By Dr. Harold Pease

Reuters reported last Saturday, August 17, 2013, “Nine men killed in Mexican drug war hotspot.” This is not new news. The day before, “eight people were found killed” and placed in a mass grave. Such happens frequently in a country where drug wars have resulted in the death of more than 70,000 people “between 2006 and 2012, and more than 6,000 have been killed since President Enrique Pena Nieto took office in December.

What is especially disturbing is that our government may have been involved with some of these murders. CBS News reported, August 14, of this month, “That three more weapons from Fast and Furious have turned up at violent crime scenes in Mexico.” Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino purchased two in “May and July of 2010. Sean Steward purchased a third,” all traced to “the Lone Wolf gun shop in Glendale, Arizona.” Just a few weeks ago, Luis Lucio Rosales Astorga, “a Mexican police chief and his bodyguard were killed by cartel members using Fast and Furious guns.”

Some may have forgotten the “Fast and Furious” scandal of 2010 in the flurry of new Barack Obama Administration scandals of late Spring, so a review might be necessary. Imagine being willing to do anything to destroy the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Since Americans will not willingly do so, imagine someone in power plotting to create the rationale that would turn most reasonable people against these rights. Evidence of such surfaced two years ago in the form of an email from a Justice Department agent that strongly indicated that the government’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was designed to do just that. Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, charged with executing the “Operation Fast and Furious,” boasted to a colleague of the operation’s propaganda value, presumably to vilify gun shows. It read: “Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby” (“Will Holder’s Watergate Become Obama’s Waterloo?” Americas 1st Freedom, April 2012). They knew precisely what they could do with the propaganda value of their sales—destroy the gun shows.

Seemingly the intent was for the government, through the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Administration (ATF), to secretly sell illegal guns to the Mexican drug cartels, and then blame those sales on U.S. gun shows to discredit them. The administration, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had argued that 90% of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels had come from gun shows in the United States. The ATF gun sales, if undetected, would provide the government rationale and support to close down the gun shows making it more difficult for citizens to obtain a firearm. The story appears to be full of government intrigue, lies, conspiracy, and the murder of hundreds of Mexican citizens and an American Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.

The transfer of the illegal weapons was done without consulting U.S. law officers outside ATF or the Mexican authorities. The government would have succeeded with the scheme were not some of the illegal firearms found at the scene of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, one of which was actually the instrument of his death.

Wayne La Pierre, Executive Vice President of the NRA, best expressed the seriousness of this illegal operation, apart from defrauding Americans of their constitutional gun rights, when he wrote. “In that ‘gun-walking’ operation, Obama administration operatives encouraged, bankrolled, and oversaw repeated felonies at gun stores and at border crossings with criminals smuggling at least 1,700 firearms into Mexican drug-fueled criminal commerce.” Regular citizens, doing the same thing would be serving time.
The e-mail in question was a part of the 6,000 documents received from the 80,000 requested of the Justice Department by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform headed by Darrell Issa. The Justice Department yet refuses to honor a three-year request for the other 74,000 documents requested.

What has been released reportedly proves that U.S. gun shows were not the source of cartel firepower, as this administration had repeatedly contended, the ATF was, and that Holder intentionally lied when he told Congress he had heard about “Fast and Furious” from the media, as did other Americans. “One Justice Department official has claimed his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refused to testify,” elevating anticipation that, so far, we may have seen only the tip of the iceberg.

The Justice Department has acknowledged encouraging gun stores in the U.S. to sell weapons to purchasers who trafficked them to Mexican drug cartels but still refuses to release some 74,000 documents with respect to the scandal. Such refusal led to “a bipartisan vote in June 2012 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. The House Oversight Committee is suing for release of the material” so there will be more to come on this story. Meanwhile there will be more killing in Mexico from the 1,400 to 1,700 guns given the drug cartels by our government.