The strings of a cover-up of a U.S. government informant's participation in mass murder in Juarez, Mexico, have been traced backed to the top level of the U.S. Justice Department, based on a report in the online investigative newspaper
Narco News.
The informant's participation in the slayings of a dozen people, who were brutally tortured before being murdered and then buried in the backyard of a house in the Mexican border town, occurred under the watch of federal agents and a U.S. prosecutor. The U.S. law enforcers allegedly allowed the homicides to occur in order to make a drug case against a narco-trafficker. Narco News has dubbed the case the "House of Death."
Now, testimony from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy has surfaced that confirms the Attorney General at the time, John Ashcroft, was briefed on the U.S. prosecutor's and agents' complicity in the murders, yet, to date, no one has been prosecuted for the murders. Rather, DOJ officials have worked to silence the lone DEA agent who had the integrity to blow the whistle on the cover-up.
From the story:
Yet another layer of deceit in the House of Death cover-up is now being brought into the sunlight with the surfacing of more public documents.
... This latest evidence reveals that the trail of this cover-up of a U.S. government informant's participation in mass murder extends from the federal agents who handled the informant, to the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio, to the administrator of the DEA and top officials within the Department of Homeland Security, to the top gun in the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
Yet, to date, no one, not the Congress, not the U.S. Courts, not the White House, not even the mainstream media has sought to expose the cover-up in this mass-murder case. Instead, as of this writing, only a lone whistleblower within DEA has been punished -- his reputation tarnished by a negative job-performance review in retaliation for trying to expose the cover-up.
In a deposition taken as part of an employment discrimination case, the DEA whistleblower's attorney, Richard Diaz, queries DEA Administrator Tandy about why she retaliated against the agent for writing a letter to the U.S. Attorney in San Antonio, Texas, who was in charge of the House of Death case. In that letter, the DEA agent, a high-ranking supervisor named Sandalio Gonzalez, exposed the informant's and federal agents' complicity in the mass murder. The U.S. Attorney, Johnny Sutton, responded not by investigating Gonzalez' charges, but rather by using his connections within the Justice Department to strike back at Gonzalez.
To make matters worse, after Ashcroft retired, his successor, Alberto Gonzales, actually promoted Sutton to a policy making position within DOJ.
The story also includes links to Tandy's court testimony. Again, from the Narco News report:
Diaz: Okay. And how did you learn of that (Gonzalez' Feb. 24, 2004, letter to Sutton)?
Tandy: The letter?
Diaz: Yes.
Tandy: I believe I was notified about the letter by the Deputy Attorney General's office.
... Diaz: And when you said utter loss or lack of confidence, based on the letter, what in particular in the letter caused you to have that utter lack of confidence?
Tandy: The letter was inexcusable.
Diaz: Why?
Tandy: It was like tossing a hand grenade into the middle of a firefight. There was a substantial issue between DEA and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, over ICE's use of an informant. And the jeopardy that DEA agents and others had been placed in as a result of ICE's handling of an informant that DEA had previously blackballed.
Mr. Gonzalez was very well aware at the time he sent that letter that this was a very sensitive, very delicate situation between DEA and ICE. It was such a significant issue for these two agencies, that I went personally to brief the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General over the issues with ICE, that I spoke to the U.S. Attorney [Sutton] about my concerns about the issues of ICE's handling of this informant along with that U.S. Attorney's AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney Juanita Fielden], that I met with DEA -- personally met with in El Paso, the DEA agents, employees and their families, who had been evacuated from [Juárez] Mexico as a result of this issue -- that we had requested, DEA headquarters had requested, an inter-agency ICE joint, ICE and DEA headquarters review team to go into Mexico and El Paso to review what had happened in this debacle, and that that team had been hand-selected by DEA and that that team had been on the ground, and was still in the course of conducting their joint review for a report jointly to DEA and ICE and ultimately to the Attorney General.
... Diaz: Based on your recollection of the letter, do you believe that anything that Mr. Gonzalez wrote in the letter was untruthful?
Tandy: I don't have a recollection either way. It was such colossally poor, fatal judgment on Sandy's [Gonzalez'] part, to get in the middle of what he knew was a sensitive, established, ongoing process to deal with the issues.
Diaz: Were you aware of the matters that were raised in the letter [which included the alleged complicity of ICE agents and a U.S. informant in mass murder] before you became aware of the letter [Gonzalez' letter] itself?
Tandy: Absolutely. I had already briefed the Attorney General [Ashcroft] and Deputy Attorney General [Comey] on the issues, the underlying issues with ICE's handling of this informant, along with the AUSA [Fielden].
[Note: Tandy sent an e-mail on March 5, 2004, to a number of high ranking Department of Justice officials -- including Comey -- concerning Gonzalez' letter, indicating that she only recently became aware of it. In the e-mail, Tandy describes Gonzalez' letter as "inexcusable" and indicates that she "apologized to Johnny Sutton ... and he and I agreed on a no comment to the press."]
... Diaz: When you say that Mr. Gonzalez exercised poor judgment in sending the letter, what would have been -- once Mr. Gonzalez became aware of this issue, what, in your estimation, would have been the proper course of action for him to take? ... Nothing at all or something different, and if so, what differently?
Tandy: This was being handled at the highest level of the Department of Justice and at the highest executive levels of ICE and DEA, at headquarters' levels. Mr. Gonzalez knew that that is how this was being handled. He knew that that was the process that was sensitive and important to this agency ....
If you happen to see this diary post before it gets buried on this site after a few moments, ask yourself why this story isn't on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
My answer: People with the power to inform and control you determined that it is in their best interest for you not to know about it.
"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." -- George Orwell