Have you ever wondered why we are seriously losing the war on illegal drug trafficking after 40 years in which the United States has spent $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, and for what? Today, drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal, pervasive and organized than ever before.
It is estimated that Twenty Million people in the U.S. use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year. So it is with not much surprise, but I do find it obscene, to be watching a scandal unfolding for many months, that is finally being reported by the mainstream media.
ATF OFFICIALS IMPLICATED IN OPERATION FAST AND FURIOUS is an example of the "geniuses' in charge of the war on drugs. This incredibly stupid and incompetently implemented drug war gun smuggling program named "Operation Fast and Furious" was carried out by the The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The ATF told gun-store owners to sell thousands of semi-automatic firearms to straw purchasers (those who buy guns for someone who can’t do so legally) and then just watched as the guns went (were allowed to walk) across the border, into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
The idea was supposedly to trace and identify Mexican drug cartel members and the network of associates used by them to distribute weapons into the hands of the criminals responsible for over 40,000 murders in Mexico since 2006.
Behind the carnage in Mexico and in the United States is an industry that supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to Americans. The cartels have built a network of dealers in 231 U.S. cities from coast to coast, taking in about $39 billion in sales annually, according to the Justice Department.
The ATF began all of this under the Bush Administration in what became known as Operation Wide Receiver in 2006, after receiving information about a suspicious purchase of firearms. The investigation involved letting the guns “walk,” and the investigation concluded in 2007 without any charges being filed.
Under the Fast and Furious Program implemented by the ATF under the Obama Administration weapons were allowed to be illegally purchased so that they could also be tracked to gun traffickers and drug cartel leaders. But the ATF somehow managed in their ineptness to lose track of these firearms, and the weapons were allowed to cross into Mexico undetected.
Just how high up the chain of command that the knowledge and approval of this now defunct program goes, we don’t yet know, but we do know that Fast and Furious, an arm of the ATF’s five-year-old Gunrunner program,was started during the Obama administration in 2009, and came to light in December 2010.
That was when drug gang members killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in a firefight in a remote canyon near Nogales, Ariz. Three of the assault rifles used in the gun battle had been “allowed” to be purchased through Fast and Furious.
In addition to Terry, U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata on February 15, 2011 was killed in a separate incident by a weapon allowed to "walk" into Mexico from the U.S.
The U.S. House of Representatives is currently working on an investigation toward holding the U.S. Department of Justice in contempt related to "Operation Fast and Furious".
None of this would have been revealed to the public except for certain Federal agents so fed up with the cover up of these cases that they alerted the media.
An Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms senior agent John Dodson assigned to the Phoenix office in 2010 was one of the first "whistle blowers", Dodson's job is to stop gun trafficking across the border. Instead, he says he was ordered to sit by and watch it happen.
Dodson's bosses say that never happened. Now, he's risking his job to go public."I'm boots on the ground in Phoenix, telling you we've been doing it every day since I've been here," he said. Here I am. Tell me I didn't do the things I did. Now you have a name on it. You have a face to put with it. Someone now, tell me it didn't happen".
Agent Dodson has said that he personally feels guilt for the deaths of the Agents. He and other sources say the gun walking strategy was approved all the way up to the Justice Department. Surveillance video obtained by CBS News shows suspected drug cartel suppliers carrying boxes of weapons to their cars at a Phoenix gun shop. The long boxes shown in the video being loaded in were AK-47-type assault rifles; So it turns out ATF not only allowed it, they video taped it.
Documents show the inevitable result: The guns that ATF let go began showing up at crime scenes in Mexico. And as ATF stood by watching thousands of weapons hit the streets, the Fast and Furious group supervisor noted the escalating Mexican violence. One e-mail noted, "958 killed in March 2010 ... most violent month since 2005." The same e-mail notes: "Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during March alone," including "numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles."
In congressional testimony, "William Newell, a former ATF Special Agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division", report journalists Robert Farago and Ralph Dixon of the Washington Times, that with its designated cover of tracking where guns went, so drug lords who purchased them could later be arrested downstream, was actually a deliberate effort to prevent the Los Zetas drug cartel from staging a successful coup d’etat against the government of Felipe Calderon by arming rival gang Sinaloa, according to the Times writers, a relationship that extended to “(allowing) the Sinaloas to fly a 747 cargo plane packed with cocaine into American airspace unmolested. The CIA made sure the trade wasn’t one way. It persuaded the ATF to create Operation Fast and Furious a “no strings attached” variation of the agency’s previous firearms sting. By design, the ATF operation armed the Mexican government’s preferred cartel on the street level near the American border, where the Zetas are most active,” states the report.
