Primer: Obama/Holder v. Iran

I figured you might like a primer on the new Iranian issue, as it’s all over the headlines and it’s an issue which could actually lead to war if mishandled -- although that’s extremely unlikely. Here’s what’s up:

● What Happened: On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the DEA and FBI had foiled a plot to murder the Saudi Arabian ambassador and blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies. This plot was supposedly masterminded by Iran’s “elite” Quds military unit. The Quds are a special unit within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard whose job it is to “export” Iran’s Islamic revolution to other countries.

According to Holder, Manssor Arbabsiar (a Corpus Christi, Texas car salesman) was tasked by the Iranian government with finding someone to carry out the killing and the bombings. Arbabsiar turned to the nastiest of the Mexican drug cartels, Los Zetas, a group of former special forces soldiers who started their own cartel. I wrote about Los Zetas here: LINK. Arbabsiar wanted Los Zetas to do both the killing and the bombings and he wanted them to agree to funnel tons of opium from the Middle East into Mexico.

However, the person Arbabsiar contacted turned out to be a DEA informant. Whoops.

● Team Obama’s Response: The administration accuses Iran and describes this as: “a dangerous escalation of Iran's long-scale use of violence.” The reason they claim Iran did this was “the Iranians watch the Saudis roll tanks in Bahrain, and they see a key ally in Syria going down, so they step up the Quds Force.”

Joe Biden has been sent forth from the Idiotorium to take the lead on this. He described this as “really over the top” and said it was “an outrage that violates one of the fundamental premises on which nations deal with one another.” He also said that “no options have been taken off the table” for dealing with this, though the administration has already ruled out military action. Instead, they are considering sanctions, the standard response by liberals when they don’t know what to do.

● The Saudi Response: Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter regional rivals largely because their versions of Islam consider the other to be heretics. The Saudi embassy said this was “a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions,” and their former head of intelligence said Iran will have to “pay the price.” They have not been more specific yet. However, Saudi Arabia does not have a military capable of defeating Iran.

● The Iranian Response: For its part, Iran denies involvement. They told the UN they are “outraged” and “strongly and categorically reject these fabricated and baseless allegations, based on the suspicious claims by an individual.” Tehran claims Obama has fabricated this to “divert attention from the Wall Street uprising.” Ha ha! They also repeated claims the US has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years.

For the record, the only link so far to Iran is that the car dealer apparently is a cousin of someone in the Qud and he visited Iran right before $100,000 was wired into the informant’s account by the car dealer. The FBI claims this was wired from a Qud bank account.

● The World Reaction: The world reaction has been skeptical. Iranian experts say that Arbabsiar does not fit the profile of the typical Iranian agent, who tend to be professionals. And they say it’s unlikely Iran would be behind such a plot. Similarly, an Iranian expert in Berlin said these claims would be viewed with skepticism as “everyone is extremely skeptical about US intelligence revelations” and added, “I don’t regard it as impossible but rather improbable, even if the details of the story presented by the attorney general are essentially true.”

One western diplomat said: “I don't believe Iran's regime was behind the plot. If we assume it was Iran's plot, it would seem like a group of professional gangsters hiring a careless agent for their most important project. It's impossible.”

Even a senior American law enforcement official said (on condition of anonymity) that the US isn’t quite sure what this was and it was likely a “rogue plan. . . so outside their normal track of activity.”

● Some Questions: This all leaves us with some odd questions. If we assume Holder is correct, then what will Obama do about it? Even Clinton dropped a few cruise missiles on Sudan after the embassy bombings in Africa. So Obama can’t just pretend this didn’t happen.

But if Holder is wrong, then is he simply wrong or is there more to this?

I never like conspiracies as an answer, especially when there are more likely answers -- such as this guy just being a nut job. But it is extremely coincidental that the day after Darrell Issa starts talking about subpoenaing Holder to answer for what are likely criminal acts related to Fast and Furious, that Holder manages to unveil a huge distraction involving the very elements of Fast and Furious -- DEA, drugs, Mexican cartels and cross border crime. This is one of those coincidences you can’t put in films or people will lose their suspension of disbelief.

My normal response would be to trust professional law enforcement. BUT we’ve already seen how compromised they’ve been by Democratic Justice bosses, such as when Janet Reno ordered the Branch Davidian attack to show that she was tough or the Elian Gonzalez deportation to show Castro goodwill or Holder’s actions in Fast and Furious itself, where potentially hundreds of lives have been taken or destroyed by Holder’s attempt to use the ATF for political purposes. Trust is in short supply here.

