Fast and Furious Falling Apart
Fast and Furious Falling Apart
By Russ Vaughn
When BATF agents first blew the whistle on what is now known as Operation Fast and Furious, the rationale offered by DoJ for such an evidently foolish operation was that it was designed to allow BATF to track and prosecute the leaders of the Mexican drug cartels. As more information surfaced from the Mexican government and the BATF's Mexican bureau chief specifying that none of them knew anything of this operation, many of us who were paying a bit closer attention to the case immediately smelled the first foul scent of corruption.
The fatal flaw in DoJ's explanation was this: if the Mexican authorities had not been brought into the operation, nor even the BATF's own agents authorized to operate in Mexico, then the proffered DoJ justification made utterly no sense, for the simple reason that once those walked guns hit the south side of that border, there was absolutely no process in place to track them to their supposed targets. Therefore, DoJ was patently misrepresenting its motive. Why?
For those who keep a constant wary eye on the left's never-ending war on our 2nd-Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the increasingly fishy smell emanating from Washington led to connecting the dots back to the year-earlier revelations in the liberal media that weapons being used in Mexican crimes were traceable back to American sources more than 90% of the time. That false meme had spread quickly through the major liberal media, along with calls for stricter gun control laws in this country by...guess who! How about our president, our secretary of state, our attorney general, and other notable Democrats, for starters?
Here we had an operation mounted by the executive branch of the United States, an operation which had as its stated goal -- after being outed, that is -- the targeting of Mexican drug lords on sovereign Mexican soil. Yet this was done without the knowledge of anyone in the Mexican government. Quite clearly, a secret and subversive operation had been conceived and implemented against our sister nation to the south -- subversive because, again, quite clearly, the American government was subverting the sovereign authority of Mexico without that nation's knowledge. If the goal was, as stated later by DoJ, to track guns into Mexico to the purchasing sources in the cartels, then was there not some diplomatic requirement to notify the Mexican government that we were arming their most violent criminal elements? And what was the need for keeping our own BATF agents in Mexico -- the only American agents with Mexican presence to conduct such surveillance and tracking operations on Mexican soil -- equally in the dark?
It doesn't require much in the way of deductive powers to conclude that the fish-wrap smell seeping out of Washington probably had to do with Eric Holder's Department of Justice being used to tightly wrap something rotting from the head down. And what could that be? Early proponents of the theory suggesting that if the DoJ's rationale smelled fishy, then perhaps the true reason for F&F was to create justification for more gun control legislation here in this country were looked at as crackpot conspiracists. Even now, most of those Republican members of Congress pursuing this scandal refuse to cite the true purpose of F&F, still referring to it as a bungled federal program. There are exceptions: Florida congressman John Mica speaking on one of the Sunday talk shows this weekend, made clear his opinion that F&F was a sinister and cynical attempt by the Obama administration to undermine the 2nd Amendment. I watched him say it, but Google has no link. Imagine that.
For those who haven't really followed the Fast and Furious scandal, here's a five-step summary of how the operation was supposed to work:
1 Allow guns to flow freely to criminal elements in Mexico, where they are naturally used in the extremely violent and deadly criminal activities of the drug cartels.
2 When sufficient guns of American origin have been used in such criminal activities, enlist the willing services of the liberal media to announce the discovery thereof to the world.
3 Enlist multiple prominent Democrats to untruthfully proclaim that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crimes originate in the U.S.
4 Use steps one through three to substantiate the liberal fallacy that private gun ownership leads to increased gun violence by gun owners.
5 With the compliance of a thoroughly duped American public, enact increasingly restrictive gun ownership policies through federal agencies, bypassing Congress and the Supreme Court.
