Posted by Tina
“Operation Fast and Furious”, the administrative scheme to intentionally sell guns to straw buyers so they could be tracked in Mexico, has backfired big time. The idea was to to provide a means to arrest cartel guys as they purchased these guns, instead, 150 Mexican citizens and Brian Terry, an American border patrol agent, were murdered by cartel thugs using these guns.
Rep. Darrell Issa who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Sen. Charles E. Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee have been holding hearings to discover how this ill-conceived program was hatched.
Kenneth Melson who was appointed to run the ATF two years ago by President Obama finds himself sitting in the hot seat. Some are suggesting he is responsible and should step down but he says he won’t take the fall and he refuses to go:
“He is saying he won’t go,” said one source close to the situation, who asked for anonymity because high-level discussions with Melson remained fluid. “He has told them, ‘I’m not going to be the fall guy on this.’ “
There’s some speculation that this program was the brain child of Attorney General Eric Holder and/or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. As always the more serious question becomes, just how high up the ladder does this go?
There are other questions to ponder as well…
Remember this story about “bad American gun dealers” selling guns into Mexico?
In Phoenix Monday, a gun dealer went on trial for supplying assault rifles to Mexican drug gangs who are locked in a bloody war with authorities — and each other. CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports on a case that’s being watched closely in both the United States, and in Mexico.
In the escalating drug war south of the border, Mexican cartels supply the drugs, but the guns largely come from the United States.
“Firearms trafficking to Mexico is a huge problem,” says Phoenix ATF agent William Newell. “Drugs go north, guns come south.”
George Iknadosian is accused of being a top gun-supplier. When government agents raided his Phoenix gun shop last May, they found hundreds of weapons allegedly destined for Mexico. He’s now on trial, accused of knowingly selling more than 700 guns to so-called straw buyers – U.S. citizens who buy the guns legally and then turn them over to a trafficker.
“They get $100 for their trouble, and the trafficker will take the gun down to Mexico and sell it for exponentially more than they pay here,” says ATF agent Peter Forcelli.
As many as 2,000 firearms are believed to cross the border into Mexico every day. And they are often assault weapons, Tracy reports.
The ATF says that 7,700 guns found in Mexico last year were traced to sellers in the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal the case against store owner George Iknadosian was ultimately dismissed:
An Arizona court on Wednesday dismissed the case against a gun-store owner accused of looking the other way while front men purchased weapons to deliver to Mexico’s drug cartels.
The following as reported in the same WSJ article sounds like a cover story given what is coming out now:
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, briefing reporters at the agency’s Washington headquarters Wednesday, declined to comment on the ruling.
State and federal authorities, including a task force supervised by the Phoenix office of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, worked for 11 months with local police building a case against X-Caliber (Iknadosian’s store). According to law-enforcement officials in Phoenix, the investigation included sending undercover agents posing as buyers to Mr. Iknadosian’s shop, where agents not only purchased weapons, but boasted of plans to resell them in Mexico.
Was Iknadosian targeted and set up to take a fall? Might this scheme have a dark political purpose? There is something darkly sinister going on here.
(Jack I’d like your opinion about the judges ruling to dismiss the charges if you have time to read the full WSJ article linked above.)
We all know how high this thing goes we also know nothing will be done to the ass hole.