Hey Libs....Still Laughing Off Fast and Furious?

[Gouki]

yup Trish is right, this program started under the Bush Admin which is why I call capitol hill a mix of the false left and right with the exception of a few politicians that actually care about the current and future state of the US and the world, and Liberty is also correct, CIA drug running ops have been documented with the mega banks like Wells Fargo laundering the money for years, a trillion dollars since the war on drugs started and there are more people in the US on drugs (both legal and illegal) than ever before, decriminalize and many of the problems associated with control substance abuse will start to diminish, dealers will have to get a legit job or find another scam, much of the crack head prostitution will stop (something else that should be decriminalized , the drug heads won't attempt to break into people's houses and vehicles to steal money so they can buy the overpriced smack, the Mexican people might have a chance of taking their country back if the drug cartel's profits are stopped and the money stops filling their coffers

[Dino Velvet]

To me the signal question to ask here is why both the Mexican and US Governments think that violence is the solution to the violence of the narcotics trade in the USA and Mexico. Taking on the cartels, who are fighting both each other for a greater share of a declining trrade and the Mexican government is a futile project - the cartels can buy police, and have allegedly bought members of the government too. For an oil rich state with a once-robust tourist industry and the richest man in the world, the core question ought to be -Why Isn't Mexico as Rich as the USA and Canada?

The USA has, overtly and covertly been supplying weapons, credits for arms etc to so many nasty regimes over the decades you have to wonder where the morals went anyway? Has onmyknees already forgotten who was one of the most relible backers of a certainly dead Arab called Saddam Hussein? And remind me who it was who joined with Saudi Arabia, that crade of Arab democracy, to beef up the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during their combat with the USSR? And the consequences...

..if you want to attack President Obama, the 'war on drugs' might be a good place to start; but then I don't suppose his fellow Americans are going to stop shoving white powder up their nose, or smoke the current money-earner, marijuana in its various forms.

It's a shame what's happened to Mexico. As a California native, I've had many good times down there, spending my American Dollars, and being treated with respect while treating them respectfully. The violence makes me and any other sane person worry about traveling down there, especially certain parts.

I don't know if complete legalization is the solution. Just not comfortable making meth and some other hard drugs legal but I definitely want to find a way to remove the black market profit. The violence on not only the people directly involved in the drug trade but also the innocent is disgusting and disheartening.

Mexico has been blessed with so many natural resources and much of the population is very hard working. Just so corrupt down there.

[onmyknees]

Wide Receiver(2006), Fast and Furious(2009)...both gun walking programs initiated by the ATF under the Bush administration (operations of Project Gun Runner)... Gun walking programs loved by republicans everywhere...until now.

You are so foolishly and blindly incorrect one wonders if you're this ignorant, or just continue to cover for Obama out of ideology or identity. I tend to think it's the later.

Now the facts....Wide Receiver was indeed a program started under the Bush Admin,.....however the weapons were implanted with GPS chips and there was a retrieval and tracing facet to the program. Several hundred weapons found themselves south of the border. When it was discovered that the cartels had discovered how to disable the GPS chips, the program was discontinued and it was with the full knowledge and input from the Mexican government.
So there were similarities, but enormous differences in the two programs. Fast and Furious was done without the consent or knowledge of the Mexican Government, imagine dumping guns on a friendly country without their knowledge? .....and no way for any of the 2100 weapons to be traced. So now you must ask yourself....if guns were allowed to walk and deliberately put in the hands of assassins, with no way to be traced or retrieved, what in gods name was the purpose? According to the Mexican Government ( these are their figures not mine....) nearly 300 Mexican citizens have been executed by these weapons and one of these weapons was found at the murder scene of US Border Patrol Agent. So please stop with this false comparison...it's asinine.
Another fact....Holder in sworn testimony told Congress that Bush's A. G. Mulkasey had full knowledge of Fast and Furious, he later had to retract that statement and apologize for his misinformation.

