Culpable Either Way
Attorney General Eric Holder is sticking to his guns, not the ones he didn’t know were being smuggled into Mexico, about his ignorance of the existence of Operation Fast and Furious. A two year operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives that allowed, and often facilitated, the purchase of two thousand firearms in the U.S. which were then smuggled into Mexico to bolster the Mexican drug cartels. The operation’s purpose was to be able to track the smuggled weapons back to senior members of Mexican drug cartels and hold them responsible for gun smuggling, but the operation was a flop and only a few petty gun runners were arrested.
The ATF is an agency that is responsible to Holder’s Justice Department, and the claimed unawareness of Holder in regard to the two year gun running operation is suspect. OFF firearms were found at over 170 violent crime scenes in Mexico and were used in the murder of 150 Mexicans and one U.S. border agent. Congressional and Senate Republicans are claiming that Holder was not only fully aware of the operation, but he received five memos from the ATF detailing the status of the operation. Thus Holder was either incompetent and unaware of a massive gun smuggling operation conducted by his own agency, or was completely aware of the operation’s existence and is now lying to the entire nation. Either way Holder, the ATF, and possibly more people within the Administration are culpable for the crimes hence committed, and the furtherance of outcries from the Administration against either Pakistan or Iran for smuggling weapons into Afghanistan and Iraq seems quite ludicrous given the propensity of our own government to export death into a neighboring country.
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Tyler Brown is a graduate student in History from Poplar Bluff, Missouri. He is a member of the Ole Miss Chapter of Young Americans for Liberty and a contributor to UMFreedom.com.
