Who Cares about Kevin O'Reilly?

White House National Security
Staffer Executive, Kevin O'Reilly
Did he report to President Obama?
The White House declines to comment.

A Mexican reporter from Univision asked President Obama what he knew about Operation Fast and Furious on March 22, 2011, President Obama stated that "a serious mistake may have been made." He also stated that there would be an investigation and whoever was found to be responsible would be held accountable. 

A year and a half later, documents and testimony before the House of Representatives demonstrated that a senior National Security staffer at the White House named Kevin O'Reilly repeatedly communicated by email and telephone with ATF Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious, Bill Newell, about the case while it was under way. O'Reilly indicated in one email that he wanted to share information about the case with other National Security staffers, but stated that it would go no further than that. White House officials have said there is no evidence that Newell and O'Reilly ever discussed the controversial tactic of gunwalking and, on those grounds, have blocked the attempts of Congressional Republicans to interview O'Reilly, who was sent on assignment to Iraq for the State Department. 

BATFE Special Agent-in-Charge
Bill Newell
Phoenix, AZ

CONTEXT: "Fast and Furious" is the name ATF assigned to a group of Phoenix, Arizona-area gun trafficking cases under Project Gunrunner that began in fall of 2009. It's the largest of several known operations in which ATF employed gunwalking, involving more than 2,000 weapons, including hundreds of AK-47 type semi-automatic rifles and .50 caliber rifles. According to sources who worked directly on the case, the vast majority of guns were not tracked and Mexico's government was not fully informed of the case. The ATF Special Agent in Charge of the operation was Bill Newell.

Kevin O'Reilly returned to the US from Iraq on the eve of the presidential election. He is working in the US State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (meaning Mexico) and he continues to refuse to cooperate with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He has also refused to cooperate with the Department of Justice's Inspector General.

Both the House committee and the Inspector General's office sought to interview O'Reilly about Fast and Furious but the White House refused to grant him permission to be interviewed.

Dan Restrepo
National Security Senior Director
for the Western Hemisphere

Kevin O'Reilly told SAC Newell in e-mail that he would inform two other White House National Security Staff officials: Dan Restrepo, the senior director for Western Hemisphere; and Greg Gatjanis, director for the Counterterrorism and Counternarcotics, about the Fast and Furious operation. The State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, is currently held by Assistant Secretary of State Roberta S. Jacobson. Congress didn't issue her a subpoena, but she'd likely be draped by President Obama's blanket of executive privilege  too, so she wouldn't have to testify.

Gatjanis and Restrepo don't have any recollection of  -- anything, it seems. If they did, the bread crumbs would likely lead back to President Barack Obama.

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND: Kevin O’Reilly previously served as director of North American Affairs for the White House National Security Staff (NSS), where he had a 2010 e-mail exchange with William Newell, the special agent in charge of the Phoenix field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which oversaw Operation Fast and Furious. 

Assistant Secretary Roberta Jacobsen

In August 2011 -- after the e-mails were first discussed at a July 26 congressional hearing -- O’Reilly was named as the senior director of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Programs in Iraq, a State Department position. 

The State Department put out a story that O’Reilly’s reassignment to Iraq from the White House “was a standard foreign service career rotation that had been planned for months in advance of his detail to the NSS.” At that time, the State Department could not confirm O’Reilly’s new title at the State Department. 

The State Department claimed to be unaware of an assertion by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who said someone else had been selected for the job in Iraq before O’Reilly was “suddenly” transferred there. (See related story) 

“O’Reilly’s sudden transfer to Baghdad occurred just days after the aforementioned e-mails with William Newell were produced to the Committee and Newell testified about them before Congress,” Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight panel, and Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to O’Reilly’s attorney Thomas G. Connolly. 

“Additionally, we have learned that O’Reilly took the place of a previously selected individual—an individual who had gone through a competitive application process and thorough vetting process, had the necessary qualifications, and whose spouse was already in Baghdad in anticipation of the individual’s arrival—to serve as the head of the Police Development Program.”

This is the same US State Department where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a timely (and unfortunate) concussion on the eve of her testimony before the US Senate on the Benghazi Scandal. We wish Secretary Clinton a speedy recovery and have no doubt that the memory loss due to her alleged trauma will keep her from every testifying about her repeated lies to the American People about Benghazi, Libya.

I suspect that this humble blogger is the only one who sees patterns of cover-up and denial repeating themselves in different venues, all with the same politicians calling the shots.

