The below is not the entire Univision Operation Fast & Furious expose: it’s merely about ten minutes of it. Ten very graphic, very infuriating, and very embarrassing ten minutes of it. Don’t watch it if you have a physical/mental problem with seeing people being murdered on-screen, and for real:
[youtube]9Y1Zz3otzos[/youtube]
(see also this ABC article)
It’s a useful primer for what happened: which is to say, Mexican drug cartels decided to buy guns from US shops and the US government (ATF Special Agent William Newell* is mentioned by name, but he’s not the only one caught up in this mess) decided to not only let them; they decided to track illegal gun sales by waiting to see when and where guns known to have been sold illegally showed up at Mexican crime scenes.
Please pause for a moment to think about it. And possibly participate in a calming exercise.
Moving on, there is a lot of frankly outrageous things in this clip, so let’s get into a few of the worst ones:
- Univision tracked down an additional 57 guns in the OF&F list that had been used in crimes (ones not known to Congress). One of the most awful ones? The murder of sixteen people -“mostly teenagers” – at a Juarez birthday party in 2010.
- The murder of USAF Sgt. David Booher (wrong place, wrong time, apparently) was touched on. This was more of a general observation about how brazen the cartels have gotten – Univision did not actually attempt to link the murder to Operation Fast & Furious – but it still bears noting that the US government knew precisely what kind of environment that they were attempting to manipulate with the program.
- And then there was ATF Special Agent Hope MacAllister. You may remember Ms. MacAllister from some interesting conversations that she had with one particular gun dealer; but what was brought up yesterday was her actions involving the detaining of Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta in 2010. Now, we already knew that she and the ATF let Celis go in exchange for ‘cooperation’, despite the fact that he was running drugs; we just didn’t know the stunningly unprofessional nature of her ‘recruitment,’ which involved her writing her cell number on a ten dollar bill and giving it to the new informant (who, naturally, never actually cooperated with the ATF).
And that’s just the one clip. We haven’t even gotten into all the other places in North and South America where the US government was doing the same thing that they were doing in, or more accurately to, Mexico. Or the US law enforcement officials that our government helped get killed. Or even the incredibly offensive way that the government refuses to take responsibility for any of this, or get out of the way of horrified investigators trying to trace where things went wrong. Or any of the rest of it.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Eric Holder. Must. Resign. And the Romney-Ryan campaign MUST beat that drum every day, until Holder does. This is not about elections. This is about the honor of the United States of America.
*Newell, by the way, has lawyered up and is now claiming via attorney that the Mexicans were aware about Operation Fast & Furious. One wonders what evidence the man has for that.