Posted on 06/21/2011 7:28:46 AM PDT by marktwain
The most damning revelations coming out of the hearings on Operation Fast and Furious held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are the unmistakable indications that the program was never designed to succeed as a law enforcement operation at all.
A quartet of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agents and supervisors turned into whistleblowers to bring the operation down, but only after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down in the Arizona desert. Two of the weapons recovered at the scene of Terry’s murder were traced to the operation.
Fast and Furious, also known by the more accurate “Gunwalker,” allowed known straw purchasers to buy large quantities of firearms — often a dozen or more semi-automatic rifles — at a time with the full knowledge of ATF agents and executives. The guns were then smuggled into Mexico, as frustrated front-line ATF agents watched, under strict orders to do nothing.
ATF agents testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee could not explain how the operation was supposed to succeed when their surveillance efforts stopped at the border and interdiction was never an option.
ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He continued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”
The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.
Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.
At the same time in 2009 that federal law enforcement agencies (the ATF, the DOJ, and presumably Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security) were creating the operation that led to the executive branch being the largest gun smuggler in the Southwest, the president’s team was crafting the rhetoric to sell the crisis they were creating.
On television, in various news outlets, and even in a joint appearance with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Obama pushed the 90 percent lie, implying that 90% of the guns recovered in Mexican cartel violence came from U.S. gun shops.
At the same time they were damning gun dealers in public, the administration was secretly forcing them to provide weapons to the cartels, by the armful and without oversight. More than one gun industry insider suggests that the administration extorted cooperation and silence from these gun shops. As the ATF has the power to summarily shut dealers down for the most minor of offenses, that is very, very possible.
The administration has spared no effort to stop the investigation in its tracks. Democrat senators attempted to poison the well the day before the Oversight Committee’s hearings. The ranking Democrat on the committee did as well, before being flummoxed into silence by the testimony presented.
And Obama himself has offered the solutions we would expect from a gun prohibitionist:
Faced with a Congress hostile to even slight restrictions of Second Amendment rights, the Obama administration is exploring potential changes to gun laws that can be secured strictly through executive action, administration officials say.
The Department of Justice held the first in what is expected to be a series of meetings on Tuesday afternoon with a group of stakeholders in the ongoing gun-policy debates. Before the meeting, officials said part of the discussion was expected to center around the White House’s options for shaping policy on its own or through its adjoining agencies and departments — on issues ranging from beefing up background checks to encouraging better data-sharing.
Administration officials said talk of executive orders or agency action are among a host of options that President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering.
As there is a pattern of behavior to suggest that Gunwalker was not a botched law enforcement operation, but was instead an effort by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department to carry out a subversive anti-gun policy of the Obama administration, it is pertinent to examine Obama’s past associations with anti-gun groups.
From 1994-2002, Obama was a director of the Joyce Foundation. Joyce is a progressive organization dedicated to “social justice,” and one of their primary areas of advocacy has always been the funding of gun control organizations. Joyce has long attempted to erode Second Amendment rights, and during Obama’s tenure as a director went so far as to try to subvert Second Amendment scholarship. Joyce gave millions to effectively buy law reviews with grants, and then used those reviews to publish only papers that attacked the individual rights interpretation. The goal was to so pervert legal scholarship that the scholarship would affect Supreme Court decisions.
Joyce director Obama, and those surrounding him, internalized fellow Chicagoan Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. While the Joyce plot narrowly failed, it affirmed Alinsky’s strategy of agitating, fanning hostility, and disorganizing the public in order to force radical change.
We know that Obama’s friends in Joyce Foundation-supported gun control groups suspiciously have not attacked the administration’s gun-running, but instead have attacked the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
We know that of the 7,900 weapons (just under 8 percent of the guns captured from cartels) that came from gun shops in the United States, about 2,000 of them were the result of Gunwalker.
We know that Gunwalker was never designed to interdict the weapons the ATF and DOJ pushed objecting gun sellers to provide. We know that management reacted to the spiraling violence that Gunwalker caused not with concern, but with enthusiasm.
The Department of Justice claims that their inspector general will investigate Gunwalker, but it appears obvious to the very agents that brought this scandal into the open that they have a clear conflict of interest. There are already calls for a special prosecutor to investigate Gunwalker.
Considering the arming of narco-terrorist gangs, the destabilizing geopolitical effect on Mexico, the foreign policy ramifications, and the possibility of extrajudicial and criminal activity at the highest levels of the executive branch, a special prosecutor should be just one avenue of investigation. This could possibly lead to prison for senior administration officials and an indictment against President Barack Obama himself.
That seemed to be the “plan” and such a plan likely originated very high up: Let cartels buy guns in the US and take them south of the border. Use the resulting violence there to justify US gun control by executive order as an “international matter.”
