I don’t know much about this whole Gunwalker episode, beyond the little I’ve read in the news. But it’s now meant the United States’ chief executive law officer has just been held in contempt of Congress. Pretty serious stuff.
I said I’d close down the reffo’ camp once Disqus was back online. But this Gunwalker thing has me rather intrigued. I noticed the comments on this towards the end; feel free to continue the discussion here.
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
As far as a brief overview reveals the gunwalker issue is mainly a bit of Republican party theatre.
The program by the AFT to sell guns and then track them to the Mexican Narco gangs was initiated by Bush.
Instead of stopping all guns sold from being sold on, some were allowed to move along the illegal arms trade routes to try and identify the paths that the drug cartels used. This seems to have worked in at least one instance where guns sold by the ATF were recovered along with far more illegal weapons including grenade launchers and anti-aircraft guns.
The ATF is not the sole source of weapons for the drug gangs, or on the street in general.
However when border guards were attacked, one killed, with weapons that included ATF sourced AK47s the accusation was made that the failure to interdict around half of the ATF weapons sold, so that there are around 1000 guns on the street sold by agents, was a conspiracy to undermine the second amendment. The right to bear arms.
Quite how prescient you would need to be to ‘know’ that some of the guns would be used against federal officials and this could be spun into a gun control message is unclear.
Why the conclusion is not that the ATF has messed up perhaps has something to do with the GOP wanting any stick to beat the man in the Whitehouse.
Slighty more credible than the 2nd amendment conspiracy theory is the charge that Holder SHOULD have known about the loss of guns into the illegal market from the ATF gunwalking operations, and may have known more but the full details are not being released on the basis of presidential executive privilege. The justification is that some of the information covers ongoing operations and legal cases.
The privilege being claimed is the same as claimed by Bush to prevent paperwork showing Cheney’s role in exposing a CIA agent as part of a smear on a diplomat that disputed the WMD evidence in the Iraq war.
While there seem to be GOPs who are convinced that Obama is out to regulate guns, and take his complete inaction on this issue as clear evidence that he is very sneaky…
I have also seen the accusation that one reason that guns sold to arms traders as part of this ATF operation were not interdicted and the dealers arrested because there was a concern that it might look like the authorities were harassing gun trade and targeting 2nd amendment rights.
This raises the bizarre possibility that guns were left in the hands of gangsters so that the Obama administration could avoid the appearance of cracking down on gun ownership/dealing and so escape attacks from the GOP.
It looks like a typical SNAFU. A policy started by one administration that got out of hand, badly managed and had undesirable consequences.
It looks like partisan opportunism to use the issue as a means to beat up a member of the Obama administration
I suppose it is not too dissimilar to the Labour party calling for the resignation of the Home Secretary over the failures in the border agency and immigration authorities.
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/article3556645.ece?textsize=large&test=1
Izen two dead border agents is clearly manslaughter on the part of the Justice Department as personified by Eric Holder. Whether the scheme was instigated under Bush or not is of no consequence it was Holder that ramped it up. The initial goal was trace weapons getting into the hands of the drug cartels which was a very small problem until Holder authorized what amounts to arming a small country with heavy weaponry. The reason he did so he needed an excuse to say look this is what the second amendment is doing to poor Mexicans boohoo we must therefore regulate all weapons in keeping with the UN official agenda on this.
This entire story would have been buried but for some brave bloggers whose lives have been threatened or were until some rather courageous ex military sniper and special forces types quietly let it be known if these guys have an accident so will you. So the story made it out into the mainstream against a MSM that tried to kill the story. Now even so this could have been a non event or “negotiated” into obscurity by the politicians but for Mr Holder refusing to hand over documents to Congress upping the ante. He has already been held in contempt of Congress and may actually be arrested but I doubt that myself.
Now I myself wish we didn’t have to have any guns but when you live in a city where they are trying to go for the world murder/violent crime record you can see the need and the criminals really are nothing but animals with no empathy or morality. However I’m sure you will find some way to pin it on whitey conservatives and the poor darlings are misunderstood or something.
Chicago has gun controls and also has more deaths per year than Afghanistan thanks to a criminal element that fears no one as they are the only ones armed.
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-s-gunwalker-excuse-blame-bush
Izen, the entire fascade of saying this was “started by George W.” is just a red herring. The actual operation “Fast and furious” is completely different then the program that George W’s admin used. In that case, it was operation wide receiver and was run well and was discontinued the second problems developed.
Fast and Furious on the other hand only stopped when someone ended up dead. Quite a large difference in the way it was run, especially the key points about how in Gunrunner (operation wide receiver) the Mexican Government itself was informed and participated unlike in this operation.
The differences are staggering…..And as much as I dislike George W. For other reasons, I think simply “blaming him for anything that goes wrong” is a tactic of a coward and especially Holder who was not held in contempt by Congress for this operation, but for refusing to disclose document relevant to this operation that would allow people to figure out what actually happened.
As far as the connection to Holder:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20108460-10391695.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20108240-10391695.html
And more into the how and why the entire spectacle was organized:
http://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/gunwalker-update-white-house-yelling-at-cbs-reporter-rush-on-random-act-of-journalism/
IF you read, the links are from CBS sources where one lone reporter was investigating this mess. The process was apperantly from sources about “curtailing the second ammendment” and that is from the horse’s mouth.
