Tag: mexico

I’m confused about this Mexican Cobalt-60 theft case.

So they found that cobalt-60 that got stolen, and now they’re looking for the corpses of the guys that stole it (they apparently opened up the box, which is NOT A GOOD IDEA TO DO WHEN COBALT-60 IS INSIDE THE BOX). Two things: one, my sympathies for what happened to the robbers is not infinite:

The cargo truck, equipped with a crane, was nearing its destination in the darkness early Tuesday, several hours before the storage facility opened. While waiting for daybreak at a gas station in the state of Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, the drivers were jumped by two gunmen who beat them and stole the truck, said Mardonio Jimenez, a physicist and high-ranking official with Mexico’s nuclear safety commission.

I wouldn’t have sentenced them to death for assault and battery, but it’s not like they got mailed the cobalt-60 by mistake, and opened up the box in their living room. Continue reading I’m confused about this Mexican Cobalt-60 theft case.

Mexican narco-terrorists vs. Mexican vigilantes.

Via Instapundit, this is not particularly good news:

AYUTLA, Mexico—Masked men, rifles slung over their shoulders, stand guard on a lonely rural road, checking IDs and questioning travelers. They wear no uniforms, flash no badges, but they are the law here now.

A dozen villages in the area have risen up in armed revolt against local drug traffickers that have terrorized the region and a government that residents say is incapable of protecting them from organized crime.

The villages in the hilly southern Mexican state of Guerrero now forbid the Mexican army and state and federal police from entering. Ragtag militias carrying a motley arsenal of machetes, old hunting rifles and the occasional AR-15 semiautomatic rifle control the towns. Strangers aren’t allowed entry. There is a 10 p.m. curfew. More than 50 prisoners, accused of being in drug gangs, sit in makeshift jails. Their fates hinge on public trials that began Thursday when the accused were arraigned before villagers, who will act as judge and jury.

Continue reading Mexican narco-terrorists vs. Mexican vigilantes.

Barack Obama tacitly admits Eric Holder is as guilty as sin about Operation Fast & Furious…

…in other words, the former is having the latter stay on as Attorney General.

President Obama is holding on to Eric Holder as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, The Post has learned.

The newly re-elected president asked his controversial attorney general to stay for the second term, and Holder has agreed despite enduring a firestorm of criticism from Republican lawmakers.

Because, of course, now that the election is over Democratic lawmakers no longer need to worry about offending the sensibilities of Mexican-American voters (I’ve had folks argue privately that they never were worried about offending said sensibilities; I see their point, but do not share it). So if you were hoping for any kind of justice, here, stop hoping that the Democrats will be involved.  It’s Issa or nobody, at this point.

Continue reading Barack Obama tacitly admits Eric Holder is as guilty as sin about Operation Fast & Furious…

A look at the horrific, graphic Univision Fast & Furious excerpt.

The below is not the entire Univision Operation Fast & Furious expose: it’s merely about ten minutes of it.  Ten very graphic, very infuriating, and very embarrassing ten minutes of it.  Don’t watch it if you have a physical/mental problem with seeing people being murdered on-screen, and for real:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y1Zz3otzos

(see also this ABC article)

It’s a useful primer for what happened: which is to say, Mexican drug cartels decided to buy guns from US shops and the US government (ATF Special Agent William Newell* is mentioned by name, but he’s not the only one caught up in this mess) decided to not only let them; they decided to track illegal gun sales by waiting to see when and where guns known to have been sold illegally showed up at Mexican crime scenes.

Please pause for a moment to think about it.  And possibly participate in a calming exercise. Continue reading A look at the horrific, graphic Univision Fast & Furious excerpt.

#rsrh If you follow me (@moelane) on Twitter then you know…

…that I spent the time period from 7 to 8 being heavily impressed with Univision’s coverage of Operation Fast & Furious, despite the fact that I don’t speak Spanish and I was counting on people doing running translations for me.  I will have to sit down and watch the whole thing again once it’s subtitled, but this is my first takeaway: Univision made a compelling case that the US government is stonewalling any kind of meaningful investigation into what the hell happened, and it did so all the more powerfully by not taking a partisan political side.

