Saturday, July 09, 2011

The government's gunrunners

The scandal surrounding the bizarre federal gun sting gone awry -- Opera tion Fast & Furious -- continues to mushroom. A Phoenix TV station says its investigation of a local drug bust three months ago involving four illegal aliens turned up 43 weapons that had been sold legally to "straw purchasers" in Arizona but wound up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels -- all under the watchful eyes of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And that's not all. A search of court and ATF documents turned up at least four other local cases in which major drug busts also involved numerous assault rifles on the agency's Suspect Gun Database. Yet ATF agents essentially stood by and watched -- as one critic put it, US law-enforcement agents essentially provided security for gun smugglers working for Mexican drug cartels. That such weapons are turning up in drug cases north of the border is hardly surprising. What's outrageous is that two of them have been linked to an Arizona shootout in which Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry was killed. Yet when several agents -- appalled by a program that knowingly sent as many as 2,500 deadly weapons south (only a few hundred of which have been recovered) -- tried to blow the whistle after Terry's death, their allegations were ignored by the Justice Department. So guess who's in charge of investigating this monumental disaster? Justice's inspector general...more

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