Add the State Department to suspects in DOJ-ATF gun smuggling scandal

April 18th, 2011 1:21 pm ET

Anthony Martin
Conservative Examiner



As the dragnet widens in the momentus scandal involving agencies of the U.S. government deliberately placing guns and weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, it can now be reported that the State Department is included in the list of suspects. Today, Examiner's Kurt Hofmann reports that the U.S. State Department, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, approved the sale of $177 million in firearms and explosives to the Mexican government, which, not surprisingly, made its way into the hands of the cartels.

Corruption in the Mexican government is legendary.

According to Hofmann,

Granted, the State Deparment-approved sales in question here are to the Mexican government, not the drug syndicates. That, unfortunately, means a great deal less than one might hope. Corruption in the Mexican government is somewhat legendary in its scope and depth. As has been discussed time after time after time (etc.), that corruption often leads to the Mexican government's weapons ending up in the hands of the very drug cartel gunmen the government is ostensibly so determined to stop.

The fact that the State Department is involved in this horrific scandal, along with the Department of Justice and its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, is a most serious revelation. As reported in previous articles, the end-game of the guns-to-Mexico scheme was to 'prove' that U.S. firearms are fueling the drug cartels and its consequential violence along the southern border, even creeping across the border into the southwestern states. The Obama Administration, according to ATF agents who blew the whistle on the illegal plot, intended to use statistics concerning U.S. guns in Mexico to call for more stringent gun control.

Hofmann continues,

Finally, remember the serious problems with the notion that the "Project Gunwaker" scandal has been a badly flawed, but honorably intended, attempt to bring down major "kingpins" of the Mexican underworld. That just doesn't add up. What is vastly more plausible is that what the U.S. government wanted was a way to blame the U.S. gun market for the horrendous death toll in Mexico, so what was needed was a big pile of Mexican bodies, killed with guns from the U.S. VoilÃ*! A Rahm Emanuel "serious crisis" to not "let go to waste."

If the Obama administration is willing to use the Department of Justice that way, why not the State Department, too? Secretary of State Clinton is hardly likely to have any philosophical objections to the goal of more restrictive U.S. gun laws. So why not approve hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons sales to the notoriously corrupt Mexican government, knowing full well that many of the guns will end up in criminal hands?


Bill Conroy of Global Research has also investigated the State Department's involvement in the scheme and states unequivocally that U.S.-backed programs are supplying the firepower for Mexico's soaring murder rate.

And it is important to note that the Department of Homeland Security, under Janet Napolitano, shares culpability in this unconscionable scheme by its blatant refusal to secure the southern border and to enforce existing U.S. law concerning illegal aliens and those who aid and abet them. Instead, Napolitano has turned a blind eye to the growing criminal enterprise at the border by stating, 'At no other time in history has the southern border been so secure.'

Words thusly spoken have a way of coming back to haunt those who utter them.

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