Posted on 06/26/2012 7:14:10 PM PDT by marktwain
Ever since the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted in favor of holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt last week, the Left has been conducting a public relations push to downplay operation “Fast and Furious” and convince Americans that the failed gunrunning initiative was actually started under former President George W. Bush under the name “Wide Receiver.”
The insinuation is that Fast and Furious is somehow a continuation of the Bush-era operation. The only problem with that theory is that it’s not true.
Even White House Press Secretary Jay Carney last week attempted to shift the blame from Holder and the Obama administration and onto the Bush administration.
“Everything has been provided to — congressional investigators and that is really the issue, isn’t it? It is how did this operation come about. It originated in a field office during the previous administration. It was ended under this administration by this attorney general,” Carney said during a presser last week.
But even the laziest of fact-checks would prove his assertion wrong.
In no way does that excuse the Bush administration from allowing a poorly-planned operation to proceed. However, the differences between the two operations are stark and should be considered.
(1) First and foremost, operation Wide Receiver did not result in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent or an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer. Fast and Furious did. The guns that ultimately killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and ICE officer Jamie Zapata were traced back to straw purchasers related to Fast and Furious. Zapata’s family filed a wrongful death suit against the U.S. Justice Department last week.
Further, officials have confirmed that the guns from Fast and Furious have already killed hundreds of Mexican citizens and Holder has said on the record that they will likely kill many more. The total number of confirmed deaths so far from Wide Receiver: Zero.
(2) Second, Wide Receiver, though flawed, was more of a gun-tracing operation than a gun-walking program. Gun-tracing involves putting specific safeguards in place to track firearms, such as RFID chips perhaps with video or aerial surveillance. Gun-walking is what happened in Fast and Furious, where ATF agents sold thousands of guns without a reliable way to recover them, apparently just hoping for the best.
Some of the guns from Wide Receiver were implanted with RFID chips and were actively tracked electronically. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Phoenix also implemented aerial surveillance tactics in an attempt to follow the weapons.
However, problems reportedly arose due to poorly implanted RFID chips which were forced into the guns, bending the antennas and decreasing their effectiveness. Cartels and straw purchasers also eventually came up with creative ways to shake tracking maneuvers and overhead surveillance, such as driving in loops for hours until surveillance planes had to refuel.
Those in charge of Fast and Furious took no similar steps to strengthen their chances of recovering walked guns other than recording the serial numbers before watching them disappear in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
In fact, ATF agents involved in Fast and Furious have previously testified that they were ordered to stand down and not track the weapons even when interdiction was possible and instead “took notes” and let the guns walk across the Mexico border. Watch some of ATF whistleblower John Dodson’s Congressional testimony:
(3) Third, one must take into account the size and scope of the operations.
Speaking to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Holder said that “three hundred guns” were allowed to “walk” (although note the difference between “tracing” and “walking” above) in Wide Receiver. While there is no evidence that suggests otherwise, the figure is dwarfed by the approximately 2,000 firearms that walked in Fast and Furious. Roughly 1,400 guns were lost and about 700 have been recovered in Mexico and at crime scenes like the sites of Terry and Zapata’s murders.
(4) Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence proving the two operations are separate from each other is the fact that Wide Receiver was shut down in 2007 shortly after it was clear the program was a failure. This was before Obama was even in office and nearly two years before Fast and Furious began.
Fast and Furious wasn’t shut down until late 2010 after the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, a border agent and an ICE officer.
(5) Finally, unlike Fast and Furious, officials involved in Wide Receiver were reportedly in close contact with Mexican authorities during the operation, though how involved Mexican officials were is not entirely known.
What is known is that Mexican authorities were kept completely in the dark during Fast and Furious, according to the Mexican ambassador to the U.S. Mexico. He announced on June 1, 2012, that Mexico would be launching its own probe into Fast and Furious.
It should be perfectly clear that both the Bush and Obama administration conducted two separate, flawed operations. One, however, was a much deadlier and larger operation.
If there is evidence of wrongdoing, or false testimony related to operation Wide Receiver, those responsible should be held accountable. But the argument that Fast and Furious is all about “politics” and should just be swept under the rug because the previous administration also carried out a similar program is irresponsible.
A contempt resolution will be considered by the full House of Representatives this week. If lawmakers decide to hold the attorney general in contempt, it will be a first in U.S. history for a sitting attorney general.
Gunwalker / Murdergate ping.
