Thread: Fast and Furious back in headlines as Univision reportedly finds more victims

Fast and Furious back in headlines as Univision reportedly finds more victims

Published: 1:28 AM 09/29/2012
By Matthew Boyle/Daily Caller

Spanish-language television network Univision plans to air a television special that it said reveals more violence than previously known, as well as the stories of how many more Operation Fast and Furious victims were killed, the network announced in a Friday release.

“The consequences of the controversial ‘Fast and Furious’ undercover operation put in place by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2009 have been deadlier than what has been made public to date,” the network said. “The exclusive, in-depth investigation by Univision News’ award-winning Investigative Unit — Univision Investiga — has found that the guns that crossed the border as part of Operation Fast and Furious caused dozens of deaths inside Mexico.”

Among other groups of Fast and Furious victim stories Univision says it will tell in the special to air Sunday evening at 7 p.m., is one about how “16 young people attending a party in a residential area of Ciudad Juárez in January of 2010″ were gunned down with weapons the Obama administration gave to drug cartel criminals through Fast and Furious.

“Univision News’ Investigative Unit was also able to identify additional guns that escaped the control of ATF agents and were used in different types of crimes throughout Mexico,” the network added. “Furthermore, some of these guns — none of which were reported by congressional investigators — were put in the hands of drug traffickers in Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. A person familiar with the recent congressional hearings called Univision’s findings ‘the holy grail’ that Congress had been searching for.”

A video preview published on Friday shows a number of the bodies of people killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as well as victims’ family members pleading with outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon for justice.
Congressional investigators from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committee have been probing Fast and Furious since early 2011, shortly after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with Fast and Furious weapons. Terry was killed on Dec. 14, 2010, in Peck Canyon, Ariz.

Others whose murders have been connected to Fast and Furious weapons include Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata and Mexican citizen Mario Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s sister, Patricia Gonzalez, was the state prosecutor for the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Fast and Furious was a program of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder’s DOJ. It sent thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers — people who purchased guns in the United States with the known intention of illegally trafficking them somewhere else.

Mexican government officials have estimated that at least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons.

Holder and President Barack Barack Obama have obstructed the congressional investigations into this scandal. After months of failure to comply with a subpoena for Fast and Furious documents, information and witnesses, Holder was voted on a bipartisan basis into criminal and civil contempt of Congress. Obama has asserted executive privilege over the documents.

The DOJ’s internal inspector general recently released a report concluding that Holder was not cleared by his currently ongoing investigation, despite a swath of media coverage saying that Holder was “exonerated” by it. Though he did conclude that he couldn’t find evidence or proof Holder knew about Fast and Furious, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified before Congress that almost everyone in Holder’s inner circle at DOJ did know, and that he and his team think it’s odd at best that Holder didn’t.

“We found, as we outlined in the report, we struggle to understand how an operation of this size, of this importance, that impacted another country like it did, could not have been briefed up to the attorney general of the United States,” Horowitz said during a House oversight committee hearing. “It should have been, in our view. It was that kind of a case.”

Former White House National Security Council staffer Kevin O’Reilly — who was intimately involved in Fast and Furious planning with Phoenix ATF officials, according to emails obtained throughout the congressional investigation — has since been reassigned by the Department of State to a detail in Iraq. Obama administration officials have refused to make O’Reilly available to congressional investigators and to Horowitz’s internal DOJ investigation.

On Friday, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reported that congressional Republicans are now threatening to subpoena O’Reilly and force his testimony on Fast and Furious.

Univision has aggressively covered Fast and Furious, and its most recent major run-in with the scandal came when network anchor Jorge Ramos grilled Obama in an interview on the scandal, asking him why he hasn’t “fired” Holder. During the interview, Obama made at least one false statement relating to Fast and Furious.

Read more: Univision finds more Fast and Furious headlines as victims | The Daily Caller

The Untold Story Behind The "Fast and Furious" Scandal
Video trailer at link.


