The Washington Post published a very informative article this week about Mexican immigration to the United States and the logical and progressive nature of immigration and investment coming from mostly illegal immigration to the U.S. Currently, the immigration rate from Mexico to the United States is balanced with many Mexicans returning to Mexico after years […]
Recently, the general gloom about Mexico has been replaced by a bit of positive reportage. Mexico’s economy grew faster than Brazil’s last year, and it is set to do so again in 2012. Largely, that’s because NAFTA is once again paying dividends for Mexico. Higher wages in China and volatile transport costs have made Mexico the […]
I want to provide an update on my story about Mexico’s presidential election, which takes place today, July 1. It seems this election is as much a referendum on democracy and the openness of the Mexican political system itself as it is about any one candidate. After 12 years of struggle to move Mexico forward under […]
The end of the Arab Spring has likely come about in two different ways. The official election of President Morsi in Egypt can be seen as the end of protests against the military government and the beginning of the first democratically elected leader in Egypt’s history, or it can become the beginning of a one […]
Biogas saves Kenyan school money, conserves nature A school in the rural Rift Valley of central Kenya is a model for successful small-scale response to climate change, according to this article. The school cooks with biogas produced from latrines, eliminating fuel and sanitation costs while reducing harmful carbon emissions and sparing surrounding forests some 150 […]
This week The Economist has created a very interesting and innovative forum to discuss the pros and cons of the PRI party regaining power in Mexico after losing the presidency to the PAN in 2000. This forum takes two campaign leaders from both parties and places them in an open debate over the next week […]
No one ever said democracy is easy (well, if anyone did, they shouldn’t have). It offers the promise of freedom and the ability of people to choose who governs them. But constant vigilance is required to ensure democracy holds on, and prevents government from transforming into something more sinister. Democracy exists today in many parts […]
Last week the New York Times exposed that Wal-Mart de Mexico bribed local officials $24 million to hurry permitting for new stores. Most of the subsequent reportage has focused on stateside implications for Wal-Mart, which may include violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The company’s stock is down over 7% since the story broke. […]
Three main issues surrounded this year’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia this past weekend. For the most part, those issues created a division between the Americans and Canadians poised against most of Latin America with the exception of the prostitution scandal that will likely be more of an issue between Obama and the […]
June 6, 2012. Four months after the post below went online, the MSM (NYT, CBS, New York Post, Fox) is reporting that Representative Darrelll Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigating DOJ’s gunrunning scheme, Fast and Furious, claims the wiretap applications submitted during the course of the operation prove that DOJ officials at the highest levels knew ATF agents were bending, ignoring, and violating US law to move more than 2000 combat-ready weapons across the US border into Mexico. None of the weapons carried tracing devices, and ATF whistleblowers who pressed superiors about the need to have some sort of interdiction strategy in place that would allow them to recover the weapons before they could be used to murder innocent people (Brian Terry) were told to stand down or find another job.
Whether Issa’s latest revelation will revive the official investigation into a government scheme to supply Mexican gangs with weapons that could be traced back to recent sales by US gundealers along the SW border, a move that even the most skeptical mind has trouble believing was designed to do anything but shore up the argument for stricter gun control in the US, is yet to be seen.
Attorney General Eric Holder has told the press that Issa’s Committee is on a ‘witch hunt’ meant to target high-ranking ‘African-Americans’ within the Administration, officials Holder identified more explicitly by adding ‘like me, and the President,’ and it is unlikely the GOP House Leader John Boehner is eager to divert pre-election media coverage from Romney’s singleminded focus on the economy–even though Fast and Furious, with its parallels to Iran-Contra, might well result in the prosecution of admininstration officials for contempt, obstruction of justice, perjury, and multiple violations of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). Think Ollie North.
In case today’s (June 6th) reports about the importance of wiretap applications linked to Fast and Furious still leave you confused, there’s a repost of my earlier analysis below. Of special interest should be the photocopy of the memo requesting approval for a wiretap signed by Lanny Breuer in March 2010. A DOJ spokesperson says Breuer never scrutized the details, that they were never spelled out to the Head of DOJ’s Criminal Division.
Hmmm…..
Let’s talk wire taps, investigative tools popularized by every cop and criminal show that’s crossed our television screens.
Well, it turns out that ATF agents involved in the gun walking scheme known as Fast and Furious made numerous applications over a significant period of time for the issuance of court orders authorizing wire taps.
Bad news for top cops at DOJ. Like Willy Sutton, who said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” members of the House Oversight Committee have told DOJ they want those wire tap applications because they know that’s where the evidence is–in detailed descriptions of investigative techniques and signatures they believe will point to the involvement of senior DOJ officials.
In the end, Terry, Diaz and Meyer found themselves on the sharp end of the stick for their efforts: the US Department of Justice, agencies like DHS and the Department of State, and the usual entourage of corporate and political underwriters, including the government of Mexico, all had a hand in creating scenarios designed to transform good guys into villains, narratives that ended in Terry’s death at the hands of a cartel gunman, Diaz’s imprisonment for ‘exercising excessive force’ during the arrest of a suspected drug trafficker, and in Meyer’s case, the loss of a high-paying job with a multinational defense contractor, and blowback that now has this decorated young veteran on the ropes in the court of public opinion. Let me tell you something. The only ‘mental problem’ from which Meyer suffers is a chronic case of integrity, an inability to distort the truth to accommodate political reality.
Consider–if Terry, Diaz and Meyer had ‘occupied Wall Street’ instead of the killing zones along our SW border and in Afghanistan, they might have been poster boys for the March of History, and on top of it all, alive, free, and gainfully employed.
For the second time in President Calderon’s administration, a secretary of interior (Secretario de Gobernación) has died in what government officials have prematurely dubbed as an aerial accident. Francisco Blake Mora, the de-facto second in command in Mexico’s executive branch, was en route to a conference in the central state of Morelos when his helicopter […]
Three House Committees and one Senate Committee are spotlighting ATF’s Fast and Furious. Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) sent a letter to President Obama more than a month ago asking him to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Eric Holder for perjury. What no one seems to understand is that any US Attorney with jurisdiction in a district where a ‘gun walker’ crime transpired has the statutory authority to empanel a grand jury and open an investigation into more than just perjury…think violation of the Export Control Act. You don’t need a ‘designer prosecutor’ to investigate high profile officials. No one in Washington is going to go out of the way to tell you about this. Read all about it here..
Anyone in the business of studying violence should look askance at recent US claims that Iran’s Quds Force – a unit belonging to the Pasdaran, aka the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – is behind the amateurish plot to assassinate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the US. The main issue in contention here is […]
Ok. Now we’re into it. Administration top dogs have thrown ATF Director Ken Melson and US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke under the truck.In firefighting, they call it a ‘controlled burn,’ torching a perimeter of just enough man-made flame to meet and beat the advance of a wildfire impervious to less-drastic solutions.
Good luck, gentlemen.
The House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the DOJ/ATF gun-running operation known as Fast and Furious is roaring through the halls of Congress, and despite DOJ’s efforts to spin the story every which way but up, Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) are on a trail insiders whisper may lead investigators all the way to the top.