It takes a little bit of research to find the truth since the MSM is mum on the issue, but in the end Holder got held in contempt for with-holding documents and the only reason I could see with-holding these documents which came from the CBS reporters stories was that the papers would be actual proof that the AG was actually involved. And why did the president issue executive priveledge?
There is much more here then what most people think. And its much worse then anything Nixon did if it is true. I am not saying its proven yet, but its starting to look like a cover-up at the white house and the second more whistle-blowers start showing up the entire charade will crack and Holder on down will be thrown under the bus.
As far as Obama, I have no clue on whether he knew about it at the time, but he has already stuck his neck out on the cover-up as it seems. So if something is found out, we will very shortly find out the truth.
I hope I helped explain some of this with other sources. Of course, there is only one source who claims it was about the second ammendment, but one source is enough to investigate in my opinion to find out if this was the case.
To say that holding Holder in contempt is wrong is simply ignorring the evidence that there is something fishy going on here.
As always, izen is a reliable “reverse barometer.” If you know nothing else than izen‘s position on a political issue, you know with good reliability that the precise opposite is true.
In actuality, the Operation Fast and Furious measures perpetrated by our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief’s federal Department of Justice collectively comprise an act of war perpetrated against a friendly foreign power – los Estados Unidos Mexicanos – in actions deliberately undertaken as a matter of Executive Branch policy to provide uncontrolled and untracked delivery of military-grade firearms to known criminal narcotics traffickers in Mexico.
This is at the very least a matter for the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
Not only does U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (who is the chief law enforcement officer in our federal government) correctly warrant criminal sanctions as having conducted himself in contempt of Congress, but he is properly susceptible to criminal prosecution under the laws of our several states in which his and his subordinates actions under Fast and Furious were committed.
And then we go to the Netherlands, whence he and his correspondents in felony must be transported in chains.
Dislike the Republican Party though I certainly do (hell, I hate the dog-futtering, log-rolling, bankster-sucking, “go-along-to-get-along” slimeballs), I have to agree with those among their ranks that Odumbo’s hideous Fast and Furious is a boatload worse than Nixon’s involvement in Watergate, and warrants a helluva lot more severe punishment for Stanley Ann Dunham’s Little Bastard than a decorous opportunity for the lying weasel merely to resign in humiliation and disgrace.
That’s not enough. This guy needs to go to prison for a long, long, long time.
G’day Tucci,
Correction of Holder’s title cheerfully accepted – Oz
@- Kitler
“Whether the scheme was instigated under Bush or not is of no consequence it was Holder that ramped it up. The initial goal was trace weapons getting into the hands of the drug cartels which was a very small problem until Holder authorized what amounts to arming a small country with heavy weaponry. The reason he did so he needed an excuse to say look this is what the second amendment is doing to poor Mexicans boohoo we must therefore regulate all weapons in keeping with the UN official agenda on this.”
This is obvious nonsense, the last decade of narco-war in Mexico has hardly been characterised by a lack of weaponry until the ATF started supplying them. The observations of the arms traders show that they were buying many more guns, and heavy weaponry, from other quasi-legitimate sources than they were getting from the ATF sting ops.
The damage gun-running into Mexico from the South America causes is quite evident without the ATF having to add to it.
The role of Holder is in dispute. That he ‘ramped up’ the program is far from clear, as of now it is only a claim by some partisan sources. I gather that some Congress members {Issa?} are now accepting that he was unaware of the details of the program until recently after the release of emails detailing his response to assurances from the Phoenix office that no guns were walking….
@- “This entire story would have been buried but for some brave bloggers whose lives have been threatened or were until some rather courageous ex military sniper and special forces types quietly let it be known if these guys have an accident so will you. So the story made it out into the mainstream against a MSM that tried to kill the story.”
Conspiracy Woo.
Let me take a wild guess that these brave bloggers are also pushing the ‘Birther’ nonsense, and/or are being fed ‘insider’ information by the disaffected agents who seem to have had a general falling out with the Phoenix office that was running this.
When a story has as ‘supporting’ details the claim that shadowy unnamed powers threatened to kill the messengers and it was only exposed because other equally ‘spy novel’ freelance agents provided protection it is only the people with a deep desire for confirmation bias that take those details as INCREASING the credibility of the story.
For any neutral observer such melodramatic ornamentation is a clear indication we are closer to fiction than fact.
@- “Now even so this could have been a non event or “negotiated” into obscurity by the politicians but for Mr Holder refusing to hand over documents to Congress upping the ante. ”
Not quite.
As far as I can determine it is not Mr Holder who refuses to release all the documentation, it is redacted by presidential executive privilege. The justification being that there are ongoing cases….
@- Benfrommo
Ah, thank you links to some more background…
@- “There is much more here then what most people think. And its much worse then anything Nixon did if it is true. I am not saying its proven yet, but its starting to look like a cover-up at the white house and the second more whistle-blowers start showing up the entire charade will crack and Holder on down will be thrown under the bus.”
