September 29, 2011
July 26, 2011
ATF sting turns into arms pipeline for drug gang
Operation Fast and Furious may have been intended to work as a trap for gun smugglers but appears to have become a reliable source of guns for Mexican gangsters:
Congressional investigators examining a gun-trafficking sting investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious have identified 122 weapons linked to the operation that have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to a report they are expected to release Tuesday.
The report, which offers new details about the operation, lists 48 occasions between November 2009 and February 2011 in which Mexican authorities found one or more such weapons, based on internal e-mails of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose Phoenix office set up the operation. It was compiled by the staffs of Representative Darrell Issa of California and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the two Republicans leading the investigation.
“The faulty design of Operation Fast and Furious led to tragic consequences,” the report concludes. “Countless United States and Mexican citizens suffered as a result.”
June 23, 2011
More on Mexico’s plight
With the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives losing control of their crack-brained “Operation Fast and Furious” (aka “Gunwalker”), you’d think that the firearm problem in Mexico has gotten worse. Even if the low estimate of 2500 weapons delivered to the narcotrafficers is accurate (most think it’s at least 4 times that number), it barely puts a dent in the extent of Mexico’s problems:
By now it should be clear that the Mexican drug cartels have taken over the country. They’ve murdered journalists, politicians, judges, businessmen, police, soldiers and each other, with impunity. Their control is so complete that they’ve set up roadblocks to extort blood money from anyone bold enough to believe they have the right to travel freely. They’ve murdered so many people that they’ve resorted to dumping lifeless bodies into mass graves.
Every single day, there’s a fresh story of murder and mayhem. Today, it’s “Eight Bodies Found in Mountains in Northern Mexico” and “Gunmen Kidnap 7 from Drug Rehab Center in Northern Mexico”. The crime-related casualties number in the tens of thousands. That’s to say nothing of the thousands physically and psychologically maimed by torture, or the millions of Mexican living in fear, denied their basic human rights. The Taliban have nothing on these guys.
In other words, adding a few thousand guns from American sources isn’t even a drop in the bucket as far as Mexico’s real problems are concerned:
The ATF purposely mislead Americans to believe that “90 percent of Mexican cartels guns come from Bob’s Gun Store.” That lie was exposed: 88 percent of guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities and successfully submitted for trace to the ATF came from America. (Not necessarily American gun dealers either, BTW). How many qualifiers can you stick in a stat to make it bark like a dog? More importantly, the total population of guns confiscated by the Mexicans in that stat was 30,000.
Now consider the fact that the Mexican police and military are thoroughly corrupt. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that these two entities have supplied the drug cartels with majority of their box fresh military-grade weapons. Weapons that American and foreign weapons makers sold to the Mexican authorities legally. And that means the Mexican have no reason to confiscate any weapons — other than creating a little security theater and transferring ownership from one cartel to another.
June 20, 2011
Operation Gunrunner
Also from the latest Libertarian Enterprise:
BATFE started Operation Fast and Furious, now better known as Gunrunner, as a sting to catch people smuggling weapons to the narcotraficantes in Mexico. They ran into a problem. Gun dealers in the area involved “made” the straw men buyers and called the BATFE to report these types. ATFE told the gun dealers not to worry and sell the guns. Not ten or twenty times, not a couple of hundred times like a reasonable person would expect. The lowest figure I’ve seen is about 2,500, enough weapons for a small brigade.
Let us clearly summarize this idea, the ATFE ordered law abiding American merchants to arm a brigade of criminals.
In effect ATFE armed an army of murderers, rapists, extortionists, and slavers who financed their actions by smuggling drugs into the US. This has helped destabilize the government of Mexico and led to the terrorizing of the honest working people of that nation. The last time I checked such behavior constitutes an act of war. Either it is the policy of the United States to destabilize the government of friendly nations ( given some of the stunts we’ve pulled this is less unreasonable than it ought to be) or elements of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abused their police authority in the United States to conduct a filibuster (look up original meeting) against Mexico. Not only that, they did so with the approval and support of Attorney General Eric Holder.
December 22, 2010
In Soviet America, bank robs you!
All joking aside, how is this allowed to happen?
The NYT reports on a growing phenomenon of wrongful foreclosure by US banks on homeowners who are caught up on their mortgage payments — and on homeowners who have no mortgage at all. In some cases, homeowners return from vacation to discover their locks changed and their every earthly possession sent to the dump (one woman lost her dead husband’s ashes when her bank burgled her ski chalet). Prominent in the list of banksters who rob innocent people of their homes and all their belongings? Those upright guardians of morality at Bank of America, who have decided that their customers can’t choose to contribute to Wikileaks’s defense fund.
H/T for the headline to commenter “Doramia“.
