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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Was Fast and Furious Not About Gun Control?

An interesting article turned up on the Blaze today, about a high ranking member of the Sinaloa drug cartel alleging that F&F was not what we think it was. 
It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.

The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges.
Nobody with an IQ above freezer temperature thinks F&F was ever about tracking guns.  Maybe the Bush version, which actually put tracking hardware in the guns, but everyone admits the Obama/Holder F&F guns were lost as soon as they left the country.  Realistically, they were lost as soon as they left the stores.  

Now Zambada-Niebla is not exactly up there in the realm of great character witnesses, right?  I mean, he is a logistician for the Sinaloa cartel, and desperately trying to win his freedom.  But there actually is some background that argues there might be truth here. According to the Blaze story:
Also, U.S. officials have previously acknowledged working with the Sinaloa Cartel through another informant Humberto Loya-Castro. He is also allegedly a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel as well as a close confidant and lawyer of “El Chapo” Guzman.
So this doesn't seem to be something completely out of the blue.  Perhaps it's just another side to a story that is leaking out. 

Let's speculate on this for a minute.  The US would provide guns to Sinaloa; for information.  Then the US would use the info to kill off the competing cartels, yet another benefit to Sinaloa.  It seems that Sinaloa is getting all the benefits, and giving up nothing of value to them.  In fact, it seems that what the US DOJ/DEA offered Sinaloa was unrestricted access to the US drug markets - apparently for nothing. 

So Sinaloa cartel got everything, and the US got nothing out of this?  Possibly, DOJ/DEA got only one cartel to deal with, and once the others were gone, they could "nuke" this one and be done with all of the cartels.  If that was their plan, I have a bridge I'd like to sell them.

Was it just for money?  Did the DOJ/DEA/whoever make a deal to hand the drug market in the US over to the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for money?  Did the DOJ sell us out for money from the cartels?  Which was it: epic stupidity or epic corruption? 
The claims seem to fall in line with statements made last month by Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico who said U.S. agencies ”don’t fight drug traffickers,“ instead ”they try to manage the drug trade.”
With an estimated 3000 Mexicans killed in the state of Sinaloa alone, including police, you can understand the Mexican state officials being upset with this.
Soldiers and police officers guard packages of seized marijuana during a presentation for the media in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

This could be an interesting trial - if it happens.  The Fed.gov is predictably playing the national security card, but the few terse statements and denials that they make seem to hint this isn't all bull crap.

I also want to note that even if this is true, it still doesn't mean the plan behind F&F was not intended to give leverage for gun seizure or control.  It could have been a happy "two-fer". 


8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. yet another modified limited hang out - but tertiary at most - and again, limited.

    itor

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  3. Here's another twofer: The Colorado shooter's father Robert Holmes developed bank fraud detection software for FICO as his job. If Robert Holmes had developed some program that could blow the lid off the LIBOR scandal, it's possible someone could have poisoned his son with some kind of goofer dust, and either framed him up or pushed him somehow to do that shooting, as either a warning or a punishment to the father.

    We'll probably never know, but it seems odd to me that a kid who was smart enough to have gotten all the way into a Ph.D program but with no military experience would go nuts, think he was the Joker, amass on a student Ramen budget (I assume that based on he was living in a crappy apartment in a a slum) an arsenal costing probably well over $10K, booby trap his own apartment like someone might in a war zone in the Middle East, put on a mask, and shoot all those people; and then just tell police about the booby traps. He also looked drugged at his arraignment hearing.

    The other question nobody is asking is, where did he get the flash grenades or the explosives to wire his apartment? You can't just buy that on the street or at the local gun shop.

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    1. I spent a little time down this rabbit hole. Interesting speculations for sure.

      When the story first broke, I said something like the second paragraph ("seems odd to me that a kid who was smart enough to have gotten all the way into a Ph.D program but with no military experience would go nuts, think he was the Joker, amass on a student Ramen budget"). There's a piece of the story I haven't got: did he buy all this on a credit card he planned on defaulting on, or did he use real money?

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  4. It's probably about both gun control and the drug trade. That way the Gooberment had a diversion. If it was discovered they could scream look over there, which the LSM has done so well for this administration.

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  5. Another onre down the memory hole in 6 mo.In 1970 SHOCK! The CIA uses the vietnam war as cover to smuggle heroin out of the golden triangle.SHOCK! 1982 the US uses the war in El Salvidor to smuggle heroin AND cocain IN and GUNS out of the US. SHOCK guns to IRAN(1983). This has gone on with every president from AT least WW2( Yer old egnough and smart egnough to know this, so why the big GASP!) Ray

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  6. Ray - Anon 0715 - has an excellent point: the fed.gov has been using illegal drug dealing as a way to fund black projects for a long time. It's one of the reasons drug prohibition is still in place.

    It just adds more reason to think this little slime ball could be telling the truth (slime ball = Zambada-Niebla - the cartel guy in the story).

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  7. When I worked for San Diego PD, I was the "uniform" on three drug busts involving DEA. None of them went to trial. Not one. And, before someone says that DEA simply didn't need my testimony, allow me to inform you that I was the one to find the cash and cocaine in one of the busts. To this day I don't know whether or not they intentionally "missed" finding it or not.

    Based on what I heard from some other guys in the department, that was a very common thing, at least in San Diego.

    Money. Control. IOUs (favors done for favors received). Anyone who thinks it is about stopping drugs is too naive to breathe without assistance.

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