Its starting to look like the conflicts within the ATF notably between Voth and Dobson, led to the gun-walking on ‘Fast and Furious’, the operation to track the guns sold. The agents apparently resented the lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting the dealers in the sting by the Phoenix DAs office.
I can see why some might WANT the AG and Obama to be directly involved, but is it not more credible that this is an operation that got out of hand, at least in part because of some very odd interpersonal stuff going on between the agents? The ambition for career advancement by busting some big dealers with the guns must have looked
Ike a possibility, and perhaps a chance to settle personal scores with work colleagues, or bosses.
If Obama or even Holder were directly involved in planning and instigating this program of allowing guns to walk, the question would be when and why. The second amendment theory is really silly. Mexicans are killing each other without any help from US arms dealers. Although stopping US arms trafficking would clearly be a good thing for the US.
There would be no guarantee that ATF guns would{not} show up in an American crime in any predictable timescale. Most of the guns used by Mexican gangs come from the Mexican and South American sources. The revelation that US agents had sold guns in a sting that were then used against Americans would not be of any political advantage to Obama… As recent events have demonstrated, quite the opposite.
The motivation for such a policy just isn’t there. At least not for Obama.
For a president that the GOP seems convinced is a gun control freak Obama seems extremely indolent. He still hasn’t changed regulations as he said he would after the Gifford assassination attempt. Some seem to think that is just his deviousness….{grin}
I stick by my original take on this with more info, its a classic local SNAFU which has dragged in the central authority because they had to rubber-stamp some of the wiretaps quite probably without being aware of the full import of the actions on the ground of a bungled ATF op.
Partisan activists are making political hay out of it, but there is not much fuel in it.
Burn out within a fortnight.
{except with the teabag/birther brigade}
At 4:10 AM on 30 June, izen continues squirming to evade reality with:
The point you’re squirming uselessly away from, izen, is that Operation Fast and Furious involved the purposeful decision of our federal government’s National Command Authority – the Mombasa Magical Mystery Mulatto – to knowingly cause the uncontrolled and untracked conveyance of military-grade firearms to criminal organizations in los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, a foreign country with which our own United States of America had not been in a state of conflict.
This is at the very least “filibustering” in the old sense, to wit:
Considering that the decidedly political violence of los narcotrafficantes has been directed against officers of the various Mexican cities’ and states’ governments as well as against los Federales, and has involved massive government corruption and extortion in those polities as well as overt violence, even this partial contribution to the arsenals of the Sinaloa Cartel (the principal beneficiaries of this particular element in our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief’s resume of criminal malfeasance in public office) gives us more than sufficient cause to argue that in Operation Fast and Furious the Obama Administration had engaged in acts of war against a foreign power without the knowledge or approval of the U.S. Congress, yet another violation of the War Powers Act of 1973.
The members of the U.S. House of Representatives are determined to find out precisely what the hell our POTUS-With-An-Asterisk knew about this criminal horror perpetrated under his authority – on his watch, per his own policies, to his own political ends, by his hand-chosen government thugs in the Executive Branch which he and nobody else commands and controls completely – and when that citizen of the Republic of Indonesia (on what passport did you travel to Pakistan in 1981, you lying bastard?) knew that Eric Holder became a candidate for a trip in leg irons and handcuffs to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
This is proper and fitting in our Republic. Our Congresscritters are supposed to jump the ass of our President (or whatever is sitting behind the Resolute in the place of a lawful President) when there are indications that there’s criminal skullduggery in the Oval Office.
And as for “the teabag/birther brigade,” izen, might I commend to you Christopher Monckton’s briefing to the House of Lords on the subject of our Fraudulence-in-Chief’s obvious perpetration of criminal forgery anent both the 2007 COLB exhibited during the 2008 campaign and the hilarious piece of inept Photoshop work his idiot minions put onto the Whitehouse Web site in April 2011?
Tsk. Make that:
“Our Congresscritters are supposed to jump the ass of our President (or whatever is sitting behind the <iResolute desk in the place of a lawful President) when there are indications that there’s criminal skullduggery in the Oval Office.”
@- tucci78
“The point you’re squirming uselessly away from, izen, is that Operation Fast and Furious involved the purposeful decision of our federal government’s National Command Authority – the Mombasa Magical Mystery Mulatto – to knowingly cause the uncontrolled and untracked conveyance of military-grade firearms to criminal organizations in los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, a foreign country with which our own United States of America had not been in a state of conflict.”
I can only conclude that any cognitive ability you posses has been adandonded for partisan polemic.
You have added new details unsourced.
How do you know the Military grade firearms were purposefully conveyed uncontrolled and untracked?
The whole point of the AFT op was to track and identify the weapons they put into the market. That is how they were able to identify the guns involved in the border clash in which a guard was killed. The new claim the weapons were untracked implies that specific instructions must have been given to the agents involved to fail to carry out the very purpose of the program.
Think it through. There is no motive for giving such an order, such a course of action would run the risk of exposure when the weapons turned up and given the predominance of other sources would have little impact on the availability of weapons for the cartels. The second amendment motive doesn’t make sense, getting the ATF to provide arms to the Mexican gangs just makes the ATF look stupid. However careful the track-covering there would be suspiscions and accusations of complicity as we see at present. All that is clearly predictable and would detter even the most devious and arrogant of administrations from pursuing a policy with no upside and such horrendous downsides. It is a completely implausible scenario… Unless you are blinded by partisan dislike.