Whistleblowers blew the plan.
I can’t wait for the 60 minutes exposé.
Garan-f’in teed this was a PR op designed to give the ruling class cover for more 2nd amendment infringement, and garan-f’in-teed Obambi knew about it. This is criminal. Will anyone be held responsible? Doubt it.
What a cosmically STUPID question. Yes, yes, yes, of course it was!!! Think back to early in Barry’s term. The MSM was running all sorts of wet-your-pants articles about how the flood of American guns was THE problem on the border. It was all a ruse of manufactured ‘data’ to 1) give the majority democrat Congress the cover to write new draconian gun laws and 2) indoctrinate the American people on why new laws were good. The ATF never meant for the guns to be traceable. They felt that once south of the border they’d basically become invisible and not easily (or ever) traced back to themselves. In fact the ATF had no plan on how to do the tracing. First, they never informed the Mex govt of the operation and second they had little presence in Mex by which to trace or investigate. Not only was it a diplomatic farce and train load of felonies but an covert attempt by our own govt to deprive us of our rights, a backdoor attack on our Constitution. The only correct outcome is jail time for Holder, Melson and a host of ATF agents and the swift exit of Barry from the presidency.
As an aside I think many dems would be happy to see Barry take a fall on this one. Clearly the dem party is going to take a beating at the polls as long as Barry remains president. Hes a huge liability . This would be a neat and tidy way of giving the dem party a happy face while unloading an Albatross.
I would surmise that the real reason of Gunwalking was to punish Arizona for 1070 by showing the world that Arizona is nothing but a gun-running state that supplies guns to cartels to kill innocent Mexicans before they can cross the border into USA; this would swing more latino votes to Obummer- so Obummer knew all about it or probably was his idea in the first place. cf. March interview That is the real reason.
Seriously, the ‘rat was asserting “he would have eventually died anyway” as a defense of this policy?
Actually, I’m not surprised, after reading “You can still trust the communists to be communists”.
NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING
is out of bounds as a “means” to achieve the “ends” of global communism.
this maybe just my twisted form of logic, but what if this just happens to tie in with the un treaty on small arms ban? I would NOT put it past the gun grabbers in congress to pull such a stunt! And why not, they have a president who does not like the US for which it stands right now, but wants us to be under the heel of the un & their dictates no matter what & a bunch of ultra liberals in congress who want the same thing.
LTN
The overwhelming majority of MSM employees are 1960s Marxist-Alinsky street/campus revolutionary rabble and ideological issue of the 60s extremists.
1960s Marxist-Alinsky street/campus revolutionary rabble and their ideological issue have arguably become the Establishment.
As they used to say a generation ago, "Bring it all down, man."
It's time. I say let the patriot professional military and LEO handle it. Tolerate the temporary disruptions. Let's get it over with.
It should have been done a generation ago when the 1960s Marxist-Alinsky street/campus revolutionary rabble were swarming the country advocating communism. Now they are implementing their form of Stalinism. (BTW, many radicals in the '60s were not too fond of the U.S.S.R. Not revolutionary enough.)
If modern America's Man on Horseback is out there, Get on the damn horse already!
Let's try this question instead:
Is there any evidence it wasn't ?
Does ursus horribilis defecate amongst the conifers?
There are a few folks in the DoJ/ATF hierarchy that either need to be in jail or decorating lampposts.
Obama TOLD Sarah Brady he was working on gun control, “under the radar.” And that was Fast and Furious/Gunwalker. Problem is, ATF Agent Dodson jammed Hussein’s radar...reeeel goood!!! If Republicans do their job, Holder will be gone and Obama will be as one termer. And that job is—let Ken Melson, the current head of ATF and Obama puppet, know he will do serious time if he clams up. Hussein is already about to “under the bus” Melson and the only thing that might save him is a deal with Issa/Grassley for full cooperation.
Wonderful point!
“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Barack Obama reportedly told Sarah Brady regarding gun control. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.” This interesting bit of news was reported in an April 11 Washington Post Lifestyle section story about Obama’s gun-control and regulatory policy wonk Steve Croley.
Toward the end of the article the writer, Jason Horowitz, mentions a March 30 meeting between Jim and Sarah Brady and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney during which the President “dropped in.” Horowitz quotes Sarah Brady relating how President Obama gave his personal assurance that he and his administration were working hard on a gun-control agenda.
Regards,
TS
Keeping up with the news, check out # 6.
.
Very interesting links at this link....
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread695930/pg1
Issa, do the right thing. Get obama GONE!
“Agenda Behind Fast & Furious Gunrunner Program”
http://noisyroom.net/blog/ ^ | 6.18.11 | AJ
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2736714/posts
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