"Grenade-walking" part of "Gunwalker" scandal

(CBS News)

There's a new twist in the government's "gunwalking" scandal involving an even more dangerous weapon: grenades.

"Gunwalking" subpoena for AG Holder imminent

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, who has reported on this story from the beginning, said on "The Early Show" that the investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)'s so-called "Fast and Furious" operation branches out to a case involving grenades. Sources tell her a suspect was left to traffic and manufacture them for Mexican drug cartels.

Police say Jean Baptiste Kingery, a U.S. citizen, was a veritable grenade machine. He's accused of smuggling parts for as many as 2,000 grenades into Mexico for killer drug cartels -- sometimes under the direct watch of U.S. law enforcement...[Full Article]

Fast and Furious weapons were found in Mexico cartel enforcer's home

Guns illegally purchased under the ATF operation were found in April hidden in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, court records show.

This arsenal uncovered by police in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in April turned out to include weapons from the ATF's ill-fated Fast and Furious operation. (Associated Press)

Reporting from Washington—

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.

In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The smugglers' tactics — quickly moving the weapons far from ATF agents in southern Arizona, where it had been assumed they would circulate — vividly demonstrate that what had been viewed as a local problem was much larger. Six other Fast and Furious guns destined for El Paso were recovered in Columbus, N.M.

"These Fast and Furious guns were going to Sinaloans, and they are killing everyone down there," said one knowledgeable U.S. government source, who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. "But that's only how many we know came through Texas. Hundreds more had to get through."...[Full Article]

U.S. Government Used Taxpayer Funds to Buy, Sell Weapons During 'Fast and Furious,' Documents Show

Fox News

AP This Jan. 25 picture shows part of a cache of seized weapons displayed at a news conference in Phoenix.

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel -- the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

This disclosure, revealed in documents obtained by Fox News, could undermine the Department of Justice's previous defense that Operation Fast and Furious was a "botched" operation where agents simply "lost track" of weapons as they were transferred from one illegal buyer to another. Instead, it heightens the culpability of the federal government as Mexico, according to sources, has opened two criminal investigations into the operation that flooded their country with illegal weapons...[Full Article]

ATF promotes supervisors in controversial gun operation



Los Angeles Times



The three, who have been criticized for pushing on with the border weapons sting even as it came apart, receive new management jobs in Washington.

“I share responsibility for mistakes that were made,” said ATF supervisor William G. McMahon about Operation Fast and Furious. (U.S. Congress / August 14, 2011)

Reporting from Washington—

The ATF has promoted three key supervisors of a controversial sting operation that allowed firearms to be illegally trafficked across the U.S. border into Mexico.



All three have been heavily criticized for pushing the program forward even as it became apparent that it was out of control. At least 2,000 guns were lost and many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and two at the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.



The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency's headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF's deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency's Phoenix office.



Documents: Fast and Furious paper trail



McMahon and Newell have acknowledged making serious mistakes in the program, which was dubbed Operation Fast and Furious...[Full Article]

Exclusive: ATF Intimidates Gun Owners With Home Visits

Federal agency attempts to make firearms retailers spy on their customers under new illegal directive

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 29, 2011

Even as it finds itself embroiled in a scandal that saw weapons being deliberately sent to criminal gangs in Mexico, the ATF has issued a letter ordering firearms dealers in border states to report sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles, and is following it up by harassing gun owners with intimidating home visits as well as threatening gun dealers to spy on their customers.

As the Justice Department announced earlier this month, “All gun shops in four Southwest border states (Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico) will be required to alert the federal government to frequent buyers of high-powered rifles.”

The ATF letter also orders gun dealers to report to the feds sales of “two or more pistols or revolvers, or any combination of pistols or revolvers totaling two or more.”

The letter, which was subsequently sent out to gun dealers and has since entered the public domain, orders firearms retailers to “Submit to ATF reports of multiple sales or other dispositions whenever, at one time or during any five consecutive business days, you sell to an unlicensed person or otherwise dispose of two or more semi-automatic rifles capable of accepting a detachable magazine and with a caliber greater than .22 (including .223/5.56 caliber).” The directive takes effect from August 14, 2011.

However, what the federal agency isn’t keen to make public is how its agents are using these reports to make threatening home visits to firearms owners, while ordering gun store owners to become de facto informants by telling them to spy on their customers.

