Posted on 10/07/2011 1:09:25 PM PDT by marktwain
(CBS News)
The ATF, the agency that's supposed to stop gun smuggling, turned a blind eye for years, as hundreds of guns "walked" across the Mexican border, CBS News has learned.
In a report on "The Early Show," CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson said a confidential informant has come forward "with a fascinating story of how U.S. agents began letting guns 'walk' across the Mexican border - more than four years ago."
ATF "Fast and Furious": New documents show Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed in July 2010
Gun enthusiast and licensed dealer Mike Detty said he was working a Tucson, Ariz., gun show in early 2006 when a young Hispanic man bought a half-dozen semi-automatic rifles. He paid $1,600 cash.
Detty recalled, "But then he asked if I had more, and I told him that later in the month I would have another 20 from my supplier. And he said, 'I'll take 'em all.'"
Detty said he suspected the buyer was trafficking for a drug cartel. Tucson is just an hour from the Mexican border and a popular shopping center for smugglers.
Detty notified ATF - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. To his surprise, ATF told him to go ahead with the big sale and sent an undercover agent to watch. Then, a local ATF manager made an unusual and dangerous proposition: He asked Detty to be a confidential informant.
Detty told CBS News, "He said, 'Mike, I think we've got a real chance at taking out a powerful cartel. Can you help us?' I made that commitment. And I really thought I was doing something good."
Detty said he even signed an informant contract. As he understood it, he'd sell to suspected traffickers. Agents would track the weapons, expose the cartel's inner workings, and then interdict the guns before they could ever get loose on the street - or so Detty thought.
Detty said his business, "Mad Dawg," catered to this dangerous clientele in his living-room showroom. ATF agents watched and listened outside.
In an audio recording from a sale, Detty can be heard saying, "if your guys need more guns - " A suspect replies, "I do." Detty says, "You let me know."
"I do," the suspect repeats. Detty says, "And it's cool with me, OK?"
"I want to buy all of them that are like that. All of them I can get," the suspect says. Detty responds, "OK, I have a lot of them like that."
"I want to buy them all," the suspect responds.
Detty said ATF would have a small audio recording device. Sometimes it was hidden in a box of Kleenex," he said. One of the biggest cases was code-named: "Operation Wide Receiver."
Attkisson asked Detty, "Do you know about how many guns we're talking about?"
Detty said, "It's right around 450."
Detty came forward after things didn't work out as Detty had thought they would. Detty says he realized ATF was letting guns "walk" and instead of helping to take down cartels, he'd helped ATF arm them.
Attkisson asked, "When you look back and think in hindsight knowing what we know now - that all those guns were going on the street - what do you think about?"
Detty said, "It really makes me sick."
Attkisson noted that all this happened under the Bush administration - three years before the start of "Fast and Furious," the better-known ATF operation under the Obama administration that has come under scrutiny . "Fast and Furious" allegedly let thousands of weapons fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, and is now the subject of two investigations.
The "Fast and Furious" tactic of letting guns "walk" was exposed after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered last December and at least two assault rifles from "Fast and Furious" were found at the scene.
As for its predecessor, "Wide Receiver,": prosecutors finally, quietly, rounded up seven suspects last fall. No cartel leaders, just buyers who - critics say - should never have been allowed to put even one weapon on the street, let alone operate for years.
Detty said, "My first day as an informant, if they had said, 'Here's our plan, Mike: We're going to let as many guns go across the border as they can haul, and we're just gonna look and see where they pop up,' I'd have said, 'No way. That's not a plan. That's idiocy.' "
Attkisson said efforts to reach former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who was in office when "Wide Receiver" started under the Bush administration, were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, his successor is under fire. Republicans are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether Attorney General Eric Holder told the truth when he testified earlier this year to Congress about when he first knew about 'Fast and Furious.'"
According to Atkisson, "gunwalking" may not be limited to border towns.
She said, "We have found allegations of gunwalking in at least 10 cities in five states, so this apparently was not isolated to Arizona."
I suspect that the details of Wide Receiver in 2006 were far different from Fast and Furious in 2009-2011. Let us get all of the truth out. My impression is this is an attempt at the "everybody does it" excuse.
What is the timing on this "coming forward? If it is just recently, as implied, how does he know that the guns were "walked"?
So this is the new story from the White House? Pardon me if I do not believe it.
Bush’s fault as usual.
Yeah, sure - it’s Bush’s fault.
The press will go to any lengths to obfuscate issues in defense of the Obama administration.
So all of a sudden it’s “Bush started it?” A page right out of the Clinton playbook.
I agree, but they need to follow this where ever it goes and charge those involved with accessory to murder.
Ah...a clear picture now comes into view: “I **INHERITED** this mess from George Bush —it was put upon me, and made me feel really uncomfortable...I needed time to ramp it down incrementally...”
