At this point, it’s no secret that thousands of U.S. guns have illegally made their way across the U.S. – Mexico border and into the hands of deadly drug cartel operatives. State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton has indicated in the past that she feels “very strongly” that the U.S. and Mexico share co-responsibility in the drug war. Now, the Mexican government may be considering holding U.S. gun companies responsible in court. CBS reports:

CBS News has learned that the Mexican Government has retained an American law firm to explore filing civil charges against U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors over the flood of guns crossing the border into Mexico.

Sources say Mexico’s frustration with U.S. efforts to stop the flow of weapons has pushed them into this novel approach. The law firm is looking at charges that may include civil RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act]. The contract was signed on November 2, 2010 by a representative of Mexico’s Attorney General, at their Washington embassy.

Mexicans have good reason to be frustrated by the United States’ inability to stem the flow of guns down south. A report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.” From 2006 to 2009, a total of almost 19,000 guns in Mexico were traced to the United States. An overwhelming majority of these guns came from the stores in Texas, California, and Arizona. News broke earlier this year that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives purposefully permitted 1,800 weapons to “walk” into the hands of drug lords and gun runners in an attempt to trace them back to high-level drug cartel operatives. And while these traced firearms do not represent all of the guns recovered in Mexico, there’s only one gun store in all of Mexico where they could’ve come from. That store is run by the Mexican military. The Brookings Institution estimates that 2,000 U.S. guns are smuggled into Mexico each day.

Meanwhile, the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people — many of them innocent civilians — since 2006.

The Firearms Committee responded to the news that Mexico might sue U.S. gun manufacturers, saying, “it is wrong for anyone to blame America’s firearms industry for the problems Mexico is currently facing.” Richard Feldman, President of the Independent Firearms Association, suggested that “maybe we should be suing the Mexican government for their failure to prevent drugs from coming into our country.” Tea Party Nation also issued its own release which proclaims that “Mexico is our enemy” and that “Mexican President Felipe Calderon is about as useful as Joe Biden sleeping through a Barack Obama speech.”

While the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act makes it especially hard to win a lawsuit against the gun industry, Mexico may have have a case. Many of the guns that have made their way to Mexico were purchased by U.S. citizen “straw buyers” who were paid by gun runners to buy the firearms for them. Yet, there has been at least one case in which a gun dealers were directly involved in funneling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. If Mexico can prove that at least one individual engaged in a “pattern of racketeering activity,” they might have a case against the gun industry under the RICO statute.

With all that said, even if Mexico does have a case against gun manufacturers, it shouldn’t distract attention away from the responsibility that Mexico shares with the United States. U.S. drug consumption is funding the drug war, U.S. guns may be fueling it, but ultimately, Calderon’s militarization of the drug war has only resulted in more violence and deaths.

After President Obama announced his plan to cut military spending last week, the war hawks immediately got to work trying to throw a wrench in any talk of reducing the Pentagon’s massive budget. But without much substance to fall back on, many hyped a made-up narrative that Defense Secretary Robert Gates disapproved of Obama’s suggested cuts.

“[W]hy is Gates publicly announcing that the commander in chief blew it?” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wondered (though he didn’t publicly announce anything of the sort). And in a post titled “Gates and Mullen vs. Obama,” the Weekly Standard pointed out that Gates had recently as February warned against cutting military spending and suggested that must mean that Gates also disagrees with Obama’s new plan:

In February, Defense secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a cautionary note at a congressional hearing on the defense budget. [...]

But now it’s not congressional cuts to the Pentagon’s budget that the top civilian and military commanders have to worry about. Mullen and Gates will have to worry about cuts that the commander in chief is proposing.

However, during a press conference at the Pentagon yesterday, Gates put all this nonsense to bed, saying he’s on board because of “the way it is structured, with the president saying that no specific budget decisions will be made until we have completed this review.” He later added that his previous comments about spending cuts did not apply in this case:

Q: Last November, you criticized the deficit reduction commission’s specific cuts as math, not strategy. Could that same criticism be applied to the White House number of $400 billion that seems to have come out of thin air.

GATES: Well, first of all, it’s a target. And I don’t have that same criticism because of what the president said, that no specific budget decisions will be made until we’ve reviewed these things, and these choices and options are put before them.

So that pretty much takes care of that. So what will the Military Industrial Complexers make up next? They better hurry. As Aviation Week noted yesterday, “the momentum had until now been on the side of those who want to protect defense coffers” but President Obama’s proposal is moving the debate in the other direction.

Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi called upon the United States yesterday to help strengthen international human rights law, and stressed the need for political, as opposed to economic, sanctions against the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran for its human rights abuses.

Speaking at an Iran conference at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Ebadi, the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, examined how democratic countries should behave toward non-democratic countries like Iran. “The worst solution is a military attack,” Ebadi said. “Democracy is not merchandise to be exported to a country, democracy cannot be purchased and sent to another country.”

In the past, Ebadi has strongly criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying that it increased Iran’s influence in the region and politically benefited hardliners in Iran. “Dictators actually like to be attacked by foreigners,” Ebadi said yesterday, “so using excuse of national security, they can put away their opposition.”

Ebadi also opposed the use of economic sanctions, “because they will hurt the people.” “Notwithstanding the ten years of economic sanctions against Iraq,” she said, “Saddam was still there, while many people died deprived of food and medication.”

The best tools against regimes like Iran’s, Ebadi said, are political sanctions, which she described as “measures taken against violators of human rights, [but] that do not hurt the people.”

Read the rest at Middle East Progress.