So I think we should keep an open mind at this point and not assume anything unless and until strong, verifiable, independent proof is provided.

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The Next Obama Scandal: “Gun Walking”

Operation Fast and Furious was an idiotic attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to get proof that Mexican drug cartels are buying guns from American gun shops. This reckless operation had no chance of success and it got people killed, including American Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. What's more, it has all the hallmarks of being politically motivated and is likely to reach into the White House.



Starting in 2009, the ATF, part of Eric Holder’s Justice Department, got cooperative Phoenix-area gun shops to sell guns illegally to Mexicans. Rather than arrest these buyers, as they would have done in the past, the ATF instructed its agents to turn a blind eye to the sales. This has been called “gun walking” because they let these guns walk out the door. The ATF hoped the guns would be recovered from Mexican crime scenes, which they believed would let them build conspiracy cases against Mexican drug cartels. It didn’t. In fact, it couldn't because the entire concept is flawed. Consider this:

1. By telling the gun shops to knowingly sell the guns illegally, the agency itself made it possible for the guns to reach Mexico. Thus, this operation cannot stand as proof that American gun shops are selling to Mexicans because it was the ATF itself that made this possible and there is no evidence that any non-cooperating gun shops made similar sales.



2. Secondly, there’s no way to connect the drug cartels to the gun sales because the ATF didn’t keep track of the guns. In other words, even if cartel members used these guns in Mexico, there’s no way to trace the gun from the purchase to the cartel. And if the ATF's plan was just to assume the connection (something that is not permissible in a court of law) then why even bother releasing the guns?

Thus, even if the operation worked perfectly, it still could not have achieved the ATF's goals.



But more importantly, what was the cost of this stupidity? Republicans Rep. Daryl Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley just issued a 51 page report damning Operation Fast and Furious. From the start, this operation was criticized by experienced ATF agents as “reckless.” Said Grassley: “Both line agents and gun dealers who co-operated with the ATF repeatedly expressed concerns [about the operation]. . . but ATF supervisors did not heed those warnings. Instead, they told agents to follow orders because this was sanctioned from above.” And when ATF bosses were told this could result in people getting killed, they responded: “if you are going to make an omelet, you need to scramble some eggs.” In other words, they didn’t care. Apparently, they even threatened to fire or punish agents who complained.



It is unknown how many crimes these guns were used to commit because the ATF had no way to monitor what happened to the guns. But before the operation was stopped, 1,730 guns were allowed to disappear onto the black market, including hundreds of AK-47s and sniper rifles. One of those AK-47s was later used to kill Board Patrol Agent Brian Terry. And when he was killed, the ATF embarked on a cover up. William Newell, the special agent in charge of the operation, ordered the arrest of 20 of the minor gun buyers and then declared the operation a success even though nothing was ever linked to a single senior cartel member. When he was asked if the guns the ATF had let disappear were deliberately allowed to end up in the hands of criminals, he lied: “Hell no!”



So what you have here is a government agency that embarked on a policy that could not achieve the goals for which it was planned, which endangered thousands of American and Mexican lives, and which covered up the mess it created. If that’s not an argument for reining in the government, then nothing is.



Naturally, Obama has denied any knowledge of the operation and I’m sure Eric Holder will too. There is speculation that acting ATF director Kenneth Melson will be made the scapegoat here. But this is not the kind of operation that happens without higher up approval. In fact, one ATF agent has stated that this operation was cleared by the State Department, i.e. Hillary Clinton (who "coincidentally" came to the border to decry American guns right before this operation started).



To dodge this scandal, the Democrats are spinning this as the fault of the gun lobby for blocking the appointment of Obama’s choice to run the ATF -- that's the same Democrats who had a 60 seat majority but didn't confirm the guy. They also are trying to claim this started in 2006, which is true of the overall operation but not of the gun walking -- which only started in 2009 apparently after the approval of State. The ATF is trying to spin this as the result of the ATF not having enough personnel to monitor the guns, but that begs the question why they even started the operation.



In fact, why would they do this at all? The ATF says they wanted to get a better grasp on how cartels work, but that kind of knowledge is already available and this wouldn’t have helped them in any event. The real goal, in my opinion, was to create data to prove what Obama/Hillary/Holder were all arguing: that gun control is needed because American gun shops are arming Mexican drug cartels. That argument wasn’t working because everyone knows better. As I pointed out at the time, it’s silly to think Mexican cartels were buying guns from American gun shops when they have co-opted whole departments of the Mexican police and whole military units -- they could easily get better hardware out of Mexican armories. BUT. . . if American guns with serial numbers known to the ATF could suddenly be traced to a significant portion of murders in Mexico, then Obama/Clinton/Holder would have a new argument to aid them in their gun control attempts.