@-“And as for “the teabag/birther brigade,” izen, might I commend to you Christopher Monckton’s briefing to the House of Lords on the subject of our Fraudulence-in-Chief’s obvious perpetration of criminal forgery….”
And that just blew any credibility you might claim. Monckton? Really!? Even most of the climate sceptics regard him as a liability these days given how often he has been debunked.
Do you know what you get if you scan a partially printed and partially handwritten document with modern software to produce a searchable adobe PDF file? Try it some time.
Yeesh.
No, I don’t know. Could you fill us in? This could be significant – Oz
At 8:47 AM on 30 June, blind to anything but the standard “Liberal” fascist propaganda line on our Marxist Mulignane’s cover crap for his part in the criminalities of Operation Fast and Furious, izen with clockwork predictability completely screws the pooch by regurgitating:
Nope. That was “the whole point” of Operation Wide Receiver (running from 2006 to the end of 2007, during Dubbya’s period of misfeasance in the presidency), in which the conveyance of firearms to known shadow purchasers acting on behalf of criminals in both these United States and in Mexico was accompanied by concealed RFID tracking devices in some of the weapons and engaging in some (wonderfully incompetent) cooperation with Mexican law enforcement authorities.
As could be expected of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) – the gun-toting bureaucrats responsible for initiating the Ruby Ridge abomination and the magnificent F-Troop fratricidal raid on the Waco “compound” of the Branch Davidians – they screwed up the technology of tracking and the techniques of controlled (and therefore limited-by-apprehension) delivery, not even pursuing indictments in more than two of the cases where arrests were made. These two indictments were unsealed in 2010.
In the limited number of documents turned over to investigators,
Now, when we get to Operation Fast and Furious – under the total control of our Hopenchangey Hubshi and his little “progressive” minions – we have an undertaking brought into existence long after “Wide Receiver” had been terminated for reasons more than sufficient, among which were the fact that the BATFE had (big surprise!) screwed the pooch in trusting to gadgetry and coordination with the authorities south of the border.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll recount here most of an article (26 June 2012) that izen really doesn’t want to read, and won’t read or confront even if a hotlink is provided. It’s titled “The 5 Biggest Differences Between Operation Fast and Furious and Operation Wide Receiver:”
Said “sitting attorney general” was, in fact, held in contempt earlier this week.
Continuing with izen:
Yeah, doesn’t it?
So what the hell motive on the part of our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief does “make sense” to anybody but a willfully ignorant yammering “Liberal”? In the U.S. Senate, Odumbo was consistently ranked as “most liberal” in his voting record, and repeatedly expressed hostility to the Second Amendment protections provided private citizens in defiance of the gun-grabbing inclinations of our “Liberal” fascists.
Nah. Taking careful note of the flaming incompetence of the ACORN assholes surrounding our ex-Community Organizer (who strives never to let a crisis go to waste, even when he has to manufacture the crisis to begin with), who the hell wonders that they would screw things up even more spectacularly than the Republicans managed to do?
As for what might “make the ATF look stupid,” doesn’t this reveal magnificently just how bloody ignorant is izen about the history of the federal BATFE? Right then, right there, putzele, you dropped your trousers in public and showed everything anybody ever needed to know about your shortcomings.
Oh, yeah, we finish up with izen’s dismissal of Christopher Monckton’s cited (and linked) briefing paper for the House of Lords:
…in which we’ve got ourselves from izen a perfect instantiation of the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, refusing absolutely and categorically to consider or address the content of a presented source of information and opinion by witlessly attacking the supposed character of the author thereof.
Friggin’ contemptible, on all counts.
Izen,
You really are twisting yourself into a pretzel defending the indefensible.
Two federal agents (Terry and Avilla) and ~200 Mexicans are dead due to guns involved in the program. Even in the Watergate scandal, there was no blood involved.
We want to get to the truth, not least for the families of those involved, and the Terry family have been quite clear as to what their wishes are.
After ~18 months of multiple hearings and subpoenas, the documents requested still haven’t been furnished to the investigation committee. There is no reason for this if there is nothing to hide. Furthermore, Holder has abjectly failed to identify who exactly in the DoJ (or White House) was directly responsible for oversight of the program. Surely someone has to take responsibility for what happened. Either Holder is lying or is incompetent. What we do know is that he has obfuscated and told mistruths (e.g. his direct knowledge, and when did he know) regarding Fast and Furious.
The U.S. is not a country which is run by a King or dictator. There are supposed to be co-equal branches of government, i.e. executive, legislative, and judicial. Neither Holder, or even the President, should assume that they are above any checks and balances, and the law. If subpoenas have been made for documents, they should be furnished, there is no good reason not to unless there is something to hide. The hole has just been dug deeper in that Obama has exerted executive privilege on the documents, something that is totally unjustified under the scope of executive privilege, unless he was directly involved (which he has denied multiple times). This just arouses further suspicions.
