"Smoking Gun" In Fast And Furious?

Is anyone going to cover this?

This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.

Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.

Agent John Dodson was ordered to buy four Draco pistols for cash and even got a letter from his supervisor, David Voth, authorizing a federally licensed gun dealer to sell him the guns without bothering about the necessary paperwork.
“Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62x39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson,” read the June 1, 2010, letter. “These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of performance of his official duties.”

On orders, Dodson then sold the guns to known criminals, who first stashed them away and then -- deliberately unhindered by the ATF or any other agency -- whisked them off to Mexico.

I think it was Dodson who specifically attempted to defy orders and surveil the safe-house where these guns were stored. But he was stopped.

This is the problem here, and this has been the problem from the start: This was not a "botched surveillance mistake" as the Administration is trying to peddle. The ATF goons in charge of this deliberately allowed the guns to be delivered into the hands of narcoterrorists with no surveillance whatsoever.

This is not a case where they watched 2000 guns, but lost 25 guns due to the inevitable problems with 24/7 surveillance. And that, oh bad luck, some of those 25 lost guns were used in crimes, such as the murder of Brian Terry.

They didn't watch any of them. Mexico wasn't even in the loop, so how the hell could they have watched where the guns went on the Mexican side of the border?

They didn't "lose" 2000 guns. They intended to let 2000 guns loose.

Why? This is the question, which the media does not seem interested in at all. And because the media isn't interested in asking why, the Administration gets away with the false cover story that this is just the story of a few guns going missing, while the other 1975 guns were always under the watchful eye of surveillers.

Why were all 2000 guns not lost but rather loosed?

What.

Was.

The.

Goal.

Because the goal was not to suddenly arrest dozens of narcoterrorists. How could they arrest them? They had no idea where the guns had gone.

The writer goes on to speculate about my "Moderate Iranian" theory:

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.

If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go -- and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.

A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.

That latter theory would not be as bad as the first -- the first theory being essentially a criminal conspiracy against the Second Amendment, American citizens, and a sovereign neighboring nation to boot -- but it would still be plenty bad. Reagan was nearly impeached over Iran/Contra.

But one theory we can discard is the Administration's -- the "just a mistake" theory.

Not a mistake. What was done here -- letting guns loose -- was not a bug. It was a feature. It was the plan from Jump Street.

So if that was the plan, What was the goal?

Oh By The Way: 200 people have been murdered with these same guns, possibly as many as 300.

Two points flow from this:

1) This wasn't "just a few guns." This was all of them.

2) If there was some sneaky, spectacular bust planned... um, me personally? I would have ordered the Big Bust when the bodycount got up to, uh, say 10.

Or maybe last freakin' year when an American border agent got killed.

There is no goal of a Big Bust then.

So:

What.

Was.

The.

Goal?

I'm allergic to big conspiracy theories but here, given what we know, I'm not calling the Big Conspiracy Theory crazy.

I'm just calling it "premature" and "less likely."

But the Administration is lying about the goal of this covert operation with a death toll of 200-300, and no one in the media seems terribly interested in pressing them on this point.

posted by Ace at 12:56 PM

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