What is BATFE up to?
From the JPFO Liberty Crew.
In recent years, ATF management has become widely and officially known for corruption, self-service, and at times, overt incompetence. Moreover, ATF managers at all levels routinely retaliate or discriminate against employees who make good faith attempts to address significant cases of flagrant abuse, unlawful acts, waste of taxpayer resources, etc. Managers often use the threat or actual imposition of unfounded disciplinary actions, Internal Affairs "investigations", punitive transfers, and other flagrantly unethical measures to suppress dissension and subvert legitimate complaints about serious abuses.
In the last two years alone, there have been nearly 400 employee complaints. In an organization with only about 5,000 employees, that is a huge drain on resources and adversely impacts the agency's ability to pursue its purported mission of locking up bad guys. Many experienced and skilled field agents spend so much time just trying to cover their rear ends against trivial, bureaucratic internal policies and arbitrary management actions, that they have little time to actually enforce the nation's firearms and other laws.
Recently publicized cases have involved malicious and carefully orchestrated management campaigns to smear, discredit, and professionally destroy agents who have repeatedly risked their lives for ATF and the public, solely in reprisal for the filing of legitimate complaints. In some instances, management has gone so far as to implicitly accuse agents of firebombing their own homes, without the slightest shred of evidence, while refusing to adequately investigate the actual criminal suspects, all for the sole purpose of harassing and cowing ATF's own people into quiet submission.
The Bureau's leadership has also miserably failed or even deliberately refused to meet its responsibility to protect highly decorated undercover agents from documented threats of murder, rape or other acts of reprisal against themselves and their families by some of the most vicious criminals on the planet.
All of these factors substantially degrade BATFE's ability to accomplish its authorized missions, and constitute an inexcusable misuse of taxpayer resources.
Is this the rant of some wacky blogger? Some right-wing ideologue? A smear campaign by the NRA?
No, it is a description of BATFE written by BATFE agents -- the ones who broke the story of Fast and Furious -- ATF's gun-smuggling scheme that helped pad the numbers of American guns in drug cartels' hands. JPFO's founder Aaron Zelman always warned us about BATFE excesses, but he left this world before the above would became public knowledge.
http://cleanupatf.org/mission.html is where concerned employees of BATFE anonymously voice their complaints, since internally made complaints lead to vicious reprisals. Bloggers like David-and-Goliath-Award winners David Codrea and Mike Vanderbough used that website and other deep-cover sources to break the story of Fast and Furious, sometimes referred to as Obama's Watergate (except no one was murdered in Watergate). Join with JPFO as it works to uncover and expose the worst thugocracy is U.S. government, the BATFE.
