What if Richard Nixon Had Been President During ‘Operation Gun Runner’?

by AWR Hawkins

In June 1972, political and covert operatives broke into the Watergate Hotel during President Richard Nixon’s bid for re-election. When it happened, the reasoning behind the crime was unknown but has since become clear: Republicans wanted to uncover dirt on Democrats in a bid to help Nixon win a second term. What was clear then, and has remained clear to this day, was that Nixon didn’t authorize the break-in, nor did he know about it when it initially took place. His only crime was that he covered up the Watergate incident once it was brought to his attention. (If you went to a public school for your education, this is probably news to you.)

The result of Nixon’s cover-up was the infamous Watergate Scandal, which spawned a move toward impeachment in the House of Representatives and finally, Nixon’s resignation of the presidency in August 1974.

For the record, no one died during Watergate or as a result of it. Yet Nixon’s character was maligned, as the mainstream media – the only media that existed in the 1970s – distorted the facts about Watergate in their favor, in order to bring down the man who had campaigned against the left’s counter culture movement and had actually tried to win in Vietnam.

In late 2009, various operatives in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) began an operation code-named “Gun Runner.” This operation entailed okaying U.S. gun sales to people with suspected ties to the Mexican Cartel, and then allowing those guns to be illegally carried into Mexico in order to give BATF agents an idea of where illegal guns were flowing in Mexico.

The number of guns sold is estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,500: many of which were assault rifles and some of which were .50 caliber sniper rifles.

In case you’ve never seen a .50 fired by someone who knows what they’re doing, just keep in mind that a general effective range for a .50 is 2,000 meters (but it’s even further for a specialist). And since the Rio Grande is less than 2,000 meters wide, I can’t help but wonder how long it might be before someone in Mexico is intermittingly picking off Americans who are traveling near the border on I-10 or just walking down a side street in El Paso, TX?

If you think I’m crazy for fearing such things or that I’m blowing the danger out of proportion, please note that the BATF has already admitted seeing a surge in crime that coincides with the sale of these guns to suspected cartel members. An email uncovered from one of the supervisors of Operation Gun Runner notes that there were “958 [people] killed [in Mexico] in March 2010…[which made it the] most violent month since 2005.”

While an argument could be made that there’s no way of knowing exactly how many of those 958 people were killed with guns supplied by the BATF-sponsored sales, only a fool fails to understand that it wasn’t the import of Hanna Montana albums that allowed cartel members to kill so many people. They used guns for the majority of those killings, and guns were readily available through “Operation Gun Runner.”

And what’s beyond dispute is the fact that U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down in Mexico in December 2010 with a weapon purchased via “Gun Runner.”

Again: No one was killed during Watergate, yet Nixon was openly maligned, castigated, and pursued to the point of being forced out of office because he covered up a break-in. On the other hand, it seems that untold hundreds have been killed as a result of “Operation Gun Runner” and one Border Patrol Agent – which is one too many – definitely died as a result of it.

It appears President Obama’s Justice Department knew about “Gun Runner,” and the BATF obviously knew about it as well. But beyond these two groups everyone else – including Obama – claims to have been blissfully ignorant of the experiment.

If the cover-up of a break-in warranted the pursuit of impeachment in 1974, Speaker of the House John Boehner is three steps behind if he’s not at least pressing for full blown investigations into who knew what and when, concerning “Operation Gun Runner.”


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Posted Mar 28th 2011 at 4:33 pm in Uncategorized | 123 Comments