When looked at this way, doesn't Obama's statement to a group of gun control advocates in March 2011 that he was taking steps to further gun control restrictions, but "under the radar," now seem less cryptic than it did at the time? For those who still don't believe Fast & Furious was an end-run on the 2nd Amendment by a liberal, gun-averse administration, here are five questions to consider:
1 Could the possibility that this plan was concocted at the very top of the administration, putting it on par with Watergate, explain Eric Holder's entrenched refusal to release the tens of thousands of documents being sought by congressional investigators?
2 Is the liberal media's refusal to investigate this scandal due to the fact that they suspect that the acts of this administration may rise to criminal and impeachable offenses?
3 Has the reluctance of the Republican leadership to more aggressively support the House investigation been attributable to the same possibility -- that full exposure could lead straight to the Oval Office and the politically unsavory possibility of impeachment of the nation's first black president?
4 Does anyone really think an ambitious politician like Holder would risk career-ending contempt of Congress charges to protect some incredibly stupid subordinates who supposedly, all by themselves, planned and implemented such a boondoggle?
5 In an administration known for its quickness in throwing friends and associates under the bus in matters of self-preservation, is it not remarkable that rather than being so dispatched by Holder, many of the key players in F&F have been promoted despite denials by their bureau?
If all this sounds like a bit too much to swallow, consider the political origins of the key players in the current administration. All are products of the Chicago political machine, a thoroughly Democrat movement particularly hostile to the concept of citizen gun ownership as demonstrated by the some of the nation's most restrictive gun ownership laws being in place there. And to prove the folly of those laws and the liberal fallacy that disarming the citizenry reduces crime, here's a quite recent headline from that bastion of conservative thought and opinion, Huffington Post: "Chicago Homicide Rate Worse Than Kabul, Up To 200 Police Assigned To High-Profile Wedding (Video)."
We are quick to blame the policies and activities of the Mexican drug cartels for their nation's murder rate being among the highest in the world. Is it not then fair to apply the same blame to those who control a city with some of the most restrictive gun ownership laws in America, which are yielding gun-death fatality stats almost double the total casualty rate for American troops in the Afghan war zone? It is the total and vise-like hold the Democrat machine has on Chicago that has made this city the riskiest place in America for law-abiding citizens, turning them into helpless, unarmed sheep at the mercy of roving, well-armed, predatory wolves.
Doesn't Chicago sound a lot like Mexico to you?
Never lose sight of the real reason why liberals want to confiscate your guns. Liberals assert that government is the protector of all our freedoms, and therefore we need not be concerned with protecting ourselves and our loved ones. The folly of that assertion can be refuted with one word: Chicago. But the true reason for wanting an unarmed public is because such a citizenry is powerless in the face of armed government and therefore compliant. Liberals and Democrats know full well that the key to unrestrained governing is to first disarm the citizenry.
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The Plot Thickens: Obama Asserts Executive Privilege to Block Fast & Furious Disclosures
by Andrew C. McCarthy
The Obama administration has a narrative about Fast & Furious. The Wall Street Journal obligingly reported it this morning, as follows:
Mr. Holder, in a letter last week to Mr. Issa, said, “The record in this matter reflects that until allegations about the inappropriate tactics used in Fast and Furious were made public, department leadership was unaware of those tactics.”
There are a variety of reasons to be skeptical of this version of events. To name only two:
(a) there were wiretaps in the F&F investigation, and when the government seeks a wiretap, federal law requires it to explain what investigative tactics have been used in the case, an explanation that is vetted by top DOJ officials because the government cannot apply for the wiretap without the approval of the attorney general or his designee (a high Justice Department official) — it seems highly unlikely, assuming DOJ complied with wiretap law, that top Justice Department officials did not know about the gun-walking tactic until late in the game; and
(b) the gun-walking tactic — which in F&F involved providing well over a thousand firearms to violent criminals — was shocking, and it is hard to believe that if “Justice officials” knew enough to raise their concerns with the ATF brass, they failed to alert Attorney General Holder or follow through to make sure ATF and the U.S. attorney’s office — both arms of the Justice Department — stopped the tactic.
