Fast and Furious program fails Brian Terry once more

Mary Sanchez

In the annals of misguided and bungled government investigations, Operation Fast and Furious holds a special marker.

This is not the action movie franchise by the same name. But agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did name their failed program, back when it was conceived in 2009, after the movie.

Fast and Furious is a botched federal effort to track U.S.-purchased guns trafficked to Mexican drug cartels. Agents would watch as straw buyers made legal gun buys in the U.S. and then they tracked the guns as they were passed to middlemen, who then passed them along to those who would use the guns for criminal purposes.

The accusation was that the agents were knowingly letting the guns make their way to illegal hands. The ATF didn’t want the little guys, the straw buyers; it wanted the bigger fish; it wanted the cartels.

Problem is, the ATF lost the trail. The guns went missing, more than 2,000 of them.

That is, until they weren’t missing any- more. Guns later tracked through the program began showing up at gruesome murder scenes in Mexico and eventually on the U.S. side of the border.

Finally, this fiasco got shut down when the inevitable occurred; a high-profile murder in December 2010. U.S. border patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in a shootout with Mexican “rip-off ” crews, bandits who rob smugglers as they make their way along the border.

Last week, the hunt for Terry’s killers moved forward a step. Mexican marines captured a fugitive, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, on Wednesday. He’s now being held awaiting extradition to the U.S. Five other men already have been prosecuted. One man believed to have been at the scene of Terry’s death still is at large.

In interviews, Terry’s family has expressed hope that the new administration will uncover more of what they want to hear, the full truth of what happened. It’s unlikely. There was a protracted investigation by the House Oversight Committee, and heads did roll. At one point, then Attorney General Eric Holder was found in contempt for refusing to produce documents. And because the investigation quickly became more about embarrassing the Obama administration than garnering larger truths, the investigation stalled.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Ca- lif., all but ensured the investigation would falter when he called for it. No testimony was allowed to comment on gun-control laws or legislation. The investigation did not delve into the issue of illegal gun purchases or to how easily cartels can acquire weapons in the U.S. The gains were to be political, not practical. Nothing uncovered in the investigation would help the ATF work more efficiently.

In the ensuing years, gun laws have gotten looser. Ideas on how to better track guns or how to prevent them from being resold to criminals largely don’t make it to Congress.

Early on, the scandal behind Fast and Furious began to unravel as tipsters began talking to bloggers, who pumped the fear that the program was really a plot by the Obama administration to build a case for banning semiautomatic weapons.

One of Terry’s alleged killers still is on the loose. This sad story is not complete.