YEAH SURE...!
Bush DID have a program like this, and guys like this WERE busted.
But if they, too, let the guns really walk, then let it ALL come out —let the RINO’s get busted also. If it’s 100 of them FINE..!
It would go far towards explaining the lack of RINO interest in this story, that’s for sure.
CAIN WOULD NEVER DO THIS..!!
CBS news epitaph: “Fake But Accurate”
Everybody does it doesn’t explain US AG lying under oath to Congress.
Ohhhhkay. So this is the rope a dope then? This is what we were set-up for? This is why CBS allowed her to report?
Her initial reporting was to bait the story until the trap could be sprung?
Great.
Do you really thing that just because the facts are different and there is a clear current administration cover-up and that the White house and Attorney General knew about the illegal activities that resulted in deaths that is shouldn't be blamed on Bush?
Really come on now, just because he wasn't involved or because it wasn't done on his watch is no reason that Gun Walker shouldn't be Bush's fault. (/sarcasm)
Looks like Holder and Obama got to CBS....Wide Receiver was a LITTLE different, but still a cluster F*%k............You would think after the fiasco of Wide Receiver with the RFID tags, the ATF, et5c. would have learned their lesson. Instead, when Ol Barry and Eric took over they VASTLY expanded the program and just did away with ANY attempt to track the weapons./
In Operation Wide Receiver, Tucson agents allowed the sales of more than 500 firearms to known straw purchasers. Like Gunrunner/Fast and Furious, the operation apparently backfired.
Some firearms in Wide Receive were equipped with RFID tracking devices. In Wide Receiver, it seems the illegal purchasers seemed more than slightly knowledgeable of the way the ATF and how to take their aerial and electronic tracking procedures down.
Knowing the time aloft numbers for virtually all planes used in government surveillance, the buyers had a simple method of getting their purchases across the border undetected. They simply drove four-hour loops around the area.
As surveillance planes were forced to return to base for re-fueling, the smugglers simply turned and sprinted their cargo across the border.
The RFID tags also turned out to be problematic.
Rather than making large enough holes for the tags to be laid out inside weapons, agents force-fit them into the rifles.
That cramming caused the antennae to be folded, reducing the effective range of the tags. And an already short battery life (36-48 hours maximum) meant that should purchasers allow the firearms to sit, the tracking devices eliminated themselves.
This sounds like something out of “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” but it’s not.
To date, Wide Receiver hasn’t really amounted to much in the way of interdiction, enforcement or prosecution, despite the huge amounts of surveillance video and audio evidence collected and the millions of dollars expended.
To date, sources tell us the only charges filed in the ongoing investigation are for falsifying Form 4473s. Not much of a return on an investigation that consumed millions of dollars in man-hours and money and placed the lives of law-abiding firearms dealers and their families in jeopardy.
Reported in other sources, that Wide Receiver included placing tracking devices and RFID chips on weapons. When those devices failed the op was called off, but it set a very dangerous precedence. I was recently talking with somebody in a different agency that was asked to support a Wide Receiver op. When his office found out (through their own deduction and reluctant admission by ATF) that there was no solid plan for intercepting the weapons, they told ATF they wouldn’t support such an operation.
The guy DID say:
1. He sold the guns back then
2. That there was a plan to bust the buyers
2. That he knows that guns recently sold DID also walk across the border recently
Nowhere in the report does he say that he knows that guns he sold back then ALSO did walk across the border back then.
I did not read that.
This appears to be an effort to conflate two different schemes with two different chronologies: they’re trying to say that Wide Receiver did have the same “across the border” component that F&F does.
It may, but did this report SAY that? I did not read that.
Agreed. Let all the guilty parties by charged. I suspect this is just smoke and mirrors by the MSM and the Obummer gang, but claiming that my predecessors were felons and I had to go on committing felonies - does not fly as an excuse.
Given the current Administrations palpitations about '90% of the crimes committed in Mexico having been committed with guns from America', and Obama's claims that he was working 'in the background' to destroy the 2nd Amendment -- makes me think this Administration is solely responsible for these murders -- but if previous Administrations share the guilt - so be it. Charge them all.
Ah-HAH! BUSH’S fault! I wondered how long it’d take.
You had me going until the 3rd line. :-)
My read is that with Wide Receiver there *were* efforts to tag and track:
In F&F there was NO budgeting at all for tracking.
Indeed in the ONE case in which an F&F weapon was tagged, that was done on the fly by a desperate low-level ATF agent, using his OWN money in a retail establishment like Radio Shack..!
In Wide Receiver it’s dubious that they simply wished to get innocent people killed. Risky, sure, but the SAME as F&F...?
No way.
Gunwalker: Gunning Down Bush did it too Lie
...involved 450 guns, tracking methods, operation stopped in 2007 because GPS not well developed, Cartel worked around it.
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