read his full testimony):
After I reported to Phoenix Group VII Office, I was briefed by group members on the investigation that later became titled Fast and Furious. Shortly after, I became aware of what I believed to be unusual and questionable investigative techniques. For instance, I became aware that certain suspected straw purchasers were purchasing numerous firearms from area firearm dealers. What I found concerning and alarming was more times than not, no law enforcement activity was planned to stop these suspected straw purchasers from purchasing firearms. The only law enforcement activity that was occasionally taken was to conduct a surveillance of the transaction, and nothing more.
The Fast and Furious strategy of the ATF sounded more like slow and pointless, designed to waste time and accomplish nothing.
(All written statements can be seen on the Committee’s hearing page: 6-15-11 “Operation Fast and Furious: Reckless Decisions, Tragic Outcomes”. Another important document is the report: “Four ATF Agents Working on Controversial Operation ‘Fast and Furious’ Tell their Story” also press release about the paper.)
Panel 1 included opening statements from the Committee and Senator Grassley’s testimony.
Panel 2 presented three members of the family of Brian Terry (the Border Agent killed by gunwalked weapons) and three whistleblower ATF agents.
I watched carefully and read the statements. The hearing did not convince me that the gunwalking scheme was not designed to damage the rights of US citizens to own firearms by blaming America’s Second Amendment for Mexico’s anarchy.
A bloodbath in Mexico is probably seen by Washington gun grabbers as a useful argument against American firearm ownership. Presidente Calderon has certainly been a willing partner in bashing US gun rights. The dinosaur media have been pushing the myth that the majority of weapons seized in Mexico from drug gangs are from the United States, but most have no marks showing origin and cannot be traced at all. Perhaps some big brains in the Justice Department thought delivering thousands of identifiable American guns to Mexican organized crime would improve the stats, from their viewpoint.
Good old human stupidity accounts for many of the dumb decisions made by government, so it’s possible that an out-of-the-box idea of bringing down cartels via gunwalking was seen as a swell way to increase funding to the ATF. In fact, funding seemed an important focus when I reported in July 2010 about “Gunrunner Teams” assigned to tracking the few firearms headed south. It wouldn’t be the first time a government agency created a problem in order to get money to solve it.
At this point, the motivation for the gunwalking fiasco remains unclear, although the DOJ’s obstruction shows that whatever the reason, it’s bad.