According to several gun dealers in Austin as well as one of our own staff members, the ATF is visiting people’s homes, demanding to be allowed inside without a warrant, and implying that gun owners could be terrorists for purchasing two or more firearms at a time.

Illustrating how lawless this is, a central Texas gun dealer who provided Alex Jones with the ATF letter, contacted Daniel Jones, the head of the ATF in Austin two weeks before receiving the letter to ask about news reports that President Obama was going to order the investigation of citizens that bought two or more rifles. Agent Jones told him “no that law is not going to pass, and we can’t enforce something that isn’t law so don’t worry about it.” Of course, the law didn’t pass but the ATF later enforced it anyway.

This is all based on a directive from the federal government that is completely outside of the law and unconstitutional. The law that would have required gun dealers in border states to report sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles to the ATF was “stripped entirely from the text of the regulation” when it came up for a vote in Congress on April 15, but as part of the Obama administration’s dictatorial zeal to accomplish its agenda outside of the law, the program is going ahead anyway.

The federal government is enforcing a law that was never passed.

Read the letter the ATF is sending out to gun stores below (click to enlarge).

Americans who purchase guns are already forced to undergo checks against the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System to prove they are not a criminal. The ATF’s new unconstitutional directive only adds an extra layer of bureaucracy, putting a further squeeze on second amendment rights while creating a logistical nightmare for firearms retailers.

The letter orders retailers to report each sale of two or more weapons before the end of the same business day, requiring them to fill in a form for each sale that takes over 10 minutes to complete. This extra burden will create hundreds of extra necessary man hours for every gun store per year, and could even put the smaller ones out of business.

The ATF’s intimidation campaign directed against firearms dealers and gun owners is all unfolding while the organization simultaneously comes under scrutiny for the infamous Operation Fast and Furious, a BATF program that. “Sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.” Some of the weapons were later used to kill US Border Patrol agents like Brian Terry.

After being caught sending weapons to Mexican criminals that were used to kill U.S. Border Patrol agents, police and citizens, the ATF is now treating American citizens like criminals simply for exercising their second amendment rights, all under the guise of a regulation that was rejected by Congress and never became law.

The Obama administration and the ATF claim that the Fast and Furious program was part of a sting operation to catch leading Mexican drug runners, and yet it’s admitted that the government stopped tracking the firearms as soon as they reached the border, defeating the entire object of the mission, unless the mission was about pushing through gun control in the US and had nothing to do with the drug war.

As the evidence clearly indicates, Operation Fast and Furious was likely a plot on behalf of the administration to discredit the second amendment. While the feds were selling guns to Mexican drug gangs, Obama was simultaneously blaming drug violence on the flow of guns from border states to Mexico.

The ATF’s efforts to intimidate both gun sellers and purchasers also arrives months after President Obama told gun control advocate Sarah Brady that his administration was working “under the radar” to sneak attack the second amendment.

During a March 30 meeting between Jim and Sarah Brady and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, at which Obama “dropped in,” the president reportedly told Brady, “I just want you to know that we are working on it (gun control)….We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

The quote appeared in an April 11 Washington Post story about Obama’s gun control czar Steve Croley.

The name of the gun shop owner who provided us with the ATF letter is withheld because he doesn’t want to face recriminations from a notoriously vindictive agency.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

Operation Castaway: ATF Trafficked Guns to Honduran Criminal Gangs

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 14, 2011

Evidence indicates that the ATF not only provided weapons to Mexican drug cartels and gangs but also trafficked guns to criminal gangs in Honduras, including the murderous MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, known to work with the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Sinaloa, the largest drug trafficking organization operating in Mexico, has worked closely with Wacovia Bank. Last March, the bank revealed in court it had laundered nearly $400 million through a network of exchange houses, or casas de cambio, between 2004 and 2007.

MS-13 is known for it brutality, including the murder of 28 Hondurans when gang members sprayed a bus with automatic gunfire in 2004.

New revelations about the federal operation – dubbed Castaway – came to light after Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and acting ATF Director Ken Melson.

“In recent days, it has come to light that the ATF and DOJ have participated in the act of ‘gun walking’ beyond the acts conducted within the scope of ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’” Bilirakis wrote to Holder and Melson.

The story broke on July 6 when journalists Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea ran a story on Operation Castaway in The Examiner.

“Virginia O’Brien, Special Agent in Charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Tampa Field Division, ran a gun-running investigation that was walking guns to Honduras using the techniques and tactics identical to Fast and Furious, it was reported to these correspondents this evening via private correspondence from a proven credible source,” the journalists wrote.

