Most. Ethical. Administration. Evah!

It appears that the United States government is responsible for providing the means of murdering a yet unknown number of people in Mexico.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious was so out of control by November 2009 that it was singlehandedly arming the Sinaloa Cartel.

At one point, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives say guns sold under the program took just 24 hours to travel from a gun store in Phoenix to a crime scene in Mexico. ATF agents there pleaded for help but were told nothing about Fast and Furious, which was intended to let guns "walk" in order to track them to higher-profile traffickers.

 According to the Congressional Report, 

In late 2009, ATF officials stationed in Mexico began to notice a large volume of guns appearing there that were traced to the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division. These weapons were increasingly recovered in great numbers from violent crime scenes. ATF intelligence analysts alerted Darren Gil, Attaché to Mexico, and Carlos Canino, Deputy Attaché, about the abnormal number of weapons. Gil and Canino communicated their worries to leadership in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., only to be brushed aside. Furthermore, ATF personnel in Arizona denied ATF personnel in Mexico access to crucial information about the case, even though the operation directly involved their job duties and affected their host country.

Rather than share information, senior leadership within both ATF and the Department of Justice (DOJ) assured their representatives in Mexico that everything was “under control.” The growing number of weapons recovered in Mexico, however, indicated otherwise. Two recoveries of large numbers of weapons in November and December 2009 definitively demonstrated that Operation Fast and Furious weapons were heading to Mexico. In fact, to date, there have been 48 different recoveries of weapons in Mexico linked to Operation Fast and Furious.

ATF officials in Mexico continued to raise the alarm over the burgeoning number of weapons. By October 2010, the amount of seized and recovered weapons had “maxed out” space in the Phoenix Field Division evidence vault.1 Nevertheless, ATF and DOJ failed to share crucial details of Operation Fast and Furious with either their own employees stationed in Mexico or representatives of the Government of Mexico. ATF senior leadership allegedly feared that any such disclosure would compromise their investigation. Instead, ATF and DOJ leadership’s reluctance to share information may have only prolonged the flow of weapons from this straw purchasing ring into Mexico.

ATF leadership finally informed the Mexican office that the investigation would be shut down as early as July 2010. Operation Fast and Furious, however, continued through the rest of 2010. It ended only after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 with weapons linked to this investigation. Only then did the ATF officials in Mexico discover the true nature of Operation Fast and Furious. Unfortunately, Mexico and the United States will have to live with the consequences of this program for years to come.

According to Fox News, ATF officials confirmed the murder of Mario Gonzales Rodriguez, brother of the Chihuahua attorney general, was with a gun obtained through the Fast and Furious program. (Thank goodness for that biased, right-wing, fascist, news organization Fox, as no other main stream media is covering this story. Makes you wonder what else they're not covering in the defense of their chosen one.  Remember this when you ask yourself how we could have gotten to the point of the economic disaster we're still experiencing--maybe if we had a media that actually worked instead of planting its lips fully around the sexual organs of the Democratic Party we might have been able to do something beforehand. But that's grist for another rant at another time.)

One of the ATF agents lied to during the operation by his ATF and DOJ superiors termed it "... the perfect storm of idiocy."  I call it just one more piece of evidence for the eventual impeachment trial--if this were a just world.

Hat tip:  Ace of Spades