opinion@dailylobo.com
Security on the U.S.-Mexico border is problematic, to put it lightly, and there have been continued federal efforts to try and secure the situation. However, gun-walking — the process of allowing cartels to indirectly purchase weapons in the United States, and allowing those weapons to move across the border in the hopes of tracking the cartels through those purchases — is arguably the wrong way of going about it.
Currently, there is a massive investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Operation Fast and Furious, which resulted in U.S.-purchased weapons being used to kill both Mexicans and Americans between 2009 and 2011. So far, inquiries have been hampered by a lack of cooperation on the part of both the attorney general and the president. However, a recent investigative report by Univision has unveiled new facts that lend credence to calls for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation and President Obama’s impeachment.
First, I must mention that the inspiration for Fast and Furious came from Operation Wide Receiver, a gun-walking initiative that began in 2006 under the Bush administration, and that the Obama administration did not invent gun-walking. However, the Obama administration did expand the scope of gun-walking, as the new report by Univision confirms, setting up Operation Castaway in the southeastern United States and channeling guns into Honduras and Colombia. For this column though, I will focus solely on Fast and Furious.
The scandal on Fast and Furious broke in January 2011 and inquiries have been ongoing. However, it was this year that controversy surrounding Attorney General Holder, head of the Department of Justice, began to emerge, when Holder claimed he and the president had no knowledge of Fast and Furious, and that it was pursued independently by the ATF.
President Obama has also been included in that controversy by citing executive privilege in order to withhold DOJ documents crucial to the investigation. The mainstream media are to blame as well, because no major network has been pursuing investigations to uncover more facts. They have only been rehashing the same facts and commenting upon the ensuing controversy. Instead, Univision, a Spanish-language network not viewed by the majority of Americans, took up the investigative challenge.
In the Univision report released last week, many new facts have surfaced. However, I will detail only two here for reasons of space, and to encourage readers to watch the report on their own.
First, Mexican military reports show that three guns from Fast and Furious were used in the Salvarcar massacre in Ciudad Juárez back in 2010, resulting in the death of 15 teenagers and the wounding of 12 more by gunmen from the La Linea cartel. These guns crossed the border near Columbus, N.M.
Second, by comparing the serial numbers of guns seized by the Mexican government and guns used in Fast and Furious, Univision identified 57 additional weapons that had not been mentioned in previous reports before Congress. They were seized at the sites of murders, kidnappings and at least one other massacre.
With these facts in hand, the hesitant behavior of the administration is clearly explained: The administration is responsible for these incidents, if only through failing to monitor the ATF’s activities closely enough rather than authorizing these programs outright, and is also guilty of expanding said questionable gun-walking programs into additional countries where the same tragedies that occurred in Mexico could be repeated. The administration realizes that once the full facts are released, the calls for resignations and impeachments will be publicly justified, and a major loss of legitimacy will follow — especially if two of the most important government officials didn’t know what one of their agencies was doing.
The last instance of this magnitude was the Watergate scandal under President Nixon. It resulted in a Supreme Court suit over the use of executive privilege to hide audiotapes crucial to an investigation. Nixon lost because executive privilege was ruled to be outweighed by the larger public good concerning a criminal case within the government. Nixon’s full dealings were revealed, and he was forced to resign in the face of an impending impeachment and possible criminal charges.
The truth behind the Fast and Furious scandal arguably fits that precedent of the public good outweighing executive privilege, due to the many deaths of Mexicans and Americans coming as a direct result of the operation. Obama is afraid the same pattern of impeachment will repeat itself should the facts come to light, and thus he is doing his best to prevent that from happening, especially in an election year.
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