Who are the human faces of the U.S. government's botched Fast and Furious gun-walking operation?
AUTO START: ON | OFF

By Univision News
Sept. 28, 2012


Who are the human faces of the U.S. government's botched "Fast and Furious" gun-walking operation?

Often lost amid the rancor in Washington are the stories of dozens of people killed by guns that flowed south as part of the undercover operation, and later slipped out of view from U.S. officials. Univision's Investigative Unit (Univision Investiga) has identified massacres committed using guns from the ATF operation, including the killing of 16 young people attending a party in a residential area of Ciudad Juárez in January of 2010.

Additional guns, previously unreported by congressional investigators, found their way into the hands of drug traffickers across Latin America in countries such as, Honduras and Colombia, as well as the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. A person familiar with the recent congressional hearings called Univision's findings "the holy grail" that Congress had been searching for.

Get the full story on "Fast and Furious" on a special edition of Univision's "Aquí y Ahora" (Here and Now) this Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT (6 p.m. Central), which will be aired with closed captioning in English.
The Untold Story Behind The "Fast and Furious" Scandal - ABC News

IIRC, Univision is a subsidiary of ABC. Interesting that ABC's liberal arm would allow this expose to go forward, as it directly connects F&F murders in Mexico with the Obama Administration.

The special is going to be at 7PM Sunday and I am going to watch it.

Obama slammed on Fast and Furious in Spanish-language TV interview: Shouldn’t you ‘fire’ Holder? [VIDEO]

Read more: Obama slammed on Fast and Furious on Univision [VIDEO] | The Daily Caller

Very sad that Americans have to rely on foreign media for the truth in our own country.
If your not deathly afraid of this dictator yet, don't worry you will be!

Added to Homepage.

http://www.alipac.us/content/fast-furious-back-headlines-univision-reportedly-finds-more-victims-985/

Watch the ABC/Univision video at the link below.

Fast and Furious Scandal: New Details Emerge on How the U.S. Government Armed Mexican Drug Cartels


By GERARDO REYES and SANTIAGO WILLS
Sept. 30, 2012

On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.

Univision

Pools Of Blood On The Streets Of Villas De... View Full Size

As part of Operation Fast and Furious, ATF allowed 1,961 guns to "walk" out of the U.S. in an effort to identify the high profile cartel leaders who received them. The agency eventually lost track of the weapons, and they often ended up in the hands of Mexican hit men , including those who ordered and carried out the attack on Salvarcar and El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez where 18 young men were killed on September 2, 2009.

In Mexico, the timing of the operation coincided with an upsurge of violence in the war among the country's strongest cartels. In 2009, the northern Mexican states served as a battlefield for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug trafficking organizations, and as expansion territory for the increasingly powerful Zetas. According to documents obtained by Univision News, from October of that year to the end of 2010, nearly 175 weapons from Operation Fast and Furious inadvertently armed the various warring factions across northern Mexico.

"Many weapons cross the border and enter Mexico, but that [Fast and Furious] number, quantity and type of weapons had quite an impact in the war in this area" Jose Wall, an ATF agent stationed in Tijuana from 2009 to 2011, told Univision News.

Following the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry at the hands of Mexican bandits on December 14, 2010, media and Congressional investigations prompted hearings. On September 20, the U.S.

Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report, which opened the door for sanctions of 14 ATF and DOJ officials.

In Washington, the Fast and Furious scandal became politicized, diverting the attention from the human cost in Mexico to political battles on Capitol Hill. In June, a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt ignored the real tragedy in Mexico.

"Americans are not often moved by the pain of those outside [their country]…" Javier Sicilia, a Mexican poet whose son was killed in the midst of the violence, told Univision News. "But they are moved by the pain of their own. Well, turn around and watch the massacres."

The Univision News investigation also found ATF offices from states besides Arizona pursued similar misguided strategies. In Florida, the weapons from Operation Castaway ended up in the hands of criminals inColombia, Honduras and Venezuela (link audio crumpler), the lead informant in the case told Univision News in a prison interview.

"When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels," Hugh Crumpler, a Vietnam veteran turned arms trafficker, told Univision News. "The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening."

