Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Phoenix’
September 27th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
ATF Sold Guns Directly to Cartels, But Never Followed Up

Fox News reports that ATF’s Fast and Furious botched gun-tracking operation to Mexican drug cartels didn’t stop at encouraging private gun owners to sell to known criminals with assurances of surveillance.  Six months before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of these weapons, ATF supervisors in Phoenix directed field agents to sell the guns directly.

The result was the same as when the guns came from private sellers: no surveillance was initiated by ATF to track the guns.  Instead, the buyers for the cartels were allowed to store them in a stash house and ship them south with impunity.

These are the kinds of revelations that get bureaus like ATF shut down.  Could it also be the scandal that sinks Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who oversees ATF’s operations?

Read the whole story here.

August 19th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
ATF Gun Scandal Supervisors Promoted

In what can only be described as a near-criminal lack of discretion, ATF management saw fit last Sunday to promote three agents who supervised the Phoenix office’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking fiasco to senior positions in Washington, D.C.

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office.

H/T: Townhall

May 7th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Arizona Immigration Law Makes it to ESPN

Sports and politics have once again collided.  Responding to a protest of sorts by the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer penned a special to ESPN.com disputing misinformation about SB 1070.  The governor took the unusual step because of calls for boycotting Arizona-based sports events, among other venues.

Along with a few purple prose moments with sports metaphors, Brewer lays out the hard facts about the federal government’s failure to enforce immigration laws.  In 2009, there were 316 kidnappings in Phoenix, making it the nation’s kidnapping capitol.  Today, there are approximately 6,000 prisoners in Arizona who are foreign nationals costing state taxpayers roughly $150 million a year.

Getting back to the boycott issue, Governor Brewer makes an assertion no one can reasonable disagree with:

A boycott that would actually improve border security would be to boycott illegal drugs. Dramatically less drug use and production would do wonders for the safety of all our communities.

We’ll see how that goes over.