October 8, 2010
The next Charles Stross novel, Rule 34
From an interview with CultureLab:
I am putting the finishing touches on Rule 34, as in rule 34 of the internet, which says if you can imagine it, there’s a porn community around it somewhere on the internet. It’s my big gay near-future Scottish police procedural, featuring alarming and innovative business models for organised crime, Gangster 2.0 and iMob. Most business models for organised crime would be familiar to Al Capone, so the California venture capital community is funding criminal start-ups with new models. It’s about 15 years out, and about 90 per cent of it is familiar right now, but the other 10 per cent will be unspeakably weird and strange, and perhaps 1 per cent of that will be beyond your imagination. It will be published next year.
August 11, 2010
QotD: Treating politicians correctly
First off, every Congressman should be treated like a known member of the Mafia — we know the person is a criminal and we just don’t have the evidence yet though we’ll be working on it. Every Congressmen should have FBI agents assigned to tail him and report on everything he is doing. Everything a Congressman does and says should be recorded and made publicly available as well. As a trade-off to being some idiot spending trillions of our dollars, you have absolutely no expectation of privacy while in office. If you can’t deal, don’t be in Congress. And because these people create the laws, it should apply even more so to them. If they are ever convicted of anything, they automatically should get their sentence doubled.
Right now Congress gets this idea they are better than us when really they’re just idiots who meddle in things while other people actually do all the useful work in this country. It’s time we treated them like lesser people with less rights and more suspicion. Then maybe they’ll know their place.
Frank J. Fleming, “We Need to Treat Congress More Like Crooks”, IMAO, 2010-08-11
August 9, 2010
Lovely little bit of legal legerdemain
Colby Cosh points out that Catch-22 was really a highly accurate predictor of Canadian law:
To put it another way, you can conceivably be tried for “participating in or contributing to” a criminal organization even if it didn’t get around to committing any crimes, you didn’t do anything to help it actually commit crimes, you didn’t know what particular crimes it might be thinking of committing, and you couldn’t possibly pick anybody else in the group out of a lineup.
This might seem to make things pretty easy for the police and the prosecutors. Nonsense! According to them, their job can never be easy enough. Like farmers and civil servants, they cease complaining only intermittently to inhale oxygen, and there is no shortage of Joint Multi-Level Integrated Discussion Committees before which they can retail their grievances.
[. . .]
Justice Minister Nicholson, in introducing the new schedule of patently less serious and mostly victimless “serious offences” on Wednesday, offered a dazzlingly simple heuristic: “The fact that an offence is committed by a criminal organization makes it a serious crime.” You will note that this introduces a curious logical circularity into our manner of upholding justice. How does the law define a “criminal organization”? See above: a criminal organization is a group of people that bands together to commit serious crimes. How do we know what a serious crime is? It’s any activity that is characteristic of criminal organizations. What, you thought Catch-22 was fiction?
March 22, 2010
QotD: American drug warriors will fight to the last Mexican civilian
The astonishing argument from U.S. drug warriors to the violence in Juárez to this point has been: the bloodshed means we’re winning. Or put another way, “If thousands of Mexican need to die to keep Americans from getting high, by golly I, American drug war official, am willing to step up and make that sacrifice.” Now that a few Americans have been killed too, that argument will get more difficult to make.
But as O’Grady writes, don’t expect that to lead to any common sense changes in policy. To this point, the Obama administration and the leadership in Congress have made it clear that the only acceptable drug policy in Mexico is more militarization, more force, and more American funding and weapons with which to do it. If thousands more Mexicans have to die on the front lines so America’s politicians can make it marginally more difficult for Americans to ingest mind-altering substances, so be it.
Radley Balko, “Mary O’Grady on Mexico’s Drug War”, The Agitator, 2010-03-22
February 20, 2010
Prohibition’s victims of US government poisoning
Deborah Blum talks about something I’d only heard a little bit about — the US government’s deliberate poisoning of illicit drinkers during Prohibition:
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”
The US government hasn’t shown that it learned (any of) the lessons of Prohibition, and there have been documented attempts by government agents to contaminate drugs on their way to American destinations. Perhaps the best known was the use of airborne spraying of the herbicide Paraquat to make Mexican marijuana more dangerous to consume. Rumours abound of other, more recent, attempts to poison other drugs on their way to the States.
December 14, 2009
This is interesting . . .
Charles Stross links to this story:
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutionsAntonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.
July 25, 2009
QotD: the last honest trash collector
There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence. We actually have experiential evidence about this. In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the ’70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn’t resonate much with you. Many of your friends probably drive Humber Super Snipers, or perhaps not. [Laughs.] That’s certainly one thing that we’re headed for. The other thing is that there’s a very good reason that governments aren’t supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What’s another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you’re in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob. Ford is like the last honest trash collector in the New York metropolitan area, the last one that’s not mobbed-up. How long is that gonna go on for?
P.J. O’Rourke interviewed by Gregg LaGambina, A.V. Club, 2009-07-16
