Posted on 06/24/2011 1:30:17 PM PDT by marktwain
The Washington Post is now claiming (as told by conveniently anonymous sources) that Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA, and Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) was briefed on "Operation Fast and Furious" last year, and did not object:
A chief Republican critic of a controversial U.S. anti-gun-trafficking operation was briefed on ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program last year and did not express any opposition, sources familiar with the classified briefing said Tuesday.
Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), who has repeatedly called for top Justice Department officials to be held accountable for the now-defunct operation, was given highly specific information about it at an April 2010 briefing, the sources said.
So let's think about what we're being asked to believe here, shall we? Purveyors of the "Issa knew all along" notion presumably also believe that Attorney General Eric Holder did not know these "highly specific" details (or even the very existence of the operation), until around April of this year, as he explained to the House Judiciary Committee on May 3:
Congressman Issa: When did you first know about the program, officially, I believe, called "Fast and Furious"? To the best of your knowledge, what date?
Attorney General Holder: I'm not sure about the exact date, but I probably heard about "Fast and Furious" for the first time over the last few weeks [Senator Charles Grassley had been sending letters to Holder asking about the operation since at least mid-February, by the way].
And about this "highly specific information"--how "highly specific"? Seattle Gun Rights Examiner Dave Workman yesterday quoted an Issa staffer responding this way:
Like they were going to walk into a classified meeting and tell us "Here’s this great plan, we’re going to let the guns go to Mexico. That’s the plan."
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
It’s worth noting that the problem wasn’t in the concept, but in the execution. I doubt that when they briefed anyone they said they were going to screw up the operation.
Issa’s response to this was glorious....something to the extent of, “so the administration has denied knowing any details of fast and furious but they are now claiming members of congress were briefed on the details???”
i called the congressman’s office yesterday to thank him and encouraged him to continue to fight against the thuggery we see coming from the WH.....
Piss Issa off. That’s the ticket!
Unfortunately, in this case, guns were being tagged, and the wild beasts were members of waring drug cartels.
Stupid is as stupid does (eats bon bon).
They briefed Issa, and didn’t brief Holder?
The concept is sound — for studies of migratory birds, fish, or other wildlife. Capture and tag a sample, release the tagged beasts, and record when and where they turn up again. You can draw all sorts of statistical inferences from the data. It’s a time honoured research method.
Unfortunately, in this case, guns were being tagged, and the wild beasts were members of waring drug cartels.
I disagree. The concept was highly problematic. They deliberately allowed straw purchasers believed connected to Mexican drug gangs to purchase the weapons and remove them to Mexico. Period. There was no chance they were going to be able to trace these weapons, no plan to do so, and no attempt to do so. How is this ok?
There are times the approach may be reasonable, if the harm that may be caused by releasing a tagged specimen will be minimal compared to the value of the data one expects to gain from it. Indeed, a conservative could reasonably argue that the harm is minimal, since supplying criminals with guns via one channel, when they could just as easily acquire guns through countless other channels, isn't terribly likely to influence whether the criminals end up armed. On the other hand, such an argument would also undermine the value of the data one would obtain (knowing that some downstream criminal got his weapons through some particular black-market dealer wouldn't be very useful, since even shutting down that dealer would leave criminals with many other sources for weapons).
More significantly, the arguments that it's harmless to give criminals guns since they'll get them anyway implies that gun control is completely ineffective toward its claimed purpose. While many conservatives might reasonably agree with that, it is the height of hypocrisy for leftists to suggest that we need tighter gun control to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, while at the same time giving those criminals guns under the counter.
A similar false argument is often brought up by the loony and obsessive birther chasers. They claim that no one objected to Obama as illegitimate before November 2008, or that our objections were only on the basis of thinking Obama was born in Kenya, and that our objection on the basis of his father not being a citizen, meaning Obama is not a "natural born citizen" (NBC) is new, post-election and therefor wrong.
But it wouldn't matter if it was indeed the case that we had not objected to Obama's illegibility prior to his popular election, nor if we hadn't raised prior to the election the objection of his father's non-citizenship making him not illegible. That deficiency for office is not correctable by all the process of swearing in, nor are the now-instantiated problems and dangers with the Gun Walker malfeasance tolerable now because someone assented to the program before the consequences and troubling details were known.
All execution issues. It's unlikely the briefing on the concept contained the phrase, "but we're not going to be able to trace them, don't plan to do so, and won't attempt to do so".
You are not making any sense.
If my plan for catching fish is to throw bait on the water and watch as the fish come up, eat the bait, and swim away then I have a bad fishing plan.
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