But let’s put all that aside for argument’s sake and assume that the Obama administration’s narrative is true. If this is what really happened, Attorney General Holder does not deserve our condemnation; he deserves a commendation. And if this is really what happened, what are the chances that the administration that can’t shovel national defense secrets out fast enough to the New York Times would withhold a paper trail that covers Mr. Holder in glory?
The issue in F&F is not the withholding of DOJ documents. The issue is the reckless provision of an arsenal fit for an army to violent cartels, quite predictably resulting in the murders of possibly hundreds of people including at least one United States law enforcement officer. That is the reason Congress did not go away, as it usually does, when the Justice Department ignores or slow-walks demands for information. What happened here is too grave to take “no” for an answer.
If this were a Republican administration, the press would long ago have made the Department’s obstruction of Congress a five-alarm scandal. Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign over a matter that was less than frivolous compared to F&F. The press is in the tank for Obama, so Holder & Co. have relatively smooth sailing — even when it became clear that they provided blatantly false information to Congress about the use of the gun-walking tactic. Chairman Darrell Issa (R., CA) has been heroic in pursuing this investigation at a time when Republicans have been generally feckless in challenging Obama’s abuses of power.
But while Holder has been in the eye of what little storm there was, it has always been the case that F&F is Obama’s scandal. Holder has never done anything other than implement Obama’s policies and manage relations with Congress as Obama wished them to be conducted. Obviously, the hope was that if DOJ was intransigent enough, the House would get frustrated and bored and move on to other things. That hasn’t happened, thanks to Rep. Issa and his colleagues. But the focus on Holder and withheld documents should not obscure that F&F is really about Obama and the murders of a federal agent and hundreds of others — very likely, to promote the Left’s political argument that American Second Amendment rights are the cause of international violence.
Because Issa has been dogged, we have now gotten down to brass tacks. The prospect of the attorney general’s being held in contempt finally prompted the president — the only official in the government empowered to assert executive privilege — to claim that the documents sought are being withheld at his (Obama’s) direction, based on his constitutional authority.
Executive privilege is a vestige of Richard Nixon’s desperate effort to conceal criminality in the Watergate scandal. The last thing Obama wanted to do, with the November election looming, was resort to the Nixon strategy (which, we should recall, failed in the end). And, again, if the Obama administration’s story was true, they would want to release the documents that support it.
They really don’t want you to see what is in those documents.
If it was, then the death of any law enforcement officer resulting from the act was Felony Murder.
Executive Privilege?
Are Obama and Holder complicit in Felony Murder?
More good articles; I read a lot of about this earlier this week and yesterday.
Amazing.
I just read this from one of our business articles we are given to read here at work.
Not looking so good:
Survey: CEOs Less Optimistic on Economy
Business Roundtable says companies expect to spend, hire less
Jeffry Bartash, MarketWatch
News Source
MarketWatch 6/20/2012
Page Content
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The leaders of America’s largest companies are turning more cautious about the U.S. economy’s growth prospects.
The Business Roundtable on Wednesday said chief executives expect to spend and hire less over the next six months than they previously planned. The group’s economic outlook index fell to 89.1 in the second quarter from 96.9 in the first quarter — the first decline in nine months.
The Roundtable, whose current chairman is Boeing (BA, US) CEO Jim McNerney, represents companies with more than 14 million employees and $6 trillion in annual sales. Members include Wal-Mart(WMT, US), General Electric (GE, US), AT&T(T, US), ExxonMobil (XOM, US) and American Express (AXP, US)
The Roundtable’s results dovetail with other surveys indicating businesses and consumers are less optimistic than they were just a few months ago.
A bevy of economic reports have shown that U.S. growth is decelerating, triggered by reduced consumer spending and a decline in hiring. The financial crisis in Europe and a slowdown in China, both key export markets for U.S. companies, have also contributed to the worries.