Other firearms under ATF surveillance were permitted to leave the country from Texas, according to court documents and the exclusive testimony of Magdalena Avila Villalobos, the sister of an ICE agent whosurvived a confrontation with cartel hit men on a rural highway in Mexico on February 15, 2011. His fellow agent, Jaime Zapata, was killed during the attacks.

"It's not from Arizona and Fast and Furious," Avila Villalobos told Univision News, speaking in her brother's stead for the first time, "but it's a very similar operation..." She later added, "Those weapons that have been recovered, it's been confirmed that they were weapons used in the shootout that killed Jaime Zapata and wounded Victor Avila."
The Texas-based operation and the firearms linked to the attack were bought by two trafficking rings in the state, according to Raymond Thomas, the Zapata family's lawyer.

Earlier this year, Texas Senator John Cornyn had echoed Thomas' assertions . Moreover, on September 25, Congressman Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley, the politicians behind the Fast and Furiouscongressional report released in July, sent a letter to the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General, requesting an investigation into Avila's and Zapata's case.

Fast and Furious Scandal: New Details Emerge on How the U.S. Government Armed Mexican Drug Cartels - ABC News


The bar shooting that killed Air Force Staff Sgt, David Booher is in the video at the link. It is graphic. It seems that the guns in that shooting were from Fast and Furious also. So it appears that Brian Terry, bless his sould, was not the first American killed with these guns in addition to the potentially hundreds of innocent Mexicans.

Holloman Staff Sgt. killed in Juarez

Wednesday, 04 Nov 2009,

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - A member of U.S. military stationed at Holloman AFB has been killed at a strip club in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico Wednesday.

Staff Sgt. DavidBooher was killed on the morning of November 4, 2009; he was assigned to the 49th medical group at Holloman Air Force Base said Tom Fuller, community relations chief of 49th Fighter Wing.

Reuters.com stated gunmen with automatic weapons burst into a strip club in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and opened fire on patrons and killed six people including an American airman.

http://www.alipac.us/f12/holloman-st...juarez-167483/
The people that are responsible for this should be tried for murder. I want them extradited to Mexico, it is the right thing to do. They must pay for the carnage that they wrought on innocent people. JMO

Kudos to GERARDO REYES and SANTIAGO WILLS. JMO

57 Previously Undiscovered Fast and Furious Guns Used in Mexican Crimes

Univision found new evidence of weapons linked to ?Fast and Furious Operation? used in Mexican crime scenes.(The Associated Press)

BY GERARDO REYES and SANTIAGO WILLS
Sept. 30, 2012

Fifty seven previously unidentified firearms linked to Operation Fast and Furious were recovered in sites associated with murders, kidnappings, and at least two gruesome massacres.

Univision News obtained the list of Fast and Furious weapons and a list containing almost 60,000 recovered firearms compiled by Mexico's Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA). A cross-reference of the serial numbers of the guns resulted in 96 full matches (several partial matches were discarded). The 96 firearms linked to Operation Fast and Furious all turned up at crime scenes in Mexico from 2009 to 2010.

In a report published on July 26, Congress mentioned there were "at least 48 recoveries involving 122 weapons [in Mexico] connected to Operation Fast and Furious." To check whether those were the same guns pinpointed by the data cross-reference, Univision News contacted congressional investigators asking for the serial numbers of the 122 guns in Congress' report. After an initial request by Univision News in mid-September and despite numerous phone calls and emails, there was no further response.

Univision News then gathered all the serial numbers available in the evidence appendixes of the major congressional investigation released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley last July. Another data analysis showed that five of the weapons in the list of 96 were already mentioned in the hundreds of emails and the 4473 forms that the Department of Justice had given to Congress. (The 4473 forms, also known as Firearm Transaction Records, are the documents that people who are purchasing guns from a Federal Firearm Licensee must fill.)

A search of SEDENA's press releases, which often include the serial numbers of seized firearms, resulted in one more firearm whose serial number matched one of those already in Congress' list.

