MassPrivateI A report, published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, suggests that the caprice, carelessness, and downright incompetence that marked the disaster was no accident. In fact, that it is endemic in the ATF.
After a bungled sting attracted the suspicion of the Milwaukee press earlier this year, reporters started to examine similar enterprises in the rest of the country. What they found astonished them. Among the tactics they discovered ATF agents employing were using mentally disabled Americans to help run unnecessary sting operations; establishing agency-run “fronts” in “safe zones” such as schools and churches; providing alcohol, drugs, and sexual invitations to minors; destroying property and then expecting the owners to pick up the tab; and hiring felons to sell guns to legal purchasers. Worse, perhaps, in a wide range of cases, undercover agents specifically instructed individuals to behave in a certain manner — and then arrested and imprisoned them for doing so. This is government at its worst. And it appears to be standard operating procedure.
As with Fast and Furious, the primary objective of the ATF’s stings seems not to be to fight a known threat but instead to manufacture crime. Across the country, the agency has set up shops in which it attempts to facilitate or to encourage illegal behavior, and it has drafted citizens into the scheme without telling them that they were involved. It is fishing — nonchalantly, haphazardly, even illegally. And the consequences can go hang.
Some of the stories are heartrending. Tony Bruner, a convicted felon with an IQ of 50, was hired in Wichita to work at “Bandit Trading,” a fake store that agents had established as a front. Bruner didn’t realize that he was working for the ATF — he thought he had finally found a steady job. But the agents knew how valuable Bruner could be to them, recognizing immediately that he was disabled (or “slow-headed,” in one agent’s unlovely phrase) and that he would therefore be easy to manipulate. Having established his trust, agents asked Bruner to find guns for them, which he agreed to do. Eventually, Bruner got rather good at it and ended up arranging dozens of gun sales.
“I was just doing my job. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” Bruner said in court. “They tricked me into believing I was doing a good job. And they’d tell me I was doing a good job, pat me on the back, telling me, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ We’d hug each other and stuff like that, and they treated me like they cared about me. I told ’em I had a felony, I’m trying to stay out of trouble.”
The ATF had no intention whatsoever of allowing Bruner to stay out of trouble. Indeed, it ensured that the opposite was the case. Having used him to arrange a series of illegal sales, agents arrested him and charged him “with more than 100 counts of being a felon in possession of a weapon.” As with most of the victims of the program, Bruner was persuaded to enter a guilty plea instead of risk a trial. He was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. According to the Journal Sentinel’s report, “the judge told him he was getting a big break because he could have gotten 10 to 12 years.” But Bruner didn’t see it this way, telling the judge that he thought he might be killed in prison by inmates who believed that he had been willingly working with authorities.
At best the ATF’s new techniques constitute illegal entrapment. At worst, they are downright tyrannical. Entrapment is legally permitted if a suspect initiates a crime in the presence of an undercover agent or if he can reasonably be deemed to have been predisposed to commit the crime when offered an opportunity to do so. But it is difficult to see how either of these tests is being met in the Bruner case or in others. Indeed, cases using entrapment are often thrown out of court if the government is seen to have put too much pressure on a suspect or to have made breaking the law so easy or attractive as to render restraint impossible. Per the paper’s report, ATF tactics involved offering ridiculous prices for firearms to attract straw purchasers, requesting that suspects buy specific firearms that carry tougher sentences, or, as it did in one case, showing a known felon how to saw off a shotgun so that they could charge him with a more serious violation when he did it. Will anyone claim that these tactics are legal?
That they are immoral, too, needs less spelling out. Because no formal arrangements were made with the individuals whom the agency selected for involuntary cooperation, there were no means by which they could claim protection for their behavior after the fact. In other words: The federal government knowingly ruined their lives without telling them. And for what? Well, apparently to try to pick low-hanging fruit.
At each step, the behavior is unjustifiable: Randomly fishing for criminals is outrageous in and of itself; doing so when there is no known threat is worse; and being aware that you are probably sentencing your chosen accomplices to more time in prison in the pursuit of something intangible is worse still. But involving those who are non compos mentis? Ruining their lives, too? For this, there is a special place in hell.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/365903/how-atf-manufactures-crime-charles-c-w-cooke
ATF wants a ‘Massive’ database for investigations:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/08/atf-database_n_3038271.html
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http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-atfs-shameful-tactics-of.html