Obama Asserts Executive Privilege over Fast and Furious Documents: The invocation of executive privilege allows the president to defy requests and subpoenas by members of the legislative and judicial branches for information the White House deems sensitive. Obama's decision will allow him to refuse to provide certain documents pertaining to the Fast and Furious program. President Obama's re-election will insure that the details of what he did and what he knew will remain hidden. However, the stain will continue to hamper his efforts in Mexico and Latin America.

Question: Why did Bill Clinton, Carlos Slim Helu and President Enrique Pena Nieto meet in seclusion in Mexico City last week? I wonder if they were discussing the weather?

Decapitation Count in Mexico (2008-2012)

>> WARNING <<    

Some people may find this disturbing.

Before

The US policy that pushes that the drug war be fought (down there) to the last Mexican, has been disastrous and it will be felt in the new Mexican policy toward the United States. 

The United States fueled the fire through their Operation Gunwalker Scandal. We now know that the Obama Administration plans to keep Attorney General Eric Holder, architect of the Gunwalker Scandal wherein USGOV agents sold firearms through straw buyers to drug cartels without tracking them. Arming the cartels directly may not play on MSNBC, but the Mexicans take note.

After

There may be more this year so these are not final numbers, but you can use them as a fair guess. These numbers do not include decapitations where the heads were NOT displayed to the public for public relations value.

During the first five years of the Calderon administration, 1,443 decapitation cases were reported. 

Between January and November 2011, 493 cases were reported. 

-Chihuahua leads the pack with 171 reported decapitations since the start of the Calderon administration 

-Guerrero comes in second at 140. 

-Tamaulipas with 119 reported cases since the start of the Calderon administration  

-Durango almost tied for third with 115 reported decapitations. 

-Sinaloa came in fifth, which may surprise some people, with a mere 89 reported decapitations. (What happened to Sinaloa? There were a lot of murders in Sinaloa, but it would seem that the people in that area are less inclined to decapitate their victims.)

-Mexico State, Baja California Norte, Jalisco, Coahuila and Veracruz finished behind the pack.

The cost of Mexican President's US-Sponsored and funded drug war can be balanced by the embarrassingly low number of decapitations before he and his American allies "got the heads lopping". 

There were only 37 reported decapitations in all of Mexico in 2007.

During the first three years of the Calderon administration, 10.3 large-scale massacres were reported per month. During the second three years, an average of 23 were reported on a monthly basis. 

English Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration
Spanish Source: El Universal

The Federation Strikes Back

There are five key accusations against ATF and DOJ made by ATF whistleblowers and other sources within FedGov:

1. That they instructed U.S. gun dealers to proceed with questionable and illegal sales of firearms to suspected gunrunners.

2. That they allowed or even assisted in those guns crossing the U.S. border into Mexico to "boost the numbers" of American civilian market firearms seized in Mexico and thereby provide the justification for more firearm restrictions on American citizens and more power and money for ATF.

3. That they intentionally kept Mexican authorities in the dark about the operation, even over objections of their own agents.

4. That weapons that the ATF let "walk" to Mexico were involved in the deaths of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata, as well as at least hundreds of Mexican citizens.

5. That at least since the death of Brian Terry on 14 December, the Obama administration is engaged in a full-press cover-up of the facts behind what has come to be known as the "Gunwalker Scandal."

(The Sipsey Street Irregulars)

__________________________________________

There has been a national election in the USA in which nobody discussed this rather sorry chapter in American History. The candidates were mute as was the mainstream media. Maybe they felt that it had all become "history", and thus a mere footnote to the great unwashed who would soon vote for the next president and "leader of the free world".

However as unlikely as it may seem, there are people in Mexico who have dead friends and relatives, killed with firearms and ammunition supplied to cartels by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who have longer memories than the American Press.

The brother of a high ranking US federal agent was kidnapped in Casa Grande, Chihuahua and subsequently killed in Mexico, last week. The murderers dumped his body near Agua Prieta. It didn't have anything to do with Operation Gunrunner directly, however it was a message sent to US Law Enforcement and you're going to hear that message again from the Sinaloa Federation. 

This is the bottom line. When the Federation (drug cartel) gives up one of its own as a sacrificial sheep to satisfy the needs MEXGOV to look good in the press or when they need to weed out a weakling, that's ok. When the US uses "atmospherics" to track somebody that they need/want around and feed that to SEMAR, then the fir will fly.

You'll hear more of this in the future both on this blog and elsewhere. The Sinaloa Federation wants USGOV to take their law enforcement officials out of the Republic of Mexico. There was a political statement made on July 1, 2012 and that government will be seated on December 1, 2012. Look for one of the reasons behind MEXGOV restricting US Law Enforcement in Mexico to be the Gunwalker Scandal.