For the Greater Good?

Fighting high-level crime effectively, both on the domestic and the international fronts, is quite a challenge for law-enforcement agencies. There is, to be sure, a place for undercover and "sting" operations, especially in order to get beyond the piecemeal approach and dismantle entire organizations. And yet, there is an inherent danger that doing so might compromise the integrity of the "good guys", which could end up aiding and abetting the very criminals that they are supposed to catch and put away. The recent Fast and Furious fiasco, in which the U.S. allowed weapons into Mexico to, hopefully, follow their trail to the big players, but on the way were used to kill, including a U.S agent, is a prime example of this dangerous strategy.

Now, it's also been revealed that, in pursuing "big fish" drug traffickers in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, U.S. law enforcement personnel or "smaller fish" under their direction may have overstepped their bounds and actually helped those criminals for quite some time. The trouble is that, while building up cases against the bosses of this underworld, a lot of drugs and money were exchanged and people got killed along the way. Also, with all that money floating around, who's to say that these people didn't take their cut?

It's easy to go too fast down this slippery slope, and break your "moral neck" in the process.

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