drug cartels | PROBABLE CAUSE

Saudi Arabian ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir

Some have argued over the last decade that the best and most cost-effective way to prevent terrorism in the U.S. is through good intelligence work rather than through lengthy wars in Muslim countries. The latest example supporting this line of thinking occurred today when it was revealed that an Iranian-backed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States was disrupted by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

An Iranian American, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, has been arrested in the case. Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based member of the secret Quds Force unit of Iranian’s Revolutionary Guard, was also charged but is not in custody.

The two men were charged with conspiracy to murder a foreign official, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism, among other counts. Arbabsiar has confessed to the charges and is cooperating with authorities in custody according to government officials. The men planned to detonate a bomb at a busy Washington restaurant, killing Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., and scores of innocent bystanders.

However, a DEA informant posing as a member of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, infiltrated the plot. The Zetas cartel was to be paid $1.5 million to carry out the attack, and two advance payments of nearly $50,000 each were wired to an FBI-controlled bank account in August.

Los Zetas, founded by a group of Mexican Army Special Forces deserters, began as the military wing and private mercenary army of the Gulf Cartel. Los Zetas took their name from the radio code used for top-level officers in the Mexican army. After the arrest of the Gulf Cartel’s leader, Osiel, Cárdenas Guillen, the Zetas began operating independently, which led to the bloody turf war that has engulfed Mexico. The DEA describes them as perhaps “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and violent of the paramilitary enforcement groups.”

The DEA informant who helped crack the case, had been charged with a drug offense and agreed to cooperate in the investigation by posing as a member of the Zeta drug cartel in a meeting with the conspirators in May. Later meetings took place in the U.S. and Mexico.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told reporters today that the case “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.” But I believe it reads more like a recipe for winning the war on terror.

Recently, the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper ran a series of investigative reports about Paul Giovanni de la Rosa, the son of a former Mexican diplomat and a U.S. citizen living in the small town of Medford, Minnesota. Giovanni de la Rosa was arrested by the ATF at the Mexican border and charged with smuggling 31 firearms to drug cartels in Mexico over a two year period. He had purchased the firearms at a Cabela’s sporting goods in Owatonna, Minnesota.

According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, there are roughly 54,000-licensed gun dealers in the U.S., nearly 7,000 of them along the U.S./Mexican border. In Mexico there is only one. Run by the Mexican army, it’s located in Mexico City and is called the “Directorate for Arms and Munitions Sales.” Anyone wishing to purchase a firearm in Mexico must obtain a permit from the army, which can take months to get. Citizens can buy only one handgun. It must stay inside the home where it’s registered and it can’t be larger than a .38 special. Owners who want to transport their firearms outside their homes need a permit that must be renewed annually. Hunting and sport rifles can be transported, but they are also heavily regulated. There are also limits on how much ammunition buyers can purchase each month, where they can take the gun, and who they can sell it to.

It’s estimated that roughly 7,000 to 8,000 firearms are sold legally in Mexico each year and that includes sales to private security firms. Yet in 2009, Mexican authorities seized almost 30,000 weapons, primarily from the drug cartels. Close to two-thirds of the firearms seized in Mexico were sophisticated rifles and assault weapons — AK-47s, R-15s, .50-caliber Barretts.

So if Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, yet the country’s drug cartels are armed to the teeth with illegal weapons, where could all those sophisticated firearms be coming from?

While some weapons certainly come from other countries, it seems obvious to those with any common sense that U.S. citizens like Paul Giovanni de la Rosa are smuggling weapons over the border into Mexico along the “iron pipeline” and selling them to drug cartels.

Lobbyists from the NRA argue that strict gun laws in Mexico have done nothing to prevent criminals and drug cartels from obtaining firearms and have left the average citizen in Mexico defenseless. But one is left to wonder if the U.S. had the same restrictive gun laws as Mexico, would 30,000 illegal weapons, many of them assault rifles, be in the hands of drug cartels.

According to the Los Angeles Times, drug-related violence has led to as many as 22, 700 deaths in Mexico since the start of 2007. That’s more deaths than U.S. fatalities in the Iraq War.

Arresting and prosecuting gun smugglers like Paul Giovanni de la Rosa must continue, but it will not stop the carnage. It appears that neither the Supreme Court nor Congress has the stomach for challenging the NRA by restricting U.S. gun sales. Perhaps, the U.S. needs to take another approach and rethink our failed drug policies. But that’s another discussion.