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Often unloved, ATF critical to solving major crimes like Boston bombing
By Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn,
Its the agency that Congress and the National Rifle Association love to hate.
But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which hasnt had a director in seven years, has been at the heart of two searing events over the past two weeks the investigations into the Boston Marathon bombing and the explosion that leveled a fertilizer plant and part of a town in central Texas.
In the hours after the coordinated blasts near the finish line of the April 15 marathon, ATF agents were on their hands and knees on Boylston Street. They were scouring the debris for remnants of the bomb, the first excruciating steps in reconstructing the devices.
Two days later, there was a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex. Since then, dozens of ATF investigators, along with local and state agents, have been sifting through a deep crater that was once a factory and the vast expanse of charred ground that spreads out from the center of the blast.
In the hunt for the suspected bombers in Boston, attention has focused on the FBI and the Boston Police Department, but investigators said that ATF, with its expertise in explosives, has played a critical role behind the scenes.
The ATF brings an institutional knowledge of previous bomb incidents around the country and around the world, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. In Boston, they tried to reconstruct the device, looking at the component parts and feeding that information into their bomb data center to see what may be similar to other devices used around the world.
...
Despite its expertise, ATF has long gotten short shrift in Washington. In January, President Obama nominated B. Todd Jones, the acting, part-time director, to be permanent head of ATF. But the Senate has not scheduled a confirmation hearing. Since the ATF director has needed Senate approval, in 2006, the gun lobby has blocked nominees, according to law enforcement officials.
Despite its $1.1 billion budget, ATF has fewer agents than it did nearly four decades ago, about 2,360. For the past several years, the agency has been buffeted by criticism on Capitol Hill over a botched operation to track guns from U.S. dealers to Mexican drug traffickers.
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/often-unloved-atf-critical-to-solving-major-crimes-like-boston-bombing/2013/04/25/bae393ba-adcc-11e2-98ef-d1072ed3cc27_story.html
2nd time i've seen the post acknowledge that the Senate has starved the ATF beast. as i posted at DU, Post columnist Joe Davidson wrote article "ATF and its emergency responders get too little respect from Congress" where Davidson wrote: "The NRA...has worked to hamper ATF enforcement of federal gun laws by fighting a computerized registry of gun ownership. That forces the ATF to trace guns using a labor-intensive, time-consuming process." The Center for Public Integrity has perhaps the best article about the ATF's weakening, "Current gun debate may not help beleaguered ATF"
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Often unloved, ATF critical to solving major crimes like Boston bombing (Original Post)
alp227
Apr 2013
OP
freshwest
(53,661 posts)1. The public needs to stand up for them, but they've all been swayed by CT.
It has effectively worked to keep the government paralyzed from doing its job for public safety.
gejohnston
(17,502 posts)2. they had the same problem before it was the ATF
before 1972, they were the Misc Tax Unit of the IRS. The IRS wasn't interested in enforcing the NRA or the 1968 Gun Control Act, so the agency used it as a dumping ground for racists, sexists, and idiots. That became the initial cadre when it became a separate agency under the treasury dept, and also a lot of their management. Unfortunately, discrimination and stupidity is still part of the corporate culture.