Farago and Dixon also cite a "CIA insider" to make the claim that Operation fast and Furious was a CIA orchestrated program.
A huge part of the answer for the failure of the war on Drugs is that it it's all about the enormous money to be made.The $320 billion annual global illegal drug cartel industry now accounts for more than 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.
Drug cartels are multinational businesses, after all and they cannot work without a bank. With so much illegal cash, the only way to move this money is through the banks.To make their criminal enterprises work, the drug cartels need to move billions of dollars across borders. That’s how they finance the purchase of drugs, planes, weapons safe houses, politicians, bankers, law enforcement officials, and buy anyone they want.
The stench of Banks and financial cesspools foul the air we breathe with their noxious, toxic, evil. The financial whores, bastards, and weasels of the Financial Institutions here in America, World Wide, and on Wall Street pop up once again as the purveyors of addicted, insatiable greed at any cost. Easy money made here by all, they become a mechanism to 'launder' the drug money.
Wall Street Banks have been the main instruments ensuring the profits of the drug cartels. Major U.S. Banks have been deeply involved in laundering drug profits, for the better part of the past decade.
The biggest U.S. banks receive, launder and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the drug lords’ accounts, who then buy modern weapons, pay private armies of assassins, corrupt untold numbers of political and law enforcement officials on both sides of the border.
Drug profits, in the most basic economic sense, are secured through the ability of the cartels to launder and transfer billions of dollars through the U.S. banking system.The scale and scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other economic activity of the American private banking system.
According to U.S. Justice Dept. records, one bank alone, Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo) laundered 378.3 billion dollars between May 1, 2004 and May 31, 2007. Major Banks in the U.S. have and continue to serve as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels, including Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan, CITIBANK, as well as overseas banks operating out of New York, Miami, Los Angeles, London.
Despite the deep and pervasive involvement of the major banks in laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit funds, the “court settlements” pursued by U.S. prosecutors have led to no jail time for the bankers. One court’s settlement amounted to a fine of $50 million dollars, less than 0.5% of one of the banks (the Wachovia/Wells Fargo bank) $12.3 billion profits for 2009. A disgustingly limp "wink" that says all one needs to knowregarding the Government being "serious" about providing real justice in wiping out crime "that PAYS".
Laundering drug money is one of the most lucrative sources of profit for Wall Street; the banks charge hefty commissions on the transfer of drug profits, which they then lend to borrowing institutions at interest rates far above what if any they pay to drug trafficker depositors.
Did you ever notice how the federal government never faces any consequences of legal Justice when it breaks the law, and that corporations are wrist slapped, if at all, for things that you or I would be put in jail for a very long time?
It doesn't matter which political party is in power. Justice, punishment for wrong doing, crimes, innocent murders are not applicable to the arrogant mob of Government untouchable politicians and their cronies. It's not a uniquely Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, Conservative sickness that any particular political segment dominates.
It doesn't matter which political party is in power. Justice, punishment for wrong doing, crimes, innocent murders are not applicable to the arrogant mob of Government untouchable politicians and their cronies. It's not a uniquely Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, Conservative sickness that any particular political segment dominates.
If you or I sold guns to Mexican drug criminals, we'd be facing decades in prison. If one of those guns were used to kill a U.S. law enforcement agent, we would put in prison for life, or placed on death row all in the name of honor, patriotism, and the American flag.
Not so when it involves the malignant alliance of arrogance linking power, greed, and lots of money. Then it's lights out, no American flag, no justice, no one knows anything, files disappear, people go missing, lawyers are hired, lawyers are lawyered up, amnesia sets in, the 5th amendment of self incrimination is memorized, and lots of slimy shit happens, money does that to people, it's almost magical.
As we've all seen from numerous examples, in the final analysis, the government is essentially a lawless, corrupt, criminal gang that breaks its own laws with impunity. It always has been and it always will be. Any other excuse for its behavior is bull shit, and that is the truth. Money does the talking, ALWAYS.