I assume you would not like it if the roles were reversed, and we had a conservative executive branch, and a leftist legislative branch. Consistency is important, and that is where the far left is failing big time nowadays, as they collapse under the weight of contradictions and hypocrisy. Mark my words, the most powerful campaign ads this time around will be comparing Obama in his words prior and after getting elected.
Izen, It was the CBS reporter who had the source who claimed that the plan was to force an incident which would then be “Solved” by going against the second amendment. There is no claim on your part on this issue of the story. Is this source lying? I don’t know, but the claim is one that bears investigation and stone-walling by the current administration just makes it look guilty.
I provided the sources and gave my opinions but you seem to just dodge those issues. If in fact it is true, which I do not claim that it is, this makes this much worse then Watergate like I said as there is blood spilled including a border agent.
Now how high it goes is anyone’s guess. For all I know, all Obama did is what Nixon did and cover-up assuming he knew nothing and the story is true. This does bear investigation as the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people due to “assault rifle” sales to anyone is something that we need to investigate. We have laws in place to stop those kind of sales and this operation over-rode that so this makes anyone involved an accomplise.
At the very least, we all deserve the correspondance to find out who decided to do this seriously flawed operation and why. Its what we at least owe to the dead.
But if you want my two cents, I tend to think the republicans are being a bunch of wusses and not pushing the issue at all. Contempt after months of talking about it? Give me a break, this guy deserved this awhile back. Democrats walking out of congress in protest? What prima donna’s. And they tell us the republicans are the ones at fault for making it a circus, they are just as guilty if not more so for not simply pushing on the president to be forthright within his own administration.
In response to izen noise:
Ozboy responds:
Inasmuch as the “Liberal” obamaphile izen will emphatically not “fill us in” because no such action is possible, Ozboy should seek directly the announced findings of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” as their findings have been released to the public on the matter of attempts they made repeatedly to “scan a partially printed and partially handwritten document with modern software” to produce what would in effect be a standard PDF representation of a genuine forensic document of the types offered by the Obama Campaign in 2008 as representations of their Messiah’s “short-form” Certification of Live Birth (COLB) allegedly issued by the State of Hawaii in 2007, or the alleged “long-form” archival birth certificate images of which were posted with much fanfare to the White House Web site in April 2011.
These details were substantively recapitulated in Mr. Monckton’s briefing paper previously cited, which (izen‘s crap notwithstanding) please see.
The characteristics of images (including PDF elements, which would not be “searchable”) made by scanning real print-on-paper, typed, partially handwritten, signed, and certified with embossed seals forensic documents suitable for submission to a court of law – as demanded for examination by trained, experienced, proven investigators prepared to testify under oath as to their findings of authenticity, provenance, and validity – were recapitulated by the forensic technicians participating in the Cold Case Posse evaluations with an eye toward resolving for once and all the issues surrounding allegations of fraud.
They’d hoped to clear the Obama Campaign and our arrogant incompetent Occupier-in-Chief by proving that the parties complicit in these frauds had, in fact, told the truth.
What they found out was that both of these “documents” (or, rather, the images that were passed off as representing such documents) were digital counterfeits created to appear to the uncritical, inexperienced, and credulous eye as if they had been scanned from previously existing legitimate forensic elements suitable for receipt by, say, a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to prove the subject’s identity so that a driver’s license might be issued.
Neither of these graphic images could so serve.
All of this is online at sources readily available to anyone who hasn’t got his head wedged all the way up his ass.
Here is how you get a ‘fake’ fake certificate…
Give me a credible motivation for deliberately creating the debacle that ‘Fast and Furious’ became. What reason could the Obama administration have for intentionally running(walking) guns into the Mexican cartels that wouldn’t just make them look bad?
The logic I am getting is circular, The ATF op was incompetently carried out, the Obama administration is incompetent therefore it was the Obama admin that did it.
Presumably the Obama administration does not consider itself to be incompetent, so what plausible scenario could they have for the op if it had gone ‘correctly’?
I agree that Obama was clearly pro gun-control before his election. One of the complaints his fans have is that since he has been almost completely inactive on the issue. Even a US rep being shot in the head and six others killed has not caused, or justified him changing the rules on magazine size. If that did not give Obama sufficient reason to act on gun control what possible events generated by the Fast and Furious operation could possibly be MORE compelling and prompt action?
What I see in the reports so far is a local SNAFU, probably driven by personal differences between the agents in ATF and the local Phoenix judicial oversight on the ATF actions with different judgments on what constituted viable legal cases.
There have been several examples of setting up straw purchases of weapons in targeting terrorist activity that have fallen apart because of the ‘agent provocateur’ problem.
I still think this looks most like the immigration political froth in the UK. On side called for the resignation of the Home Secretary because of a system of border controls first set up by the previous administration, but further modified by internal managers within the border agency which were inadequately overseen by central authority.
When it came to light this resulted in arrivals at some entry points being completely unmonitored at busy times or via certain routes the political opposition made a big noise and demanded all the paperwork. It was refused, not because it would reveal some dark Machiavellian plot, but because it would reveal the lack of effective management. As usual the attempt to obscure central incompetence ends up being interpreted as some deep conspiracy by the motivated partisan.
Izen why does it say born Mombassa on the certificate?
