Irrelevant. Actually, the conspiracy was that Obama was attempting to fabricate a case that US guns are making Mexican crime, which was not and still is not true.
Wait, so now it's a conspiracy to promote gun control legislation? This is adorable. It's been a while since there's been a conservative of this brand openly posting for a while. For all your harping on facts, you're leaping to conjecture as fast as you can invent it.
He didn't come up with that, it's been a gun-nut talking point for months.
I think I can safely say that I know more about Fast and Furious than
ANYONE on this forum.
Without going into anything confidential, I will say that it was NOT some kind of conspiracy to funnel arms to Mexico, for whatever harebrained motivation one cares to imagine.
Nor was it "somebody asleep at the wheel".
What it was was a sting operation that went on too long, because senior officials were afraid to close the trap shut too soon and miss getting the "big fish".
A little background: Starting in 2006, ATF was coming under a lot of pressure from DOJ for only focusing on apprehending and prosecuting the straw purchasers, not the people they were working for (middlemen who through various chains of further middlemen were believed to lead back to the Mexican drug cartels). Because most of the people further up the food chain weren't US nationals, it would be problematic for ATF to bust them.
So the idea was to monitor suspected straw purchases, record the serial numbers of the weapons, and then see where those weapons popped up later (such as Mexican Federal police running gun traces on captured weapons).
Couple of things went horribly wrong:
1. The drug war in Mexico escalated to the point where the Federal police weren't capturing a hell of a lot of anything, or were corrupt and turning the weapons right back over to the cartels.
2. After the initial planned period for the op was up, the guys running the thing didn't want to pull the plug because they felt like if they waited just one more month, they'd be able to tie it to a big-time player in Mexico and make a big bust. That "one more month" eventually ended up something like 18 months, iirc.
3. Because of the amount of time it went on (and the concomitant number of weapons sold during that period), it got to be problematic even keeping track of all the weapons.
4. The Mexican government and law enforcement community was kept in the dark on this. It was a diplomatic risk (they were understandably pissed when they found out), but I'd have done the same. Simply put, the Mexican security apparatus is so compromised that they simply can't be trusted with that kind of information. It's the same reason we didn't tell the Pakistanis we were coming after Osama.
The basic concept wasn't horrible. FBI and Treasury do the same thing with marked bills to try and figure out money-laundering networks. DEA sometimes does the same thing with quantities of illegal drugs. The difference being that cash and drugs don't DIRECTLY kill people.
Was there poor oversight? Absolutely. FWIW (and this is strictly my personal opinion), I think Ken Melson took way too much of the blame and not enough was given to the regional guys running the show. There was some internal hat-shuffling and some minor demotions as a result, but no real heads rolling, which is a shame. But I also think the baying for blood by the right-wing over this is disingenuous. If the FBI let a million dollars enter a mob's money laundering cycle and then lost track of it, they'd be griping about it but nowhere near to the level they are with F&F. I understand part of that in that a Federal agent died as a result of one of the weapons (although that's it's own story....there's some question as to whether he was being used as bait. But that's for another argument.), but on the whole this was just a tragically mismanaged operation with good intent, not the nefarious conspiracy that certain asshats like to make it out to be.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 721193 times)