Is Obama Admin Fabricating Iranian Assassination Plot To Distract From Fast & Furious Investigation? ………

U.S Government Smuggled Missles, Grenades And Other Military Grade Weapons To Mexico Drug Cartels …….

 Alexander Higgins – July 23, 2011 at 2:36 am – Permalink – Source via Alexander Higgins Blog

The U.S government weapons smuggling scandal grown from a simple gun smuggling scandal into a full blown military grade weapons smuggling scandal following the arrest of a Zetas cartel leader.  Law enforcement officials report the U.S government has supplied the Zetas cartel with, among other things, “an array of military grade weapons, grenade and grenade launchers, high-powered rifles, body armor, anti-aircraft missiles, and night vision goggles.”

The nation was shocked when  the U.S government was caught red handed smuggling guns to drug cartels in Mexico after government supplied guns were linked to the murders of law enforcement officials working along the U.S. Mexico border.

The scandal deepened when the hacker group ‘Anonymous’ leaked reported government documents on the Internet which appear to show that the leader of the La Familia cartel in Mexico was actually the feds point man for the gun smuggling operation.  Although the revelations revealed in data release was not confirmed by the Obama administration the information became part of a congressional investigation into the scandal.

Soon after the news of La Familia cartel scandal broke, the leader of the Zetas cartel leader Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, aka El Mamito was arrested in Mexico. During an interrogation by the police, El Mamito stated  the Zetas cartel was exclusively supplied guns by the U.S. government.

Critics charged that while the Obama administration was smuggling guns to criminals they were using the violence perpetrated by those same criminals as a justification to take guns away from U.S. citizens.

As the congressional investigation into the scandal continued  new discovered evidence revealed the government gun smuggling operations were not limited to Mexico. In fact, congressional leaders uncovered  a sister operation ran out of Florida being used to smuggle guns into Puerto Rico and Honduras.

As the Obama officials moved to distance themselves from the growing  scandal Kenneth Melson, the ATF’s acting director, came forward and accused the Justice Department covering up evidence to shield officials from the scandal.

Today comes reports that  a wide array of U.S. government military grade equipment is being stashed in safe houses inside of the U.S., that that controlled and owned by the Zetas drug cartel, from where they are smuggled into Mexico.

According to conservative examiner Anthony Martin, “The weapons stashes discovered b law enforcement, Border Patrol, and other agencies contain ample evidence of dozens of ‘smoking guns’–literally and symbolically–that prove the cartel is in the weapons smuggling business. However, the cartel has more than just smoking guns.”

Martin’s  labeling of the weapons as ‘more than just smoking guns’ just may be the understatement of the year

“The El Paso Times reported that officials have discovered an array of military grade weapons, grenade and grenade launchers, high-powered rifles, body armor, anti-aircraft missiles, and night vision goggles,” writes Martin, “The nature of the weapons that have been discovered would seem to confirm suspicions that the cartel obtains these weapons from the U.S. Government.”

Martin quotes the El Paso Times:

“Jesús Rejón Aguilar, the number three man in the Zeta’s hierarchy, disclosed last week that the Zetas bought weapons in the United States and transported them across the Rio Grande. Mexican federal authorities captured Rejón on July 3 in the state of Mexico, and presented him to the news media the next day. His recorded video statement was uploaded on YouTube.

[Former CIA Agent Phil] Jordan agreed with Plumlee’s allegations that the Zetas are operating in the Columbus-Palomas border.

Plumlee, who has testified before U.S. congressional committees about arms and drug trafficking, said the roads in Southern New Mexico provide smugglers easy access to Mexico’s highway networks.

This is very strong evidence and brings the gun smuggling operations to an entirely new level as the military grade weapons are being used by the cartels to commit acts of terrorism in Mexico and inside the United States.

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Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico

http://narcosphere.narconews.com

 

Posted by Bill Conroy – February 12, 2011 at 8:44 pm

The Big Clubs in Mexico’s Drug War Aren’t Slipping Through the Gun-Show Loophole

Another series of leaked State Department cables made public this week by WikiLeaks lend credence to investigative reports on gun trafficking and the drug war published by Narco News as far back as 2009.

The big battles in the drug war in Mexico are “not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns,” Narco News reported in March 2009, against the grain, at a time when the mainstream media was pushing a narrative that assigned the blame for the rising tide of weapons flowing into Mexico to U.S. gun stores and gun shows.

Rather, we reported at the time, “the drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.”

Those weapons, found in stashes seized by Mexican law enforcers and military over the past several years, include U.S.-military issued rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and explosives.

The State Department cables released recently by WikiLeaks support Narco News’ reporting and also confirm that our government is very aware of the fact that U.S military munitions are finding their way into Mexico, and into the hands of narco-trafficking organizations, via a multi-billion dollar stream of private-sector and Pentagon arms exports.

Narco News, in a report in December 2008 [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.

