Washington DC - Under mounting pressure to disclose more details about the government's Fast and Furious gun-running fiasco, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed today that the effort failed because a "drug tracking" component of the operation was never implemented.
"You see, we know how to give guns away," Holder explained. "We just don't know how to track the guns after they leave our hands. And that's really the most important part of the operation: the tracking. Anybody can just give them away."
That's where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was supposed to step in, according to Holder. The plan called for that agency to provide a free kilo of heroin with every gun purchased by a certified member of any A-list Mexican drug cartel.
The scheme would have then employed the DEA to monitor retail sales of the heroine to track the whereabouts of the cartel member and his Fast and Furious provided firearm.
"Give a man a gun, and he might just shoot himself in the foot," Holder said. "But give a man a gun and a controlled substance, and before you know it he has a gang of his own and he is a major player.
"And that brings us to the chief purpose of Fast and Furious," Holder went on. "The idea was to get the big fish, the big shots, the kingpins. Had the DEA cooperated, we would've been reeling them in."
A DEA spokesman explained the mixup, noting that when the Fast and Furious work order was presented to his agency, officials thought it was a program to create jobs rather than a drug enforcement operation.
"We passed it on to the Commerce Department along with a couple of kilos of heroin to get the ball rolling," the spokesman said. "In fact, we sent it right to the top, to Commerce Department Secretary John Bryson. Funny, we haven't heard from him since."