Businesses are also concerned about the potential of a so-called fiscal cliff in 2013, when large tax increases and sharp cuts in federal spending are slated to take effect unless Congress changes the law.
Some executives say it’s harder to make plans for hiring and capital spending unless they know what the tax rates will be. On the spending side, defense firms could be at risk since the cuts would largely take place in the military’s budget.
The Roundtable said most companies expect sales to rise in the next six months, but the number that forecast an increase fell 7 percentage points to 75%. Some 20% see no change and 6% predict a decline.
The number of companies that expect to raise investment spending in upcoming months fell to 43% in the second quarter from 48% in the first three months of the year. Forty-five percent predict no change.
Some 36% of the companies plan to hire in the next six months, down from 42% in the prior survey. About 44% expect no change in the size of their workforce and 20% plan to eliminate jobs.
The Business Roundtable’s main survey hit an all-time peak of 113.0 in the first quarter of 2011. The 10-year-old survey mostly ranged from the 80s to 90s before the 2007-2009 recession struck.
Readings above 50 indicate expansion; reading below that level reflect contraction.
Steve McCann
Now that Obama has invoked executive privilege in order to protect Eric Holder and apparently the White House relative to the "Fast and Furious" gun-walking debacle, the sycophants in the media and the Democratic Party will have to find a new narrative. In keeping with the administration's normal exercise in buck-passing and obfuscation expect to hear constant references and blame attached to the usual suspect: George W. Bush.
In fact there was a program dubbed "Operation Wide Receiver" during the Bush administration to trace those who were smuggling arms into Mexico; but the differences between the two programs was a matter of night and day.
In 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency, the US government instructed gun sellers, primarily in Arizona, to illegally sell arms to suspected criminals and potential smugglers. Agents working for the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) when then ordered not to stop the sales or detain the buyers but to allow the firearms to walk across the Mexican border to the waiting arms of Mexican gangs and drug dealers. This program was dubbed: "Operation Fast and Furious".
According to a report issued by the House Oversight Committee: "The purpose was to wait and watch, in the hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case." However the arms soon disappeared and tracing the weapons became nearly impossible until they began to show up at various Mexican crime scenes. It is estimated that nearly 1,700 guns were supplied to the criminals in Mexico and not until the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the subsequent reports from various whistle-blowers in the ATF did this debacle become public as well as the involvement of the Justice Department.
By comparison, during the Bush term, in 2006, a program dubbed "Operation Wide Receiver" was begun. It used the common tactic of "controlled delivery" whereby agents would allow the illegal sale to take place, closely follow the movements of the weapons and then arrest the culprits.
The difference: "Fast and Furious" was uncontrolled delivery whereby the smugglers and the arms were allowed to disappear. Further, and most important, "Operation Wide Receiver" was conducted with the cooperation of the Mexican government, "Fast and Furious" was not.
Andy McCarthy in the National Review wrote more comprehensive analysis of the Bush program in November 2011. At the time he wrote:
But it was enough to see that "Bush did it" is going to be the Democrats' excuse for the inexcusable "Fast and Furious" operation conducted by the ATF on the Obama administration's watch.
By invoking "executive privilege" the White House has now voluntarily stepped into the swamp that is "Fast and Furious," its cover-up by the Justice Department and the discovery by Congress that the Eric Holder and his department engaged in a pattern of lies and obfuscation. Their willingness to drag the Bush administration into the mud with them completes the portrait of an administration lacking in any character and integrity.
Are they so stupid to keep comparing themselves to a president that was voted out?
Nobody voted Bush out of office he was at the end of his terms
Read entire article but here is the summary
The Pinocchio Test
The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of “corporate raider” to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.
Four Pinocchios
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I didn't word that right...did I? LOL It would read better if I had said republicans instead of Bush....
They claim Bush was a failed presidency....
..now they are saying they are modeling Obama's presidency after Bush's.....
he did it, so we can do it too
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