H0lder needs to be sent into Mexico to apply GPS tracking devices to all of “his” guns.
snip-”Three prominent Muslim-American organizations were labeled by the federal government as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the trial-the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The documents requested by Rep. Gohmert for the past year were provided to the Holy Land Foundation’s defense team, yet are being denied to Congress.
“They are terrorists, and we wanted the documents you gave to the terrorists. We are a year later, and we still don’t have them,” complained Rep. Gohmert. Holder replied that he’d only provide what is already available publicly.
You read that right: Eric Holder and his radicalized appointees at the Department of Justice won’t disclose to Congress what they shared with terrorists.”
Previous post OT, but still “Holder offal”.
Wide receiver was a badly done attempt to track illegal guns into Mexico. Not much of a chance that it would have done any good even if it had succeeded. Mexico was kept fully informed.
Fast and Furious was a political operation breaking American, Foreign and Mexican laws with the intention of moving many guns into Mexico so that it would bolster Hillary and Obama’s claim that most Mexican guns came from the U.S.
That is something I would have assumed to be true and also of no real importance since these people were smugglers by profession and could have gotten as many as they needed.
I eventually learned that only a small percentage actually did come from the U.S. So the whole story was made up of whole cloth.
Wide Receiver was about law enforcement. Fast and Furious was about gun control. Take the obligatory knock on the Bush Administration, as pop culture requires, but it was legit, whereas the political operation undertaken by Obama’s hoodlums was a criminal misuse of our law enforcement resources. No one expects Obama and Holder, and their people to care about the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, much less the deaths of Americans. We know they are engaged in a war against the United States.
The fact that Obambi and Co. keep pointing fingers at the previous administration, as flawed as it may have been, makes them look like the children they are.
WAAH! MOMMY! HE DID IT TOO! These immature socialists point at Bush for all their problems 3 and half years later into their administration. These people are 5 year olds!
It was ended by this attorney general well before the time he admits knowing of it. The man must be a time traveler.
It used to be self-accountable adults would get nailed for their errors; admit it; apologize; make changes; and not repeat such errors. Integrity was the operating virtue.
Since clinton, it's now about deny, delay, parse, spin, re-direct, and NEVER take responsibility. Obambi has mastered those clintonian traits.
Obambi will probably be re-elected because so many can't see the difference between an adult and a child who points fingers at others, not to mention "The Cult of Personality".
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Bless you for posting this.
Why our simpleton Repub spokespeople are either not versed in these differences or just too tongue-tied to tell the public about them at every opportunity is just infuriating!!! The Dems never miss a chance in the media to repeat the lies, blaming this criminal fiasco on Bush.
Catching up ping.
Remember, everything the Republicans say is filtered through the MSM. The MSM controls what they let out. I recall during the government shutdown showdown between Clinton and the House, that I was fairly screaming at the Republicans for not getting their story out. Then I happened to see Newt give a speech on C-Span. It was magnificent. It nailed the Democrats. I was convinced that if only most Americans had seen it, they would have understood that it was Clinton that was shutting down the government for political purposes.
But, most Americans did not see it. The MSM simply refused to let the Republicans get their points out. I once thought the same about the NRA, then I asked an NRA administrator, high up in the organization, why they did not *buy* air time. He said, they tried repeatedly, but the MSM would not sell them time.
The CBC will be so glad to hear this as someone wrongly fed them false information. I expect to see them on the House floor, recanting the speeches they made today.....not.
“But, most Americans did not see it. The MSM simply refused to let the Republicans get their points out. I once thought the same about the NRA, then I asked an NRA administrator, high up in the organization, why they did not *buy* air time. He said, they tried repeatedly, but the MSM would not sell them time.”
VERY good point! I wasn’t aware of the NRA part, but it’s something I’ve long suspected in general about much (if not most) of MSM refusing to sell air time to anyone they disagree with.
I, too, am a big cspan watcher. But how disheartening that SO many voters (!) not only aren’t, but watch any other network for “news” (if they watch news at ALL) besides Fox News - I know, I know - we’re often displeased with much of FNC but it STILL covers stories the other alphabet networks won’t, it does have both sides of arguments going at it and it has a few relentless blasters of BHO on nightly. And I was MOST impressed on Hannity tonight to hear Steven Crowder on Hannity’s panel to have the incredible guts to passionately cite facts on how the Koran and Islam is a huge problem, despite shocking Pat Caddell :-) He was refuting the “religion of peace” argument after a video interview with a Jew-hating Muslim. SC compared Jesus to Muhammad and stood his ground despite PC’s protestations and the female panelist’s astonishment.
Sorry to digress, but FNC’s still the best we’ve got on TV in that category.
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