So we have strained our relations with Mexico and are complicit in the death of 300 of their citizens and the body count growing daily as these weapons work their way into the wrong hands. We have at least one dead border patrol agent, and an AG who on two occasions has misled Congress...and you suggest we should do what??? Laugh it off and blame Bush ?

So...either Holder is an incompetent buffoon for not knowing what carnage this program caused early enough, or he had much darker motives and knew exactly what the results were . For those of you with an open mind....( not Trish and the other Obama ass kissers) I urge you to watch this.

[buttslinger]

OMK must be the only person down here who doesn't want to throw up when Issa speaks. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rummsfeld, Delay, Eisenhower would have them all on KP. Thieves in four thousand dollar suits, those are the Americans Bush served and follow the cash, they're back and they're backing Romney, another jellyfish.
I put my Las Vegas odds of the 2012 election on Rachel Maddow's twitter acct, and Sean Hannity's. No commentary just the tote board. Hannity deleted it.
And since as a convicted felon, OMK can't vote, none are so blind.....

[Cuchulain]

Saw an interesting article today on the CNN site:

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.


Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.co...furious-truth/

[Stavros]

Thanks for the link, Cuchulain to a fascinating article, and no surprise that it appears most of the rage over 'Fast and Furious' has been cooked up by Republicans and NRA members who want to find an issue on which to hammer Obama. But with regard to this paragraph in the article:

By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.

Is it really possible to buy 20 semiautomatics at once? Isn't there some sort of rule, even in Arizona on how many guns can be purchased in one day? (And then read the insulting email from Dodson asking his boss how does the ATF define a day -Do the orders define a 'day'? Is it; a calendar day? A business day or work day….? An Earth day (because a day on Venus takes 243 Earth days which would mean that I have plenty of time)?"

The whole thing stinks, but the bad smell on what I have read comes from the NRA and its supporters in Congress.

[onmyknees]

Here it is....
all laid out for you lib apologists and deniers in chronological, factual order from the Congressional Record. You won't see this laid out in the NY Times, or on MSNBC...but because I like you...I'll share it otherwise you'd be left ignorant...or limited in your knowledge. One or two will read it, most won't....but it really won't make much of a difference. It's much easier to parrot the racial angle with respect to Eric Holder.....a la The Congressional Black Caucus. It makes it all better and much more explainable...........doesn't it? So you're left with one of only two possible conclusions....Holder is completely incompetent, and highly forgetful, ( not admirable or redeeming qualities for the head of the Justice Department) or he's a liar. I think we're beginning to see why Obama took the extraordinary steps of invoking executive privilege to shield the documents. Funny thing is as I recall...you were all touting Julian Assange for sainthood because of his habit of leaking secret documents...now you all are not so much in favor of transparency. And remember when you cheered Special Prosecuter Fitzgerald on for 2 years to find out who leaked the name of a CIA employee ( note she was not covert). In that case, no one broke so much as a nail, including Ms. Plume, but your dogged determination for the truth stopped at nothing. Hypocrisy suits you. Yawn.





Friday, June 29, 2012

Here are the Bombshell Transcripts: Secret Wiretap Applications Prove Eric Holder Lied to Congress

In the midst of a fiery floor debate over contempt proceedings for Attorney General Eric Holder, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record.

The May 24 letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the panel, quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application that has become a point of debate in the GOP’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking probe.

The wiretap applications are under court seal, and releasing such information to the public would ordinarily be illegal. But Issa appears to be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution, which offers immunity for Congressional speech, especially on a chamber’s floor.

...the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used...

Holder and Cummings have both maintained that the wiretap applications did not contain such details and that the applications were reviewed narrowly for probable cause, not for whether any investigatory tactics contained followed Justice Department policy... The wiretap applications were signed by senior DOJ officials...

After some searching, I was able to locate the actual details in the Congressional Record, which appear on pages H4409 through H4411 of Thursday’s official register.