@- Kitler
“Izen why does it say born Mombassa on the certificate?”
Probably a misprint of bethreekay, planet of the cluster lizards…(grin)
So not only did Obama’s mother/family fake his birthplace with announcments in the ‘local’ press and faked paperwork, but they also made egrigious mistakes like leaving the evidence of the faking behind.
Takes a lot of suspension of dibelief… And however inept you now claim the false citizenship deception to be it was still good enough to get him elected POTUS. I think it highly unlikely that his mother/family faked his citizenship, but if so, then they were sucsessful and he became a US citizen in education, work and political involvement.
Or do you harbour some Manichean conspiracy that he is really a sleeper agent for the pan-afro-indonesean islamo-communist cabal?
Puerile.
Oz,
Ignoring Izen’s throwing of dog toys in the hope that we’ll all run off and chase after them instead…
I’m a little out of date on the current state of the gunwalker investigations – I’m under a jurisdiction which would likely break my door down, and rip the plaster off my walls and pull my floorboards up WHEN my internet provider reports my viewing of one of the blogs which broke the story. Fortunately “Firehand” re-posts many of the more interesting Vanderbeogh posts on his blog, here: http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.co.uk/
Before Christmas 2010, Mike Vanderbeogh*, who blogs at “Sipsey Street Irregulars” noted posts at the “Clean up ATF) forum, where ATF employees were airing their dis satisfaction that their warnings about the facilitation of gunwalking, hadn’t just been ignored, but had come true – with the murder of Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.
Vanderbeogh engaged with the dissident agents and between him and David Codrea (who blogs at “war on guns” and as “Gun rights Examiner” and help from Gun Owners of America, they were able to get Senator Grassley to contact the agents.
A Federal employee is under an obligation to fully and truthfully answer questions asked by a Senator. Despite this, the BATFE management attempted to bully the employees into silence.
Codrea and Vanderbeogh have continued their own blog investigations into the extent of gunwalking within and beyond the US.
They also contacted the MSM, however the overwhelming attitude was “Okay, the professional journalists are here now, hand over the names of the contacts and eff off out of our way, amateur scum”.
The exception to that attitude was this lady:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/08/broadcasts/main524782.shtml
Whom the whistleblowers were happy to speak to, and who has done an excellent job of investigation and bringing the story to a wider audience.
The MSM, and the US NRA have largely ignored the story, and have done their best to minimise it, in the terms which Izen has illustrated in this thread.
Ultimately, as Tucci and Benfromo have pointed out, facilitating the arming of an insurgent group in another country without the permission of that country’s government, is considered an act of war.
Acts of war against a friendly neighbouring country are not undertaken lightly, and such decisions are not taken at low levels and for low value objectives.
__________________________
*Vanderbeogh is a constitutionalist – in his younger days he was involved with the constitutionalist militia movement. Before Izen goes of screaming the standard SPLC line (usually delivered in media interviews by Mark Potok) of “racist haters!” I’ll recommend Robert H Churchill’s excellent book as a reference describing the vast differences between constitutionalist and millenarian militia movements http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=327258 , there are also youtube vids of CNN TV interviews with Amy Cooter; a sociology post grad, who is researching the constitutionalist militia movement – note her exasperated sighs as she is asked questions which she has clearly refuted several times over.
Vanderbeogh’s self described aim and purpose for his blog, is a restoration of constitutional government – without a civil war. An inescapable part of that, is the description of what a civil war might look like, lest some bureaucrats should think that they wont be endangered by it – naturally, most bureaucrats take a very dim view of such ideas, and of those who disseminate and those who read them.
Ah, another opinion… But this is from a constitutionalist so we can all trust it! {sarc off}
The Sipsey street irregulars just might have a less than neutral take on this of course, opposing as they do any controls of gun trafficking.
I particulary enjoyed the idea that because selling guns to Mexican narco-insurgents is an act of war agaianst Mexico and an act of war canonly be sanctioned by the president the descision to walk guns must have been the Presidents’! Chop and circular at the same time! What logical elegance. {grin}
This seems to be a big part of the problem in this issue, the ATF was aware straw purchasers were buying guns from dealers in Arizona on behalf of Mexican cartels, but with no applicable legal sanction at the point of sale making a case was very difficult.
A lot has been posted about this from the anti-Obama side, perhaps an alternative narrative engaging with the issue of how it is even possible for guns to be sold and walked, and why some ATF agents were doing it.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
“Prosecutors: Transferring guns is legal in Arizona
This was not the view of federal prosecutors. In a meeting on Jan. 5, 2010, Emory Hurley, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix overseeing the Fast and Furious case, told the agents they lacked probable cause for arrests, according to ATF records. Hurley’s judgment reflected accepted policy at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona. “[P]urchasing multiple long guns in Arizona is lawful,” Patrick Cunningham, the U.S. Attorney’s then–criminal chief in Arizona would later write. “Transferring them to another is lawful and even sale or barter of the guns to another is lawful unless the United States can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the firearm is intended to be used to commit a crime.” …”It was nearly impossible in Arizona to bring a case against a straw purchaser. The federal prosecutors there did not consider the purchase of a huge volume of guns, or their handoff to a third party, sufficient evidence to seize them. A buyer who certified that the guns were for himself, then handed them off minutes later, hadn’t necessarily lied and was free to change his mind. Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn’t mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.”
