Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

“Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” – Benjamin Franklin

Or if they are two (or three!) non-cooperating U.S. government agencies….

“Fast and Furious,” indeed!

Maybe they should have called it, “Fast and Loose!”

(Note added March 28, 2012: It is the family of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry that is “furious.” See below.)

U.S. federal agents of BATFE released alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta to help them find two Mexican drug lords, during the now-infamous “Fast and Furious” Operation, in which U.S. government agencies supplied Mexican drug cartels with high-powered rifles and other weapons! Yes, they knew Celis-Acosta was also wanted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time! The punchline…? The two drug lords were already secret informants for the FBI (according to newly obtained internal emails)!

Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau show that as far back as December 2009 — five months before Celis-Acosta was detained and released at the border in a car carrying 74 live rounds of ammunition — ATF and DEA agents learned by chance that they were separately investigating the same man in the Arizona and Mexico border region.

ATF agents had placed a secret pole camera outside his Phoenix home to track his movements, and separately the DEA was operating a “wire room” to monitor live wiretap intercepts to follow him.

In May 2010, Celis-Acosta was briefly detained at the border in Lukeville, Ariz., and then released by Hope MacAllister, the chief ATF investigator on Fast and Furious, after he promised to cooperate with her.

The ATF had hoped he would lead them to two Mexican cartel members. But records show that after Celis-Acosta finally was arrested in February 2011, the ATF learned to its surprise that the two cartel members were secret FBI informants.

If this sounds like a Marx Brothers farce to you, then you are not remembering the human bodies piling up on both sides of the border!

If Celis-Acosta had simply been held (“shoulda, woulda, coulda”) when he was arrested in May 2010 by BATFE, the loss of hundreds of guns and loss of a Border Patrol agent’s life could have been prevented, because the whole operation could have been shut down early! (Not that it would have been…. The blundering incompetence of many governmental and corporate operations often ceases only when it becomes publicly known… and embarrassing.)

Certain personality types are naturally competitive, aggressive, and secretive (and incompetent ). The fact that they fill certain government agencies and corporate boardrooms does not make them less so.

Representative Darrel Issa (R-Vista; California’s 49th congressional district), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who are investigating Fast and Furious, said in a confidential memo to Republican committee members, that BATF should have known that the cartel members were informants and immediately shut down Fast and Furious. (Yes, hindsight is 20-20. Even Republicans have good hindsight, sometimes, but hindsight is really not enough to run a country. )

“This means the entire goal of Fast and Furious — to target these two individuals and bring them to justice — was a failure,” they wrote. The “lack of follow-through” by the various agencies, they said, typified “the serious management failures that occurred throughout all levels during Fast and Furious.”

It is STILL unclear whether MacAllister later told the DEA that she released Celis-Acosta in May 2010 and that he was headed into Mexico.

A Phoenix attorney, Adrian P. Fontes, representing Celis-Acosta, who has pleaded not guilty, said that he was concerned that the federal agencies purposely did not share information.

“When one hand is not talking to the other, perhaps somebody is hiding something,” he said. “Was this intentional?”

(Note added March 28, 2012: From the L.A. Times:

“Family members of slain U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry said they were  “sickened” by reports that federal law enforcement agencies on the Southwest border did not share information about their investigations, and believe Terry would be alive today had the ATF known that two top targets in their Fast and Furious case actually were FBI informants.

“It is beyond our comprehension that U.S. federal law enforcement agencies were not talking with one another,” the family said in a statement released Wednesday by their Phoenix attorney, Lincoln Combs. “American citizens deserve better from their public servants.”

The article has additional information about the three times that alleged gun smuggler, Manuel Celis-Acosta, was stopped and released.)

-Bill at

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