Mexico’s
Attorney General Morales, the first woman to hold that office, believes
Obama knows more about guns smuggled into Mexico than he’s admitting.
President Barack Obama appears
to be getting it from all sides regarding a government snafu dubbed
Operation Fast and Furious. Besides both houses of the U.S. Congress and
a number of public-interest groups investigating what is being
characterized as a rogue federal law enforcement operation, Mexico’s
attorney general is infuriated over the allegations that the U.S. was
behind the smuggling of weapons into Mexico that ended up killing her
countrymen.
In a statement released by
Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales, she called Operation Fast and
Furious “an attack on Mexicans’ security.”
Morales told Mexican reporters
that she is demanding a full and honest explanation from the United
States government especially since evidence is being gathered that
reveals the Obama administration was more involved in Operation Fast and
Furious than top officials admitted in their sworn statements.
If what is being reported is
true, U.S. Attorney General and other government officials may have
committed perjury and/or obstruction of justice if it’s proven they lied
when testifying before House and Senate committees.
Operation
Fast and Furious was a botched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives covert operation initiated in order to track more than 2,000
smuggled guns to Mexican drug cartels by allowing gang members to
purchase them illegally from U.S. gun stores then take them back to
their leaders.
However, according to
Congressional reports by both Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Senator
Charles Grassley (R-NE), the federal agency lost track of many of the
guns. Some later were traced to murders of police and civilians in
Mexico and the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.
There is also mounting evidence
that the Cartel members obtained other weapons including grenades and
brought them back to Mexico with the full knowledge of the ATF and the
U.S. Justice Department.
President Obama said in June he
would discipline the Fast and Furious organizers once the investigation
is completed. He then stated that the Fast and Furious fiasco was never
approved by his Justice Department officials.
However, reports from several
sources including the non-governmental agency Judicial Watch, Fox News
Channel and The Examiner strongly suggest there indeed high-level
government involvement.
According to Fox News,
documents obtained by their news staff revealed that the ATF agents
involved actually sold some of the guns to gang members. They allegedly
purchased the guns with taxpayer money.
Meanwhile Mexico’s Attorney
General claims she learned about the operation in the news media rather
than being told about it in advance by U.S. government officials,
including members of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff.
Morales said that if U.S.
federal officials were involved, it would be a “betrayal” of Mexico
while its police and military were fighting a war against drug cartels.
Tens of thousands of Mexicans have been killed since the “war on drugs”
began in 2006. Almost weekly, Mexican authorities are finding mass
graves of those murdered by the cartels.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the
House Oversight Committee’s chairman, recently said that it appears the
trail of evidence about who authorized Operation Fast and Furious leads
back to the White House.
Operation Fast and Furious
began in October 2009 with sales from American gun stores to Mexican
cartel members. They allegedly spent over $1 million on the
firearms. Then in June 2010, ATF picked up the pace of the smuggling by
allowing its agents to sell the guns to gang members, according to
government documents obtained by Fox News and Judicial Watch.
According to his own testimony,
ATF Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy six semi-automatic
handguns then sell them to buyers he knew were illegal, the documents
say.
Dodson claimed during his House
testimony, that he acted on his own, against supervisors’ instructions,
to monitor the movement of the guns to a “stash house.” He kept the
house under surveillance until a vehicle showed up to pick up the guns
for smuggling into Mexico.
Dodson says he called for a
team to move in to arrest the smugglers, but his supervisors refused.
The guns then disappeared from ATF surveillance.
Groups such as the Second
Amendment Foundation believe the operation was “dreamed up to show proof
that U.S. guns are contributing to the crime and violence in Mexico,”
something that has been alleged by President Obama, Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their
supporters in the gun-control lobby.
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