But I will. I am with Paul Ryan on this:  FIRE ERIC HOLDER.  NOW.  And note that we’ve all been saying this for over a year at this point.

More details about tomorrow’s Univision expose of Operation Fast & Furious.

Background: the Spanish-language media organization Univision has apparently been building up quite the head of steam over Operation Fast & Furious, which was an operation where we blithely let guns get handed over to Mexican narco-terrorist gangs with precisely zero oversight, hesitation, or interest in what said gangs would do with said weapons.  What they did with them, of course, was to use those guns to murder Mexican nationals.  The administration is stonewalling the investigation into all this (particularly the investigation into US Border Agent Brian Terry’s murder, as OF&F guns showed up at the murder scene); and Univision is promising a long, hard look at the ongoing debacle tomorrow.

And that look promises to be a doozy.  From the Christian Science Monitor: Continue reading More details about tomorrow’s Univision expose of Operation Fast & Furious.

#rsrh The missing pieces of the WaPo’s ‘fact-checking’ of Obama’s Operation Fast & Furious remarks.

It’s a miracle that we got three Pinocchios out of them, frankly.  Anyway, here are three things missing from the WaPo critique:

  1. Operation Wide Receiver attempted to track the guns that had been allowed to be sold to suspected gun-runners; Operation Fast & Furious did not.
  2. Operation Wide Receiver was done in cooperation with the Mexican government; Operation Fast & Furious did not*.
  3. Several hundred Mexicans (minimum) also died because of Operation Fast & Furious.

These are all significant details – and the lack of mention of Mexican casualties is particularly egregious, given that Obama’s original lie was made in a Latino forum hosted by a Spanish-language television network. Poor form, Washington Post: poor form.  C-, and do better next time.

Moe Lane

*The source for those two differences? Eric Holder.

Via:

Oversight Chair Darrell Issa makes Justice Department perfidy part of the official Operation Fast & Furious record.

A ways down below the fold is a description of a wiretap application by the Department of Justice (not the wiretap application itself) that had been provided to the House Oversight Committee by a whistle-blower, in response to Oversight’s investigation of the Justice Department’s Operation Fast & Furious debacle.  The information found in it would normally be not accessible to anybody outside of the committee – the information that it is describing is under court seal – but Oversight Chair Darrell Issa put said description in the Congressional Record, secure in the knowledge that the Speech & Debate Clause of the Constitution almost certainly protects him from any sort of retribution.  And, since it’s in the Congressional Record, it’s now by definition in the public record.

So let’s go. Continue reading Oversight Chair Darrell Issa makes Justice Department perfidy part of the official Operation Fast & Furious record.

Reminder: the NRA will score Holder contempt vote.

I’m not sure why I missed this at the time – the letter’s dated June 20th – but it’s official: “the NRA will consider this vote in [their] candidate evaluations.”  That doesn’t guarantee a contempt charge passing the House, but only because a contempt charge was already guaranteed.  For all the loose and charged rhetoric going around, if Speaker Boehner wasn’t going to let Oversight Chair Issa go forward with this it wouldn’t have gone forward, and Boehner wouldn’t have let this gone forward if the votes weren’t there in the first place.  What this does guarantee is that a lot of the House Democrats who bitterly cling to their high NRA scores like so many floatation devices are now going to have to choose what’s more important; the President, or their own careers.  Jim Matheson of Utah is merely the first to break under the strain (via Hot Air).  Seeing who else similarly back-stabs the President tomorrow should be entertaining. Continue reading Reminder: the NRA will score Holder contempt vote.

The non-smoking gun Operation Fast & Furious video.

This is going around as a smoking gun on Operation Fast & Furious…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L54gOgJxIRQ&feature=player_embedded

…only, it’s not really one.  It’s a press conference about Project Gunrunner, which was/is our general program for stopping illegal weapons traffic to Mexico.  If you watch the video, you’ll see that they’re talking about tracing the guns (Operation Fast & Furious did not), coordinating with the Mexican authorities (Operation Fast & Furious did not), and generally maintaining government oversight over the entire operation (if you believe the administration, Operation Fast & Furious did not).  Not really the same thing, in other words. Continue reading The non-smoking gun Operation Fast & Furious video.