It strikes me this is a prime example of politicians abusing law enforcement to generate a controversy to help them score political points. People died so Team Obama could score those points. This is shameful and needs to be investigated.



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El Presidente Demagogue

Sometimes politicians make it so easy to point out their stupidity and hypocrisy that it feels like taking candy from a voter. That was the case with Mexican President Felipe Calderon the other day, who demonstrated that he’s a top notch demagogue who is happy to exploit any tragedy he can to help his sagging political career. Check this out.

A week or so ago, a tragedy occurred along the U.S./Mexico border. Anastacio Hernandez, who was in this country illegally, was being deported by federal Border Patrol agents. They were in California. According to the Border Patrol agents, when they removed Hernandez’s handcuffs at the border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, he turned on them and wrestled both to the ground. One of the agents pulled out a stun gun and shocked Hernandez. Hernandez died a few hours later from that shock.

This is a tragedy on many levels. It’s a tragedy that Hernandez is dead. His death was entirely avoidable if he had simply crossed into Mexico rather than pointlessly fighting the Border Patrol. And it’s a tragedy that these two Border Patrol agents will have to live with having caused a death. Moreover, it's a tragedy that every leftist in Congress will now try to exploit this tragedy by calling for the heads of the two Border Patrol agents who do not appear to have done anything wrong. They will also call for hearings on stun guns, one of many causes on the left.

And chief among the exploiters, getting a solid head start, was Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who saw in this tragedy an opportunity to raise his Obama-like popularity ratings (41%). Calderon began by completely losing all sense of reality, by describing what happened as “torture” and stating that “a death with that degree of violence is truly a unacceptable violation.”

So a guy gets shot with a stun gun, as in “don’t taze me bro,” after he chooses to fight two cops who are letting him go, and he dies because of a freak set of circumstances, and that’s a “degree of violence” that is unacceptable? Really? That’s torture? Seriously?

How does that compare with corrupt Mexican police and drug gangs torture-killing thousands of citizens in Mexico over the past several years in ways that are too graphic to discuss? Where is the condemnation for the illegals who have been brutally killing Arizona ranchers? How about the bodies they’re pulling out of the abandoned mine in Mexico? The deputies found decapitated on Mexican highways? The murder of family members when you can’t get at the principal? The execution style killings of politicians? Any of this ring any bells Felipe? And let’s not forget that Hernandez started it.

Then Calderon tossed in Arizona’s immigration law, claiming that it “opens a Pandora’s box of the worst abuses in the history of humanity.” Really? Asking people for identification is the same as the Holocaust, or the genocides in Cambodia, Turkey, Rawanda, Sudan, and so on? It’s the same as Stalin’s mass murders and purges? It’s the same as the slave trade or Islamic terrorists blowing up school girls? It’s the same as what’s going on in Mexico right now? Me thinks someone needs some perspective.

Not to mention that this has nothing to do with Arizona’s law. This took place in California. And if you don’t know where Tijuana is, then buy a map señor. Secondly, these were federal agents enforcing federal law -- these weren’t Arizona cops. And let’s not forget that Mexico’s “laws” are much harsher when it comes to illegals, and that Mexico’s “justice” system actually is brutal and corrupt, not pretend brutal like you’re making out the US system to be.

Maybe exploiting and demagoguing a tragedy is good politics in Mexico, but it certainly sucks here. And maybe if you would do something to make Mexico something other than a cesspool of violence and despair, then this whole problem wouldn’t have come up in the first place? Maybe it's time to shut the heck up el Presidente?

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Forget The Minority Take Over Of America

You’ve all heard how there will be more minorities in the United States by 2050 than there will be whites, right? Forget it. It’s not happening. Moreover, expect the illegal alien problem to start going away soon all on its own. Why? Because demographics don’t move in a straight line.

If you do as the left does, and you look at demographics as a straight line, then you see that 30 million Hispanics in 1980 turned into 45 million Hispanics in 2000 and will turn into 67 million in 2020 and 104 million in 2040. That, combined with blacks and Asians (groups that are not experiencing growth), results in about 50% of the population by 2050.

But that’s not how demographics work, and recent developments have shown the problem with this assumption. First, when the recession hit the United States, large numbers of Hispanics left the United States. So many in fact, that the Census Bureau had to revise its estimates downward for the future take over of the United States by a decade. They now estimate that there will be only 105.1 million Hispanics by 2050 -- a full decade later than expected.