There is a lot more about how the team of agents involved split into two factions, the sunshine bears and the renegades with email flame wars and a work environment that sounds toxic with contradictory messages from different levels of management, both to get more gun runners, but without any legal sanction to apply to the straw purchasers.
And I now know FAR more about this piece of irrelevance that is necessary or worthwhile.
=sigh=
Now I remember why I usually refrain from engaging in this political effluvia.
At least, beyond its transient entertainment value and to keep a ‘weather eye’ on events.
It can help ensure you have an umbrella when they micturate on your dorsal surface and claim its precipitation.
Politics is worse than economics. Hard facts are very thin on the ground and rarely if ever provide an unambiguous explanation of events. An infinity of consistent explanatory narratives of the same events can be invented with no way of assigning any variable probability to their accuracy. It is all a matter of political taste.
As a result, human cognition being what it is, we construct coherent narrative explanations, just-so stories, that conform to our pre-existing political/social beliefs. The same set of limited facts can be construed into any number of simple, specific and credible accounts, all of them wrong. Confirmation bias renders us able to fit any stray facts into an interpretation that supports our preferences.
I am quite aware that this critique applies just as fully to my reading of the situation of course. And it is inevitable that some here will see my preferred interpretation as egregiously mistaken because based on a erroneous world-view as I regard their assertions of descriptive accuracy as baloney.
I present my take on this not because I expect it to convince anybody holding contradictory views, but as a reminder that other people can start with a different context and construct a very different narrative.
In self defence a few years back I had to absorb a whole lot of ‘management’ theory. Actually the Deming stuff is quite useful and connects up with systems theory well. Any heirachecal authority system has an inherent systemic failure. The exercise of authority by one level upon the level below is always partial and mediated by the motivations of the lower level. The top level can only set broad goals and methods, not detailed actions. That dilution into detail occurs at each boundary and lower levels will interpret more general instructions according to how they want to work. If they want to take more action they may use a general exhortation to ramp up the work as a means to take more decisions at the lower level without referring upwards the ‘detail’ of how they are ramping up. Similarly if the lower levels are not sympathetic to the demands of higher management they may take the procedural rules associated with the work as a reason to refer up all detailed decisions to delay and avoid implementation.
The result of all this ‘Dilbert’s World’ stuff is that large organisations are prone to failure because lower levels of management failed to efficiently carry out the policy set by upper levels. Or lower levels exceed their remit, taking actions that were not sanctioned by top management because the lower levels see the chance for advancement or greater autonomy within the system.
In the ‘Fast and Furious’ case there are at least three levels with differing views and motivations about what they want to opperation to produce.
But the only hard fact is the physical transfer of 2000 identifiable weapons from some legal source into the black market on the border. Total numbers of guns bought legally in the US and transferred to Mexico are estimated at around 2000 a DAY!
Beyond that basic physical fact of material transfer there is little but opinion and conjecture. An exhortation from the central office to get as many border arms dealers as possible is credible. A direct and specific order to the agents to supply a known illegal trader and to ignore standard procedure is rather less probable. That decision invariably is chosen by the lower levels of management as a local convenience or advantage. Of course middle management may not see it that way and insist on imposing the strict regs because they think the agent level is running out of control…
If you value that at much less than 2cents I would not object. I find such an analysis useful rather than regarding it as accurate.
All the above is speculation. Just as the {seductive to some} narratives that explain events as the evil actions of the satanic Obamaman.
As so often with political events the motivation for many is not to find out the facts, but to discover a Truth which is to their political taste however implausible such a goal is given the inherent uncertainty of all data and its infinite interpretability in the field of human social systems.
Oh for a return to a subject that is empirically testable……. {grin}
Empirically testable? OK… I can’t figure a “Liberty” angle, so I won’t cover it here; but we may very well have uncovered the Higgs Boson – and it will be announced here in Australia! Oz
@- Luton Ian
“Ignoring Izen’s throwing of dog toys in the hope that we’ll all run off and chase after them instead…”
Ha, I like that…..
SQUIRRELS !!!
1) The guns involved in the border guard killing were not walked by the ATF. The serial numbers were reported to the agents a couple of days after the sale by an employee at a gun store suspicious of the sale. They were part of the massive unmonitored trade in guns by straw purchasers in Arizona.
2) “New facts are still coming to light—and will likely continue to do so with the Justice Department inspector general’s report expected in coming months. Among the discoveries: Fast and Furious’ top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI informants who were receiving money from the bureau. “
Ooh, that rattled Izen’s cage. Can’t have been too bad an effort on my part 🙂
I’ll give a detailed response after dinner -just got in from a 12 hour day keeping a bunch of Kiwi shearers fed with obstinate sheep.
First off, yeah, I know Sipsey street irregulars blog is not unbiased – Vanderbeogh brought both the story and the whistleblowers to daylight. Without a certain gentleman with a Dutch name, and who walks with a stick – this may have remained a series of posts on a quiet little forum where BATFE agents who have a conscience, bitch about their agency’s criminality and corruption.
