Fast And Furious Falling Apart

By Russ Vaughn

When BATF agents first blew the whistle on what is now known as Operation Fast and Furious, the rationale offered by DoJ for such an evidently foolish operation was that it was designed to allow BATF to track and prosecute the leaders of the Mexican drug cartels. As more information surfaced from the Mexican government and the BATF’s Mexican bureau chief specifying that none of them knew anything of this operation, many of us who were paying a bit closer attention to the case immediately smelled the first foul scent of corruption.

The fatal flaw in DoJ’s explanation was this: if the Mexican authorities had not been brought into the operation, nor even the BATF’s own agents authorized to operate in Mexico, then the proffered DoJ justification made utterly no sense, for the simple reason that once those walked guns hit the south side of that border, there was absolutely no process in place to track them to their supposed targets. Therefore, DoJ was patently misrepresenting its motive. Why?

For those who keep a constant wary eye on the left’s never-ending war on our 2^nd-Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the increasingly fishy smell emanating from Washington led to connecting the dots back to the year-earlier revelations in the liberal media that weapons being used in Mexican crimes were traceable back to American sources more than 90% of the time. That false meme had spread quickly through the major liberal media, along with calls for stricter gun control laws in this country by…guess who! How about our president, our secretary of state, our attorney general, and other notable Democrats, for starters?

Here we had an operation mounted by the executive branch of the United States, an operation which had as its stated goal — after being outed, that is — the targeting of Mexican drug lords on sovereign Mexican soil. Yet this was done without the knowledge of anyone in the Mexican government. Quite clearly, a secret and subversive operation had been conceived and implemented against our sister nation to the south — subversive because, again, quite clearly, the American government was subverting the sovereign authority of Mexico without that nation’s knowledge. If the goal was, as stated later by DoJ, to track guns into Mexico to the purchasing sources in the cartels, then was there not some diplomatic requirement to notify the Mexican government that we were arming their most violent criminal elements? And what was the need for keeping our own BATF agents in Mexico — the only American agents with Mexican presence to conduct such surveillance and tracking operations on Mexican soil — equally in the dark?

It doesn’t require much in the way of deductive powers to conclude that the fish-wrap smell seeping out of Washington probably had to do with Eric Holder’s Department of Justice being used to tightly wrap something rotting from the head down. And what could that be? Early proponents of the theory suggesting that if the DoJ’s rationale smelled fishy, then perhaps the true reason for F&F was to create justification for more gun control legislation here in this country were looked at as crackpot conspiracists. Even now, most of those Republican members of Congress pursuing this scandal refuse to cite the true purpose of F&F, still referring to it as a bungled federal program. There are exceptions: Florida congressman John Mica speaking on one of the Sunday talk shows this weekend, made clear his opinion that F&F was a sinister and cynical attempt by the Obama administration to undermine the 2^nd Amendment. I watched him say it, but Google has no link. Imagine that.

For those who haven’t really followed the Fast and Furious scandal, here’s a five-step summary of how the operation was supposed to work:

1. Allow guns to flow freely to criminal elements in Mexico, where they are naturally used in the extremely violent and deadly criminal activities of the drug cartels.
2. When sufficient guns of American origin have been used in such criminal activities, enlist the willing services of the liberal media to announce the discovery thereof to the world.
3. Enlist multiple prominent Democrats to untruthfully proclaim that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crimes originate in the U.S.
4. Use steps one through three to substantiate the liberal fallacy that private gun ownership leads to increased gun violence by gun owners.
5. With the compliance of a thoroughly duped American public, enact increasingly restrictive gun ownership policies through federal agencies, bypassing Congress and the Supreme Court.

When looked at this way, doesn’t Obama’s statement to a group of gun controladvocates in March 2011 that he was taking steps to further gun control restrictions, but “under the radar,” now seem less cryptic than it did at the time? For those who still don’t believe Fast & Furious was an end-run on the 2^nd Amendment by a liberal, gun-averse administration, here are five questions to consider:

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