...The use of federal wire intercepts requires a significant amount of case-related information to be sent to senior Department officials for review and approval. All applications for federal wiretaps are authorized under the authority of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division

...A central aim of our investigation has been to find out why and how such a dangerous plan could have been conceived, approved, and implemented. Who in ATF and the Justice Department knew about the volume of guns being purchased? Who approved of the case at various stages as it unfolded? Under whose authority did this occur? Who could have—and should have—stopped it? By closely examining this disastrous program, our Committee hopes to prevent similar reckless operations...

...The Committee has obtained a copy of a Fast and Furious wiretap application, dated
March 15, 2010. The application includes a memorandum dated March 10, 2010, from Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer to Paul M. O’Brien, Director, Office of Enforcement Operations, authorizing the wiretap application on behalf of the Attorney General...

...Before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 8, 2011, the Attorney General testified:

...I don’t think the wiretap applications—I’ve not seen—I’ve not seen them. But I don’t know—I don’t have any information that indicates that those wiretap applications had anything in them that talked about the tactics that have made this such a bone of contention and have legitimately raised the concern of members of Congress, as well as those of us in the Justice Department. I—I’d be surprised if the tactics themselves about gun walking were actually contained in those—in those applications. I have not seen them, but I would be surprise[d] [if that] were the case...

..At a hearing before our Committee on February 2, 2012, the Attorney General also denied that any information relating to tactics appeared in the wiretap affidavits... He testified:

...I think, first off, there is no indication that Mr. Breuer or my former deputy were aware of the tactics that were employed in this matter until everybody I think became aware of them...

...Contrary to the Attorney General’s statements, the enclosed wiretap affidavit contains clear information that agents were willfully allowing known straw buyers to acquire firearms for drug cartels and failing to interdict them—in some cases even allowing them to walk to Mexico. In particular, the affidavit explicitly describes the most controversial tactic of all: abandoning surveillance of known straw purchasers, resulting in the failure to interdict firearms...

...MARCH 2010 WIRETAP APPLICATION STATES THE MAIN SUSPECT HAD INTENT TO ACQUIRE FIREARMS FOR THE PURPOSE OF TRANSPORTING THEM TO MEXICO...

...The affidavit acknowledges that while monitoring the DEA target telephone numbers, law enforcement officers intercepted calls that demonstrated that Target 1 was conspiring to purchase and transport firearms for the purpose of trafficking the firearms from the United States to Mexico...

...MARCH 2010 WIRETAP APPLICATION STATES THAT NEARLY 1,000 FIREARMS HAD ALREADY BEEN PURCHASED, AND THAT MANY WERE RECOVERED IN MEXICO...

...The Probable Cause section of the affidavit shows that ATF was aware that from September 2009 to March 15, 2010, Target I acquired at least 852 firearms valued at approximately $500,000 through straw purchasers...

...MARCH 2010 WIRETAP APPLICATION DESCRIBES HOW SMUGGLERS WERE BRINGING FIREARMS INTO MEXICO...

...According to the affidavit: The potential interceptees conspire with each other and others known to illegally traffic firearms to Mexico...

...The fact that ATF knew that Target 1 had acquired 852 firearms and had the present intent to move them to Mexico should have prompted Department officials to act...

...MARCH 2010 WIRETAP APPLICATION CONTAINS DETAILS OF DROPPED SURVEILLANCE...

...On December 24, 2009, Straw Purchaser Z bought even more firearms, purchasing 40
AK–47 type rifles from an FFL. All of these rifles were recovered on January 13, 2010, in El Paso, Texas, near the U.S./Mexico border. Although the individual found in possession of all these guns provided the first name of the purchaser, agents did not arrest the individual or the purchaser. Though the wiretap application states that agents were conducting surveillance of known straw purchasers, none of these weapons were interdicted. No arrests were made...

...MARCH 2010 WIRETAP DETAILS HOW FAST AND FURIOUS FIREARMS HAD BEEN FOUND AT
CRIME SCENES IN MEXICO...

