ATF Death Watch 90: ATF Fast and Furious Epic Fail Hits Home

I don’t like the term “epic fail.” It’s misused almost as frequently as “awesome”—which should be reserved for something so impressive that contemplating its existence is like standing mute in the face of God. But the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious is an epic fail. It involves at least eight major U.S. federal law enforcement agencies: ATF, DEA, FBI, DOJ, CPB, ICE, IRS, DHS, CIA. That’s because the ATF’s “guns for goons” program was part of a wider America effort to get a handle on the American-financed (however inadvertently) Mexican drug wars. You know; the wars between the cartels, both with and against the Mexican government. The Obama administration’s government-wide covert effort has been—and will be—a failure of enormous magnitude. The chickens are already come home to roost . . .

Click here for a just released report entitled Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment. Here’s your money shot:

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw has testified to the fact that over the last 18 months, six of seven cartels have established command and control facilities in Texas cities that rival even the most sophisticated battalion or brigade level combat headquarters. Texas has suffered 22 murders, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and five kidnappings related to the cartels.

In other words, they’re here. The ATF doesn’t have to enable gun smugglers heading south to supply cartel members (by turning a blind eye to U.S. gun store sales or, as has been proven, actually handing the Mexico-bound bad guys the guns). The ATF doesn’t have to worry about pesky international law. They can just keep tabs on cartel affiliates buying guns in American and then . . . nab them!

And yet that’s exactly what they didn’t do during Operation Fast and Furious. Dude, that’s awesome. The $1.6 billion per year Bureau failed to arrest a single “big fish” gun smuggler during this 10-month misegos. More to the point, why the hell didn’t the ATF arrest someone? What’s in it for the ATF to sit on their hands as . . .

Crime, gangs and terrorism have converged in such a way that they form a collective threat to the national security of the United States. America is being assaulted not just from across our southern border but from across the hemisphere and beyond. All of Central and South America have become an interconnected source of violence and terrorism. Drug cartels exploit porous borders using all the traditional elements of military force, including command and control, logistics, intelligence, information operations and the application of increasingly deadly firepower. The intention is to increasingly bring governments at all levels throughout the Americas under the influence of international cartels.

It is that last part that I find most troubling. I reckon the United States government is already under the influence of the international cartels.

The nearasdammit complete lack of blowback from the Mexican government on Operation Fast and Furious—which violated Mexico’s border and armed vicious criminals—can only mean that Felipe’s peeps knew about the ATF’s black bag job. So why didn’t they stop it?

The Calderon government is in the pocket of the Sinaloa cartel. And We the People of the United States are heavily invested—politically, financially and militarily—in the Calderon government. Hello, Barack? The Sinaloas are our friends. Los Zetas are our enemies. How about you lay off the Sinaloas? Oh, and pass the word to the ATF por favor.

Captured Sinaloa jefe Jesus Zambada Niebla (currently awaiting trial in Chicago) says the U.S. government has been supporting his team against Los Zetas for years. Niebla’s lawyers tell TTAG that their client doesn’t know about F&F in particular, but that it fits Uncle Sam’s m.o. like a proverbial glove.

As the “loss” of some 2000 ATF-enabled firearms indicates, both the micro (ATF F&F) and macro (providing a U.S. base for the Mexican Navy’s Special Ops teams to launch attacks to kill and capture Zetas) sides of the strategy to “divide and conquer” the cartels is not working to keep Americans safe. Quite the opposite . . .

In a curious twist of irony, the more successful the Mexican military becomes in confronting the cartels, the more likely the cartels will take the active fight into the United States as they compete against each other in the battle to control distribution corridors inside Texas.

STRATFOR has pointed out that the Mexican drug cartels don’t want to unleash their usual murderous mayhem (e.g. decapitating and disemboweling social media journalists and planting their headless bodies in a public place) in the U.S. lest they waken the “sleeping giant” of U.S. law enforcement.

But it’s one of those tipping point deals. Once the cartels have enough power in the U.S., they won’t care about retaliation. And remember: we’re talking about a loose affiliation of animals as well as a highly organized terrorist organization.

So now we wait. When will the American-based narco-terrorists’ violence become so obvious that the U.S. government has to stop kissing Calderon’s ass, stop playing favorites amongst the cartels and unleash our guard dogs? Will it be too late when it happens?

Meanwhile, the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious stands as a not-so-shining example of what happens when bad civil servants are given bad instructions by people who are willing to compromise our safety for their political survival. Here’s a glimpse of the result at the sharp end:

When I get up in the morning and step out the door, I’m looking for rattlesnakes and illegals, and I’m packing my gun and my cell phone. When I go down to feed my horses, I have my dog, my pistol and the cell phone. You just have to stay aware. Several months ago, I walked in my tack room and my two big dogs went ballistic, and there were two illegal aliens there. I get more angry than scared because you cannot be scared. You’re just going to have to pull your socks up and just get after it and I’ve got border patrol on speed dial.

That would be the same Border Patrol whose Agent Brian Terry was murdered by drug thugs wielding ATF-enabled firearms.