But there’s another problem with this that hasn’t been considered yet. The key to Hispanic growth has been Mexico. Indeed, almost all of the growth in the Hispanic population in the United States has been the result of Mexicans coming to the United States. When Reagan granted an amnesty in the 1980s, there were about five million Mexicans illegally in the United States. By 2000, we’d added another 12 million. That seventeen million is more than one-third of the forty-five million Hispanics in the United States today, and it represents almost the entire growth in the Hispanic population since the 1980s.

Indeed, if you look at the map to the right, you’ll see that consistent with this, Hispanics are almost entirely concentrated along the border with Mexico.

So why does this matter? Because things are changing dramatically in Mexico.

Mexicans first started coming to the United States in vast numbers in the 1980s. There were two reasons for this. First, with the end of the oil boom, Mexico’s economy tanked. At the same time, the American economy boomed. Thus, with few jobs south of the border and large numbers of jobs north of the border, people fled Mexico for the United States. This was made even worse by the fact that Mexico’s economy was almost entirely dependent on the oil industry and that its government is one of the most corrupt in the world -- leading to a lack of opportunities and huge disparities in income, which creates a large underclass.

The second reason was that Mexico’s collapse coincided with a baby boom that began in the 1950s, similar to that experienced by the United States. Indeed, in the 1960s, Mexico had the highest birth rate in the world, with Mexican mothers having on average seven children each. Thus, in addition to its economic collapse, Mexico was awash in young people, who are by-their-nature more willing to emigrate to find work. These were the people who began coming in the 1980s.

So what’s changed? Mexico’s birth rate has plummeted. It is now just over 2 children per mother, almost identical to the birth rate in the United States, and it’s still falling -- it will soon be at European levels (around 1.4). Because of this, Mexico’s population is estimated to peak in 2043, though I suspect that will happen much sooner, as it has in other countries. That means that the supply of people to head north is quickly running out.

Moreover, because of this change, the population is aging much quicker, which will accelerate the decline in the number of people willing to go north. Not only is an older population less interested in emigrating, but this also means that there will be more opportunities for Mexico’s young to find solid, long-term employment. Also, a smaller, older population tends to lead to greater personal wealth because the competition for employees drives up wages. This again, reduces emigration because it makes it more profitable to remain in Mexico. It also may draw people back to Mexico, just as this recession has done, because they can do better in Mexico.

What all of this means is that there will be fewer Mexicans very soon, and fewer of them will want to come to the United States to find work. That means that American Hispanics will no longer be receiving the mega-demographic boost that illegal immigration has been providing. When you exclude those numbers, the rest of Hispanic America is growing at about the same pace as white America.

Thus, the Hispanic growth rate will soon start to fall from 50% every twenty years to around 4%, about the growth rate of everybody else.

Hence, reports of the minority take over of America have been greatly exaggerated.


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Badges. . . We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges. . .

Do you remember the big fuss made by Team Obama and Mexico’s incompetent government a couple months back? Remember how all the carnage in Mexico was the result of automatic weapons being sold in the United States and then smuggled across the border to kill policemen? Wanna know the truth? It’s actually kind of scary. Read on. . .

Now at the outset, you know this story is bunk. Indeed, as you will recall from our article on guns, you can no longer buy new automatic weapons in the United States, and getting the older ones is extremely difficult. It’s also very difficult under the law to manufacture semi-automatic weapons that can be converted to full automatic. Not to mention that you can’t buy rockets and other real military hardware at all.

So where is this equipment coming from? Meet Los Zetas.

Who Is Los Zetas?

Mexico, like much of South-Central America, is beset by corruption. Local police are often for sale to the highest bidder. This has allowed various criminal enterprises (drug cartels, crime syndicates, smugglers) to all but turn Mexico in a series of small criminal kingdoms, with any attempt to combat these groups being frustrated by the complicity of local law enforcement.

To solve this problem, Mexico turned to their army. With the help of the United States, Mexico set up an elite anti-crime/counter-insurgency unit that it could send into any part of the country to impose order where the local authorities failed or refused, and to fight these criminal enterprises. This group, called the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), was trained in the full range of special forces tactics at Fort Bragg and is equipped with the latest in US special forces hardware. So far so good.

In the late 1990, Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen began recruiting GAFE members to act as protection. His top recruit, Lt. Arturo Guzmán Decena brought with him approximately 30 other GAFE members. They called themselves Los Zetas, for the radio code “Zeta” used by the Mexican military to identify leadership persons.