The ATF did not respond to the story when it was posted on July 6. The information also found its way to Chairman Darrell Issa of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee Member Charles Grassley.

The corporate media has yet to give Operation Castaway the coverage so far afforded to Operation Fast & Furious.

Media Matters, the propaganda operation funded by the globalist George Soros, claims reportage on the growing scandal is some sort of right-wing conspiracy and defends the mendacity of government bureaucrats who have made excuses for the illegal operations.

Obama has said AG Holder was not aware of Fast & Furious, so it is safe to assume the Holder and the Justice Department will claim they know nothing about Operation Castaway as well.

As noted by Joseph Alan Sanchez writing for Infowars.com on Tuesday, the U.S. has shipped weapons south of the border for over a decade.

“For at least a decade now, covert operation specialist Celerino ‘Cele’ Castillo III has been telling the world that the U.S. has been shipping guns south of the border on a regular basis as a sidebar to revelations of drug running from South America into North America. And now in the summer of 2011, the BATF is under fire for observing the sale and distribution of machine guns into Mexico. Congressional testimony in recent months is revealing a calculated plan called Operation Fast and Furious,” writes Sanchez.

Adding weight to Castillo’s accusation, one of the kingpins of the infamous Los Zetas drug running gang, Rejón Aguilar, told Mexican federal police earlier this month that the group purchased its weapons directly from U.S. government officials.

For his truth telling efforts and his Iran Contra whistleblowing, Castillo was convicted in 2008 on federal charges of dealing firearms without a license in a case marked by numerous irregularities and peculiar coincidences that raised the specter of a frame-up.

Despite the denials, congressional Republicans believe the Fast & Furious scandal reaches the highest levels of the Justice Department.

They have asked the attorney general’s office to turn over a sweeping trove of emails, documents and other material to determine Washington’s role in the “reckless” operation that allowed U.S. semiautomatic weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It should be obvious by now that the ATF is a renegade federal agency. Hearings should be held immediately calling for its decertification and the systematic disarming of its agents.

“Let’s transform them back into the stamp clerks (suitable for affixing labels on wine and whiskey bottles) that they once were. Then the only harm they can inflict on the body politic would be paper cuts,” writes Charles Heller, Executive Director of Jews For The Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

“Take away their badges. Badges are symbols of honor from a country as great as ours. BATFE Agents can carry business cards, like any other overpaid, tax consuming, foot dragging bureaucrat. Let’s convert these morally challenged individuals from jackboots to fur boots, or at least gumshoes without guns,” Heller concludes.

In addition to providing weapons to violent drug cartels favored by bankers, the Fast & Furious operation was cooked up to make it appear Americans legally selling firearms are engaged in criminal activity.

Democrats have wasted little time blaming the Second Amendment for the violence spawned by Mexican drug cartels and gangs using weapons provided by the U.S. government.

In June, Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, tried to affix blame on law-abiding Americans.

His effort, however, was doomed to failure – at least in the “rightwing” media singled out by Media Matters and its patron, George Soros – when news of the complicity of the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and a renegade ATF hit the streets.

“Let’s Arm The Mexican Drug Cartels With Thousands Of Guns And Continue To Leave The Border Completely Wide Open”

End of the American Dream

How in the world are Americans living in the southwest United States supposed to sleep peacefully at night when the U.S. government has given thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels and continues to leave the border completely wide open? The brutality and viciousness of Mexican drug cartels is almost beyond description, and yet the U.S. government has armed them to the teeth and does next to nothing to stop their incursions into U.S. territory. "Project Gunrunner" was supposed to be a U.S. government initiative to fight the flow of guns into Mexico. Instead, it has now come out that ATF agents were ordered to facilitate the acquisition of thousands of U.S. guns by Mexican drug cartels and then halt surveillance on where those guns where going. One of these operations was known as "Fast and Furious" and the revelations that are now coming out have Congress in an uproar. If the full truth about what has been going on is revealed to the American people it is going to turn Washington D.C. upside down. (Read More.....)

Obama Administration Caught Running False Flag Against Second Amendment

Most damning evidence indicates Operation Fast and Furious was a deliberate assault on gun rights

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, June 24, 2011

Despite the Obama administration’s best efforts to characterize Operation Fast and Furious, a recently revealed ATF program that sought to put U.S.-based firearms into the hands of Mexican drug smugglers, as little more than a ‘screw up’, the most damning evidence strongly indicates that the whole operation was in fact an attempt to launch a false flag assault on the second amendment rights of the American people.