Finally, Univision News compared the recovery dates and locations highlighted in The Department of Justice's Operation Fast and Furious: Fueling Cartel Violence, with those found in the remaining list of 90 weapons. For the cross-reference list and Congress' list, we divided each year's recovered guns by state. After that, we compared the number of weapons found in each state on both lists. That is, we compared the number of guns recovered, say, in 2009 in Baja California, according to lists by Congress and by Univision News.

For instance, if Congress had identified seven Fast and Furious weapons recovered in Baja California in 2009, and our list mentioned 24, then we concluded that our list included at least 17 new weapons. In the end, the state-by-state analysis showed that 57 of the firearms in the cross-reference were not included in Congress' report.

Univision News started looking for unreported Fast and Weapons after discovering a SEDENA document, which said that three guns from an ATF gun-tracing operation were used in the massacre in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez.

57 Previously Undiscovered Fast and Furious Guns Used in Mexican Crimes - ABC News

Cartel Leader Behind Mexican Massacres Linked to Operation Fast and Furious

Twelve hit men break into El Aliviane rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and shoot 20 young men who were reportedly praying. The weapons used in this massacre have been linked to Operation Fast and Furious.(Mexican Federal Government)

By GERARDO REYES and SANTIAGO WILLS
Sept. 30, 2012

On the night of September 2, 2009, twelve hit men carrying AK-47s forced open the main door of Casa Aliviane, a drug rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez. Inside, they started shooting at a group of 19 young recovering addicts and alleged cartel members. From a hallway overlooking an inner courtyard, the hit men riddled their victims with bullets.

In photos taken the following day, there are blood-soaked footprints in various sizes under a small tiled roof that decorates the half-pink, half-magenta façade of the Casa Aliviane. Thicker tracks mark the path of a wounded man who managed to crawl outside just before he died. In total, the gunmen killed 18 young men.

The massacre at the Aliviane rehabilitation center was ordered by Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, alias "El Diego", the same man who ordered the massacre of Villas de Salvarcar, an action in which three weapons from an ATF gun-tracing operation were used to murder 16 teenagers. At the time, Acosta Hernandez was one of the alleged leaders of La Linea, the armed branch of the Juarez Cartel.

After he was captured on July 29, 2010, Acosta Hernandez told Mexican authorities that he was responsible for nearly 1,500 murders, including the 18 at the Aliviane rehabilitation center and ten more at another similar facility called Centro Anexo de Vida. "Someone told us that they were using them as safe-houses -- people from the other gang who belonged to the Sinaloa Cartel," he told authorities.

"I instructed them to go and murder some groups of opponents in two rehabilitation centers," he said later on.

The modus operandi of the Aliviane massacre and the kind of weapons used were very similar to those of Salvarcar, Chihuahua state prosecutor Jorge Gonzalez Nicolas, who is currently investigating the case, told Univision News. "I can tell you that they are very related," Gonzalez Nicolas said, "and I can tell you that according to my investigations, it comes from the same heads, from the same group that decided to carry out [the Salvarcar massacre]."

In 2009, Acosta Hernandez led La Linea in an effort to stave off an offensive from the Sinaloa Cartel, commanded in Juarez by Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a violent enforcer close to Chapo Guzman, whoreputedly skinned an enemy's face to create a soccer ball.
Mexican authorities captured Torres Marrufo in Guanajuato last February. Behind the mirrors of his apartment's gym, they found a cache of guns that included powerful anti-aircraft weapons and firearms linked to Operation Fast and Furious.

Cartel Leader Behind Mexican Massacres Linked to Operation Fast and Furious - ABC News

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Univision Video: Fast and Furious Scandal

Univision explores how US Weapons, given to Mexican Drug Cartels have now been traced to
numerous murders in Mexico via the gunrunning program known as "Fast and Furious"
Fast and Furious Scandal: New Details Emerge on How the U.S. Government Armed Mexican Drug Cartels

VIDEO: COMMON CENTS: Univision Video: Fast and Furious Scandal