Secondly, the agency which licenses gun shops and which can close them and imprison their owners and employees at a whim (this was the agency which brought you Ruby Ridge, and the gassing and burning of children at Waco – and detained the fire engine for forty minutes – it has a little bit of a reputation) told the shops to sell to straw purchasers – that is what the operation consisted of.
“2) “New facts are still coming to light—and will likely continue to do so with the Justice Department inspector general’s report expected in coming months. Among the discoveries: Fast and Furious’ top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI informants who were receiving money from the bureau. ““Oh well, that makes it all alright then… – Not
I see a link to “gunwalker – the truth”
Wow, some one is telling the whole truth? move allong sir, nothing to see here…
It was one of those expensive ones, so it must be true, it must be true.
Thank you Oz for the sweet, fresh shower of reality in the reminder of the CERN announcement on the fourth. It is unlikely they would have enough data yet to exclude the existence of the Higgs, so presumably they have detected a 5sigma signal at a candidate energy level.
Anything above 125Gev makes life interesting for the standard Gauge model!
Could be a major breakthrough… or maybe it’s just a lot of spin – Oz 😉
Meanwhile….
I have and apology and correction to make.
I previously claimed that the guns that were involved in the border guard killing were not part of the F&F op, only reported after the sale.
That is not quite accurate.
The store where the guns were brought and the buyer were under observation, and it is true that the ATF team had asked the store to continue making sales to people they had identified as suspicious straw purchasers.
But I have been labouring under a larger misapprehension about this case. I initially thought that the ~2000 guns that went onto the streets were under the direct control, and sold by the ATF agents. This was not the case, except perhaps in the Dobson/Fernandiaz case.
All the guns that were walked were in the control, and sold by gun shops and gun shows. The only way that the ATF agents could identify possible straw purchasers was to collect names, addresses and purchase data from the paper records held by the licensed gun dealers. Surprisingly none of this data is held centrally in an electronic database. That would have made identifying suspicious patterns of gun buying a simple task.
Instead it took over six months of collecting data before the agents could identify any suspects. They then found that a pattern of buying was not sufficient to obtain a search warrant or arrest a suspect, the local A.G. wanted better proof. That is when they started video surveillance of certain stores, but lacked the manpower for continual surveillance of agents staking out a store to apprehend any suspect straw purchasers. They could only react AFTER the sale.
The problem with the F&F op seems to be that they did not have the resources to watch every suspect straw purchaser, or every gun dealer, and with no central electronic database the best they could do was check the paper records after the sales had occurred. Even then the local A.G. {a gun nut} was conspicuously reluctant to prosecute anyone for gun trafficking.
You can look at the cases indicted by the Arizona A.G.’s office here =
http://www.justice.gov/usao/az/press_releases/news_archive_2011.html
And after the 2010 Dec border guard killing there was a sudden rush of trafficking cases, including the Alva case linked to the killing. Although it is sealed, the details can be accesed.
Since Jan 2011 well over 50 people have been indicted for straw purchase/trafficking.
The data for 2010 when the ATF agents were trying to make a case for arresting and prosecuting straw purchaser is ‘unfortunately’ unavailable, however I found a list for the year 2010.
The number of indictments for arms trafficking or straw purchase that year was zero.
The misconception here is that the 7 person team of ATF agents had any control over the sale or movement of the weapons. They could only copy details from the paper records held by the official dealer after the sale. This was their only means of tentatively identifying straw purchasers and making a hypothesis that certain guns were worth recording on their watch list. They did not have the means, or legal backup from the local A.G. to search or arrest the straw purchasers at the pint of sale, or watch every suspect. In fact the only way that the local judicial branch was prepared to get involved seemed to be if the suspect guns were later recovered in a criminal event. Even then the suspected straw purchaser could not be unequivocally assumed guilty, according to the local AG office they may still have traded in good faith and be guilty of no more than gun dealing without a license….
The ATF had no choice but to let the guns walk. It was not a policy, certainly not one from the top, it was the reaIity of dealing with many legitimate sales outlets that are unmonitored and unmonitorable without a central record system.
The ATF agents used the paper records to identify possible straw purchaser suspects and recorded the serial numbers of the guns they bought. But the agents never had the manpower or the authority from the A.G.s office to arrest anyone or followguns or suspects in real time.
That this is a bit of anti-Obama political theatre based on the usual local SNAFU seems obvious. That the Republicans are complaining that the agents did not do enough to stop gun trafficking, but oppose the regulations that would make that possible just highlites the hypocrisy on both sides.
No spin on the Higgs Ozboy… Or charge.
Sigh. Let me guess: you auditioned for The Big Bang Theory, right? But the part of Sheldon was already taken – Oz 🙄
I am sorry I seem to have chased away all those that wanted the Holder/F&F case to be a big Obama bashing issue… The final example I have of this being a bit of political hypocrisy is the way senator Issa, when the ATF agents were giving testimony, tried to stop them mentioning the problems caused by the ‘toothless’ gun laws on straw purchasers…
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/06/issa_refuses_to_allow_let_atf_agents_testify_against_toothless_gun_laws_video.php
more like Leonard… -(grin)-
Never a Trekie though, did anyone get the obscure scifi series reference upthread?