...The wiretap affidavit also details the very sort ‘‘time-to-crime’’ for many of the firearms purchased during Fast nd Furious. For example, on November 6, 2009, November 12, 2009, and November 14, 2009, Straw Purchaser Y purchased a total of 25 AK–47 type firearms from an FFL in Arizona. On November 20, 2009—just eight days later—Mexican officials recovered 17 of these firearms in Naco, Sonora, Mexico. Another straw purchaser, Straw Purchaser Q, purchased a total of 17 AK–47 type firearms from an FFL on November 3, 2009, November 10, 2009, and November 12, 2009. Then, on December 9, 2009, Mexican officials recovered 11 of these firearms in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, along with approximately 421 kilograms of cocaine, 60 kilograms of methamphetamine, 48 additional firearms, 392 ammunition cartridges, $2 million in U.S. currency, and $800,000 in Mexican currency. Once again, although ATF was aware of these facts, no one was arrested, and ATF failed to even approach the straw purchasers...

...The wiretap affidavit reveals a remarkable amount of specific information about Operation Operation Fast and Furious. The affidavit reveals that the Justice Department has been misrepresenting important facts to Congress and withholding critical details about Fast and Furious from the Committee for months on end.

[Stavros]

Funny thing is as I recall...you were all touting Julian Assange for sainthood because of his habit of leaking secret documents...now you all are not so much in favor of transparency. And remember when you cheered Special Prosecuter Fitzgerald on for 2 years to find out who leaked the name of a CIA employee ( note she was not covert). In that case, no one broke so much as a nail, including Ms. Plume, but your dogged determination for the truth stopped at nothing. Hypocrisy suits you. Yawn.

1) Mrs Knees, you could have made the effort to read and respond to the article that was linked by Cuchalain which offers an wholly different interpretaton of 'Fast and Furious' and shows that Darrell Issa is an unreliable and biased politician on this issue.

2) When you write: Funny thing is as I recall...you were all touting Julian Assange for sainthood because of his habit of leaking secret documents...now you all are not so much in favor of transparency... Assange has not directly leaked anything, he is a publisher with some eccentric political views, most of them repulsive to people you claim are 'liberals'- and is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London because he doesn't want to be extradited to Sweden. Wikileaks should be more famous for its messages rather than its messengers.

3) How can someone walk into a store in Arizona and buy one or 20 a 120 weapons on one day or over a week and the store doesn't say no? Surely if you tackled the sale of arms at source through gun control, the volume of weapons purchased in the USA for use in Mexico would decline? Why are the cartels in Mexico so keen to purchase weapons in the USA when they presumably could -and probably do- buy them from other sources?

Ultimately, this issue is about gun control in the USA, and until you decide to change the law 'straw men' will be able to buy enough weapons to start a revolution and you won't be able to do much about it.

[Prospero]

Yes - few people here admire Assange as aperson. He seems a very arrogant and untrustworthy character - so don't stereotype those you don't agree with Mrs Knees (love it.
Had no idea you were female.) As Stavros says you are cnfusing the man and his publishing operation.

The issue clearly IS gun control.

[Odelay]

Bwahahahaha.... yeah I'm still laughing OMK. Sorry dude, I know you want this to be the scandal of the century but they're rebranding it as Slow and Spurious, since Obama and Holder have now been exonerated.

The report finds that Attorney General Holder was not informed of the controversial ATF operation until 2011 after the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010. “I have reviewed the Office of the Inspector General’s report on Operation Fast and Furious and the key conclusions are consistent with what I, and other Justice Department officials, have said for many months now: The inappropriate strategy and tactics employed were field-driven and date back to 2006; The leadership of the Department did not know about or authorize the use of the flawed strategy and tactics; and The Department’s leadership did not attempt to cover up information or mislead Congress about it,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

Hey, look at that... 2 black guys get off without doing any jail time for a crime they never committed.