Tosh Plumlee, a former CIA asset who still has deep connections in the covert world, told Narco News recently that a special-operations task force under Pentagon command, which has provided training to Mexican troops south of the border, has previously “… found [in Mexico] hundreds of [U.S.-made] M-67s [grenades] as well as thousands of rounds of machine gun-type ammo, .50 [and] .30 [caliber] and the famous [U.S.-made] M-16 — most later confirmed as being shipped from Guatemala into Mexico as well as from USA vendors. …”

Similarly, an AP video report from May 2009 confirms that “M16 machine guns” have been seized from Mexican criminal groups engaged in the drug war.

“It’s unclear how cartels are getting military grade weapons,” the AP report states.

Narco News offered an answer to that question in March 2009, when it reported that the deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars.

Those exports are approved through the State Department, under a program known as Direct Commercial Sales. A sister program, called Foreign Military Sales, is overseen by the Pentagon and also taps U.S. contractors to manufacture weapons (such as machine guns and grenades) for export to foreign entities, including companies and governments.

Between 2005 and 2009, a total of $41 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported under the FMS program and a total of nearly $60 billion via the DCS program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The bulk of those exports went to seven nations, including South Korea, but Mexico, too, was a receiving nation, with some $204 million in military arms shipments approved for export in fiscal year 2008 alone, according to the most recently available DCS report.

So, based on that evidence, it is clear that there is a grand river of military-grade munitions flowing out of major gun factories in the U.S. and being exported globally — completely bypassing the mom-and-pop gun store. That river of doom, however, does not bypass the drug war in Mexico.

The WikiLeaks Cables

Two separate diplomatic cables that came out of the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, in early 2009 discuss drug war-related attacks on the U.S. consulate in that city as well as on a Monterrey TV station — with each incident involving the use of U.S. military grenades.

From a State Department cable created on Jan. 12, 2009, by the American Consul General in Monterrey and sent to the Secretary of State, U.S. Northcom and other U.S. consulates:

On January 6 the Televisa TV station in Monterrey was attacked by unknown assailants, who shot eight .40 caliber rounds into the station wall and threw a grenade over a fence into the parking lot, which exploded but did not injure anyone.

… The Consulate [in Monterrey] was attacked in a similar manner on October 11, 2008, and is located approximately one mile from the Televisa station.

… The investigators recovered the grenade fuse spoon, which appears to be from a US military M67 fragmentation grenade. ATF is investigating if any M67 grenades from this lot were exported to foreign militaries. The M67 grenade is different than the M26 grenade [an older U.S.-made grenade from the Vietnam era] used to attack the Consulate on October 11, but five M67 grenades were recovered during a raid several days after the Consulate attack in a Gulf Cartel warehouse. [Emphasis added.]

So the State Department cable makes clear that the attacks on the TV station and on the consulate itself involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico. A second cable issued in March 2009 lays out the plausible path those grenades followed on their journey to Mexico’s drug war.

From a cable issued by the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey on March 3, 2009, and sent to the Secretary of State, the FBI as well as various other consulates:

AmConsulate General Monterrey’s ATF Office, the ATF Explosives Technology Branch, and AmEmbassy Mexico DAO have been working with Mexican law enforcement authorities to identify the origin of various grenades and other explosive devices recovered locally over the past few months, including the unexploded M26A2 fragmentation grenade hurled at the Consulate itself during the October 11, 2008 attack. Other ordnance recovered includes 21 grenades recovered by Mexican law enforcement on October 16, 2008 after a raid at a narco-warehouse in Guadalupe (a working class suburb of Monterrey), and twenty-five 40mm explosive projectiles, a U.S. M203 40mm grenade launcher, and three South Korean K400 fragmentation grenades recovered the same day in an abandoned armored vehicle that suspected narco-traffickers used to escape apprehension.

Local Mexican law enforcement has recovered a Grenade spoon and pull ring from an exploded hand grenade used in a January 6, 2009 attack on Televisa Monterrey, a Monterrey television station. Based upon ATF examination, it appears that the grenade used in the attack on the Consulate has the same lot number, and is of similar design and style, as the three of the grenades found at the narco-warehouse in Guadalupe. On January 7, 2009, the Mexican Army recovered 14 [U.S.-made] M-67 fragmentation grenades and 1 K400 fragmentation grenade in Durango City, Durango. ….

The lot numbers of some of the grenades recovered, including the grenade used in the attack on Televisa, indicate that previously ordnance with these same lot numbers may have been sold by the USG [U.S. Government] to the El Salvadoran military in the early 1990s via the Foreign Military Sales program. We would like to thank AmEmbassy San Salvador for its ongoing efforts to query the Government of El Salvador as whether any of its stocks of grenades and other munitions have been diverted or are otherwise unaccounted for. [Emphasis added.]

Again, this is the U.S. state Department confirming that it suspects U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.

Narco News sources indicate that it is likely some of the U.S. military weapons now being used by Mexican narco-trafficking groups may be from a past era, but they also contend it is likely a number of those weapons, such as the guns, have been rebuilt for the current drug war.

Former CIA asset Plumlee told Narco News:

There was some talk among [U.S.] task force members about  a … gun-making operation ongoing in or around Oaxaca, Mexico, more like a “refurbish” type operation from old stored weapons from the old Contra days (1980-‘90 era). [There’s] a lot of those weapons still around Panama and El Salvador. I was told most of those old weapons were “burned out” and of not much value. However, if there was a supplier or someone who could retrofit these weapons [they] could be fixed and moved just about anywhere….