Under Operation Fast and Furious, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives “Sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.” Some of the weapons were later used to kill US Border Patrol agents like Brian Terry.

An editorial posted at Investors.com this week asks, Was Fast And Furious A Gun-Control Plot?, a reasonable assumption to make given the fact that Obama has openly revealed his administration’s plans to sabotage the second amendment by stealth.

“Rather than a botched attempt to catch criminals, was the ATF program actually an attempt to advance gun-control efforts by an administration that has blamed Mexican violence on easy access to U.S. weapons?” asks the author.

“If “Operation Fast and Furious” was merely a botched attempt at law enforcement, why was a supervisor of the operation, David Voth, “jovial, if not, not giddy but just delighted about” marked guns showing up at crime scenes in Mexico, as career Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Dodson told Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee?”

The Obama administration and the ATF claim that the program was part of a sting operation to catch leading Mexican drug runners, and yet it’s admitted that the government stopped tracking the firearms as soon as they reached the border, defeating the entire object of the mission, unless the mission was about pushing through gun control in the US and had nothing to do with the drug war.

That would also explain why ATF agents like James Casa were repeatedly ordered to stand down and not seize the firearms, while the Obama administration failed to even inform Mexican authorities of the program’s existence.

Unbelievably, both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder maintain that they had no knowledge of the operation until it became public, and no one will admit to authorizing it. ATF Acting Chief Ken Melson is “strongly resisting pressure” to resign over the program, claiming that he is being used as a “fall guy” to take the blame and make the controversy disappear.

However, the notion that the Obama administration would deliberately implement a program they knew could later be used to demonize gun rights is hardly conspiratorial given the fact that Obama himself told gun control advocate Sarah Brady earlier this year that his administration was working “under the radar” to sneak attack the second amendment.

During a March 30 meeting between Jim and Sarah Brady and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, at which Obama “dropped in,” the president reportedly told Brady, “I just want you to know that we are working on it (gun control)….We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

The quote appeared in an April 11 Washington Post story about Obama’s gun control czar Steve Croley.

There also seems to be little motivation on behalf of the US government to catch drug smuggling kingpins in Mexico by way of sting operations involving firearms given the fact that those same kingpins are in many cases working for US intelligence itself.

As we reported years ago, former DEA agent Cele Castillo has blown the whistle on how the US government controls the Los Zetas drug smuggling gang and uses it as the front group for their narco-empire.

With the gang having first been trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, Castillo affirms that Los Zetas are still working for the US government in protecting drug routes to keep the wheels of Wall Street well-oiled. Castillo has gone on the record to state that the commandos are working directly for the US government drug cartel in carrying out hits on rival drug smugglers who aren’t paying their cut.

In addition, it was recently revealed that Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, the “logistical coordinator” for another top Mexican drug-trafficking gang, Sinaloa, the organization responsible for purchasing the CIA torture jet that crashed with four tons on cocaine on board back in 2007, also obtained guns from the U.S. that were later used to kill people in Mexico City. Niebla recently told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago that he has been working for the U.S. government since January 2004.

The Obama administration has repeatedly invoked rhetoric about the flow of guns being smuggled from the U.S. into Mexico as a talking point with which to chill gun rights of American citizens, repeating the demonstrably false myth that 90% of weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities originate in the U.S.

Before his election, Obama attracted the fury of gun rights activists when he said that Americans frustrated with the declining economy “cling to guns or religion” as a means of relieving their stress.

Just months into his term in the Oval Office, Obama told Mexican President Felipe Calderon that the U.S. was to blame for much of Mexico’s drug violence because of firearms that were purchased in America.

“I will not pretend that this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. The demand for these drugs in the United States is what’s helping keep these cartels in business,” Obama told Calderon during a press conference. “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

Back in April, the administration failed in its bid to push through a law that would have mandated licensed gun dealers in the southwestern states to “file reports with BAFTE on all sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles larger than a .22 caliber”.

Given the Obama administration’s open hostility to the second amendment, with Obama himself promising to launch a sneak attack against the second amendment “under the radar” shortly before the details of Fast and Furious were made public, coupled with the highly suspicious methods employed during the program itself, and added to the US government’s history of controlling Mexican drug lords, there seems little doubt that the entire scope of the mission was to launch a false flag against the second amendment, one that has thankfully failed due to the program being revealed by whistleblowers.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.