Upon the arrest of Guillen, Los Zetas set out on their own. Soon enough, they set up camps to train recruits, including ex-federal, state and local police. Eventually, this would increase the number of members in Los Zetas to around 4000 members.

(A rival gang, the Sinaloa Cartel, has established its own version of Los Zetas known as Los Negros.)

Not only does Los Zetas operate at a higher tactical level than local authorities, but they are also extremely well armed (body armor, Kevlar ballistic helmets, a variety of automatic weapons including 50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers, surface-to-air missiles, helicopters and a variety of explosives), and they make extensive use of wire tapping and cell phone tapping. Apparently, they also often masquerade as federal troops or police, using both federal uniforms and vehicles.

And what does this private army do? They collect debts, secure cocaine supply and trafficking routes, kidnap individuals, perform murder-for-hire, engage in extortion and money-laundering schemes, smuggle humans, and, most importantly, execute rivals. In that regard, they are known for incredible sadism and savagery. One common tactic, for example, involves putting their victim into a barrel of oil and setting the oil on fire -- this is reminiscent of the practice of “tiring” or “necklacing” practiced in Haiti and by the African National Congress in South Africa, where a tire is placed over the victims shoulders, filled with gasoline, and then set on fire.

Los Zetas also is known for monitoring and kidnapping journalists and their families, and they have hired gangs like the Texas Syndicate and MS-13 to carry out contract killings in within the United States. They are suspected in the recent murder of a popular politician and his family, though they deny involvement.

Threat To The Mexican Government

The fight between Los Zetas and the Mexican government has been so intense that many have feared the government would fall. Indeed, in February 2009, Rick Perry called out the National Guard, including armor and air units, “as a preventive measure upon the possible collapse of the Mexican State.”

This followed a year in which:

• In September 2008, Los Zetas members killed eight people and wounded more than 100 by tossing grenades into crowds of people celebrating Mexico’s independence in the city of Morelia.

• In December, eight soldiers were found tortured and decapitated in the resort town of Acapulco. The heads were stuffed in a plastic bag, left outside a shopping center with a note saying: “For every one of us you kill, we are going to kill 10.”

• In July, a group called La Familia, with whom Los Zetas apparently works, dumped the bodies of twelve federal police intelligence agents on a highway in Michoacán.

• At the end of August, a dozen hooded gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation clinic in Ciudad Juarez, on the Texas border, lined up the patients, and killed eighteen of them. On the same day, another 30 people were executed across Mexico.

Last week, Mexican President Felipe Calderon removed Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora from office because of concerns that the government is losing this war.

Threat To The United States

Right now, Los Zetas is primarily based in the border region of Nuevo Laredo, though they are believed to operate all along the border and in most parts of the country. There is also evidence that Los Zetas has spread to Texas.

Since late 2006, more than 80 United States law enforcement officers working on the U.S.-Mexico border at the local, state and federal level have been convicted of corruption-related charges, according to an Associated Press tally. They have helped Los Zetas move drugs as far as Delaware.

In August, it was revealed that Los Zetas smuggled $46 million worth of oil stolen from PEMEX into the United States, where it was sold to U.S. refineries using false import documents.

Following a joint investigation titled “Operation Black Jack” by the ATF, DEA, ICE, FBI and Homeland Security, American authorities raided two Los Zetas’s safe houses in Texas, freeing over 40 kidnapped individuals.

On October 26, 2008, the Washington Times reported that the FBI warned Texas law enforcement that Los Zetas had threatened “a full tactical response” should law enforcement interfere with their operations. In response, a leader of Los Zetas was arrested in Reynosa, Tamaulipas (a border city) on November 7, 2008. In that operation, the Mexican Army and Mexican Federal Police seized three safe houses and found 540 assault rifles, 287 grenades, 2 M72 Law rocket launchers, half a million rounds of ammunition, 67 ballistic vests and 14 sticks of dynamite.

Conclusion

So where do these guns that are plaguing Mexico come from? Where else would former military and police officers with deep connections to the Mexican police and military get modern American military hardware of the type provided by the American military to the Mexican military (but not available to average Americans)? Well, if you’re a liberal or journalist, apparently you think they’re buying this hardware from gun stores in Texas.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed before Mexico explodes. It is shameful that Team Obama would not only turn a blind eye, but would falsely try to convert the crisis they should be addressing into an opportunity to make false political points against lawful gun ownership in the United States.

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