And as food for thought on that front, a former U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, brought to Narco News’ attention a federal criminal case now pending in U.S. court in Nashville.

In that case, five top officials with a gun manufacturer called Sabre Defence Industries LLC stand accused of illegally trafficking gun parts, such as gun barrels and components, on an international scale. Sabre, now shut down in the wake of its run-in with the feds, made and marketed assault rifles and machine-gun components for military, law enforcement and civilian use worldwide.

In fact, its biggest client was the U.S. military, which had awarded it contracts worth up to $120 million “for the manufacture of, among other things, M16 rifles and .50 caliber machine gun barrels,” according to the indictment returned in mid-January of this year against the company and its officers.

“The indictment unsealed today alleges a nearly decade-long scheme to thwart U.S. import/export restrictions on firearms and their components,” said Lanny A. Breuer, an assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a press statement released on Feb. 8. “The defendants allegedly went to great lengths to conceal their activities and evade U.S. laws – mislabeling packages, falsifying shipping records, and maintaining a fictitious set of books and records, among other things. The illegal trade of firearms and their components poses serious risks and, as this case shows, we cannot and will not tolerate it.”

Federal authorities have not released any details on where the Sabre-made gun parts ended up, though the indictment alleges many of the parts were shipped overseas.

As a note of caution, however, the former Customs inspector points out that once a criminal group has a supply of parts, setting up a gun-making operation is not a complicated matter.

“For the small arms, and I would include, for simplicity, everything up to and including M2 .50 BMG machine guns, and even the 40 mm grenade launcher, M19, you can put them together on the kitchen table, or on the workbench in the garage,” the former inspector says.

For now, though, it simply is not known whether any of Sabre’s weapons parts ended up in gun-making chop shops south of the U.S. border, or elsewhere, or whether any of the M16s it made for the U.S. military were later provided to the Mexican government — via the FMS or DCS programs — and subsequently diverted by corrupt officials to narco-trafficking groups.

But the State Department cables recently made public by WikiLeaks do seem to confirm that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.

As the death toll mounts in the drug war now raging in Mexico, it pays to remember that weapons trafficking, both government-sponsored and illegal, is a big business that feeds and profits off that carnage. Bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Merida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.

Stay tuned….

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US : House votes to prevent reporting system for assault-weapon sales

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http://www.washingtonpost.com

By James V. Grimaldi

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 19, 2011; 8:06 PM

 

The House voted overwhelmingly Friday to block the Obama administration from implementing a controversial proposal meant to give federal authorities a new tool to catch gunrunners to Mexico.

The proposed rule was strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association, which praised the House for taking the action.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, 277 to 149, which added it to a massive spending bill that would keep the federal government running through September.

The amendment by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using federal money to require licensed firearm dealers to report multiple sales of assault weapons.

Under the proposed rule, 8,500 gun dealers near the U.S.-Mexico border would be required to alert authorities when they sell within five consecutive business days two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines.

Semiautomatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s are favored by drug-trafficking organizations fighting the Mexican government.

On his Twitter account, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the United States, called the vote “unfortunate.”

More than 34,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and launched a sustained effort to eliminate violent drug-trafficking cartels. More than 65,000 guns recovered in Mexico have been traced back to the United States.

But NRA officials said the rule hurt gun rights.

“Any proposal that only burdens law-aiding gun owners and retailers – as this proposal does – is a non-starter with the NRA,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action. “To put it very simply, if someone is breaking the law, go after them full-bore. If they aren’t, leave them alone.”

Cox praised Boren and Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) for driving the amendment to passage.

To take effect, the spending bill and its amendments must pass the Senate and be signed by President Obama, who has threatened a veto. John Feinblatt, a chief aide to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), who has urged more restrictions on gun sales, called on senators to block the Boren amendment from taking effect, saying it was a “dangerous, anti-police measure.”

Nearly 20 senators, including three Democrats from Western states, have written letters opposing the proposed rule.

ATF had asked the White House to approve the rule last month on an emergency basis, but 17 senators objected to that tactic, saying, “We are especially alarmed by ATF’s attempt to regulate the sale of firearms through an emergency notice such as this, which has not been properly vetted by Congress or by the affected public.”

Last week, the White House budget office rejected the emergency procedure and said the proposal would go through the usual process, lasting through March. In the meantime, NRA lobbyists took the battle to Capitol Hill, where in recent decades the NRA has used appropriations bills to prevent increased gun control. In 2003, Congress passed the Tiahrt amendment to prevent public access to a database of guns used in crimes.

Comments on the proposed rule, which would affect dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, closed Monday.

The reports from dealers were expected to give leads to ATF investigators seeking to catch gunrunners to Mexico. However, the NRA opposed the proposal because “this reporting scheme would create a registry of owners of many of today’s most popular rifles – firearms owned by millions of Americans for self-defense, hunting and other lawful purposes,” the NRA said in a statement released Friday night.

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