Undercover ATF Agents Exploited and Arrested Mentally Disabled Drug Addicts
By Lucy Steigerwald
The Washington, DC, headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Even among federal agencies, the ATF's incompetency stands out. Photo via Flickr user Mr. T in DC
At a bare minimum, it would be nice if the authorities didn’t go out of their way to trick mentally disabled people into doing illegal things and then send them to prison. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) can’t live up to even that low, low standard of behavior, according to an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published last week. The newspaper discovered that the ATF regularly set up shady pawnshops and smoke shops in cities across America in order to catch criminals, then engaged in some questionable behaviors that included employing—and then arresting—mentally handicapped individuals, destroying property, and losing track of guns. It looks as if the dangerously incompetent operation in Milwaukee the Journal Sentinel exposed earlier this year was not the anomaly the agency claimed it was.
The ATF set up storefronts in at least six cities all across the US, including Pensacola, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Undercover agents would sell cigarettes and designer jeans for cheap as well as actual stolen goods and guns while trying to get criminals to sell them drugs and weapons. Over the past six years, in at least four cities, they used mentally handicapped individuals in operations, then had them arrested.
Tony Bruner of Wichita, Kansas, who reportedly had an IQ somewhere in the 50s, was hired by undercover ATF agents to do odd jobs around one of their pawnshops. The 20-year-old called the law enforcement agents his friends, and eventually his “friends” encouraged to set up gun deals. He got three years in prison, and was advised by a judge to consider himself lucky he wasn't handed a harsher punishment. A brain-damaged drug addict in Albuquerque was similarly coerced into finding and buying machine guns by agents, and he got eight years when he brought them one. Most bizarrely, a pair of teenagers in Portland were paid to advertise Squid’s Smoke Shop, another front operation, by getting a neck tattoo. (A judge was so disgusted by this that he ordered the ATF to pay for the tats to get removed.) The investigation also showed that agents engaged in drug and gun stings within 1,000 feet of schools and churches in several cities, as well as allowing minors to smoke weed and drink alcohol in other stores. Landlords allege that some operations resulted in thousands of dollars of destroyed property, and that agents left without paying or leaving any forwarding address. In essence, ATF agents pretended to be criminals by becoming criminals.
Agents are also accused of selling guns to violent felons then letting them leave the store without any plan to track them, and of talking their targets into buying or selling guns that would bring more severe sentences. This speaks to a general sloppiness in ATF-run operations—in the gun-buying operation in Milwaukee, many of the charges were later dismissed, the store lost tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise when it got robbed, and agents misplaced a machine gun.
Read the rest: http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/undercover-atf-agents-exploited-and-arrested-mentally-disabled-drug-addicts
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Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." --- Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." --- Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."
Edited by Simplepowa (12/09/13 02:49 PM)
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Seems like there is a bug?! Story won't completely post.
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Undercover ATF Agents Exploited and Arrested Mentally Disabled Drug Addicts
By Lucy Steigerwald
The Washington, DC, headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Even among federal agencies, the ATF's incompetency stands out. Photo via Flickr user Mr. T in DC
At a bare minimum, it would be nice if the authorities didn’t go out of their way to trick mentally disabled people into doing illegal things and then send them to prison. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) can’t live up to even that low, low standard of behavior, according to an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published last week. The newspaper discovered that the ATF regularly set up shady pawnshops and smoke shops in cities across America in order to catch criminals, then engaged in some questionable behaviors that included employing—and then arresting—mentally handicapped individuals, destroying property, and losing track of guns. It looks as if the dangerously incompetent operation in Milwaukee the Journal Sentinel exposed earlier this year was not the anomaly the agency claimed it was.
The ATF set up storefronts in at least six cities all across the US, including Pensacola, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Undercover agents would sell cigarettes and designer jeans for cheap as well as actual stolen goods and guns while trying to get criminals to sell them drugs and weapons. Over the past six years, in at least four cities, they used mentally handicapped individuals in operations, then had them arrested.
Tony Bruner of Wichita, Kansas, who reportedly had an IQ somewhere in the 50s, was hired by undercover ATF agents to do odd jobs around one of their pawnshops. The 20-year-old called the law enforcement agents his friends, and eventually his “friends” encouraged to set up gun deals. He got three years in prison, and was advised by a judge to consider himself lucky he wasn't handed a harsher punishment. A brain-damaged drug addict in Albuquerque was similarly coerced into finding and buying machine guns by agents, and he got eight years when he brought them one. Most bizarrely, a pair of teenagers in Portland were paid to advertise Squid’s Smoke Shop, another front operation, by getting a neck tattoo. (A judge was so disgusted by this that he ordered the ATF to pay for the tats to get removed.) The investigation also showed that agents engaged in drug and gun stings within 1,000 feet of schools and churches in several cities, as well as allowing minors to smoke weed and drink alcohol in other stores. Landlords allege that some operations resulted in thousands of dollars of destroyed property, and that agents left without paying or leaving any forwarding address. In essence, ATF agents pretended to be criminals by becoming criminals.
Agents are also accused of selling guns to violent felons then letting them leave the store without any plan to track them, and of talking their targets into buying or selling guns that would bring more severe sentences. This speaks to a general sloppiness in ATF-run operations—in the gun-buying operation in Milwaukee, many of the charges were later dismissed, the store lost tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise when it got robbed, and agents misplaced a machine gun.
The ATF has lost guns before, most notably in Operation Fast and Furious, during which the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, including one that was used in the killing of a Border Patrol agent in December 2010. A Congressional investigation mostly concluded that the mistakes made were the fault of rogue, local agents. The ATF has been dogged with controversy before that, though—in the 80s and 90s the agency was accused of discriminating against female agents, and it played a key role in the disastrous raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. Unsurprisingly, conservatives tend to particularly dislike the bureau, and Republicans have blocked nominees for a permanent head for seven years. (Liberals tend to see that as fighting dirty over gun control.)
The FBI has also faced accusations that it creates criminals—or at least drags them into bigger loosely-defined-as-”terrorist
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Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." --- Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." --- Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."
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