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Wide Receiver vs. Fast and Furious
Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | June 22, 2012 | Rush Limbaugh

Posted on 06/22/2012 12:16:02 PM PDT by Kaslin

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I'll tell you something else, folks, if I were Hispanic, you know what would really trouble me? To learn that the President of the United States had allowed assault weapons to be walked across the border to drug cartels and used to slaughter hundreds of Mexicans. If I were Hispanic, that would really tick me off.

"Holder lied, Mexicans died."

We had a call at the end of the program yesterday from a woman who kept hearing that Democrats are blaming Bush for Fast and Furious. Speaking of which, you know how the Democrats hate guns, you know how the media hates guns. I mean, they laugh at, they make fun of people who hunt. John Kerry in the '04 campaign going to some tackle and bait shop in Ohio and saying, "Is this where I get me a huntin' license?" Come on.

So they hate it. The liberals, including in the media, hate it. And yet here we have a total lack of interest about Fast and Furious. No moral outrage at all. Wouldn't you think that giving semi-automatic weapons to drug lords who use them to kill hundreds of Mexicans, and at least one American border agent, wouldn't you think that would tick off people in this country who don't like guns? Wouldn't you think that would tick the media off? Wouldn't you think that's even more of a crime than sprinkling water up the noses of mass murdering terrorists? If you have a problem with waterboarding, then how could you not have a problem with this?

Well, it's clear. The media, they're going to circle the wagons and they're going to protect this president no matter what. It doesn't matter how much of their core beliefs they have to compromise, it doesn't matter. We have a one-party news media too busy remembering Watergate. They can't get over Watergate. They're all a bunch of Woodward and Bernsteins in the press corps, and they want to go back and relive Watergate 40 years ago. That's what this is giving them an opportunity to do. Obama invokes executive privilege and they start doing retrospectives on Nixon and Watergate 40 years ago, too busy to bother looking into the Obama regime cover-up of Fast and Furious.

We had a call late in the program yesterday from a woman who wanted to know what the difference was, because Democrats keep saying that Bush started a program. Jay Carney is saying it, they're all saying that Bush started this program. Bush did have a program like this. It was called Wide Receiver. And I told you yesterday that I was going to explain to you the differences today in Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, and they're significant and they're profound. Wide Receiver was a small scale law enforcement gun smuggling interdiction effort that involved Phoenix -- I mistakenly said Tucson yesterday -- involved Phoenix-based ATF agents working in conjunction with Mexican law enforcement. ATF supervisors and justice department prosecutors in Arizona were trying to build a case against a violent group of Mexican drug smugglers. Fast and Furious was an effort to build a case against American gun dealers and the Second Amendment. That's the stark difference.

Wide Receiver was an attempt to build a case against gun smugglers and the drug cartels, to find out who they were, where they are. The purpose of Fast and Furious was to build a case against the Second Amendment. In a nutshell, Wide Receiver began in 2005. It involved four hundred guns. All of the weapons in Wide Receiver had RFID trackers installed in them, and they were actively tracked. Only the Phoenix ATF and DOJ were involved. The Mexican government was kept fully informed. They were an active participant. In Wide Receiver, the ATF agents tried to track the guns using radio devices and aircraft. They wanted to find out where the guns ended up, into the hands of which cartels and where they were, so that a case could be made. It was an effort to track these people to find them, locate them.

The Bush administration, as part of Wide Receiver, notified the Mexican government when arms and drug smugglers were crossing. When the guns were being walked across the border or when they had been purchased legally, being taken back to Mexico, the Mexican government was notified. At least 1,400 arrests were made as part of Wide Receiver. Now, once ATF found out the smugglers were disabling the tracking devices, the RFID tracking devices that were planted in the guns, they ripped them out and then the guns were lost. So the program was shut down in October of 2007. Once the bad guys discovered the tracking devices, the program was ended, in 2007. Ended.

Now, here's Fast and Furious by contrast. Fast and Furious began in October of 2009. Obama is in his tenth month. Wide Receiver doesn't exist. It'd been shut down for two years. Fast and Furious involved over 2,000 guns. Wide Receiver was 1,400 guns. Roughly. No tracking devices were planted in the Fast and Furious guns. The regime didn't care where they ended up. There were no tracking devices. No effort was made to track them. No helicopters. There was no on-the-ground surveillance of the straw purchasers. None of it. The guns were sold, they were walked across the border, and that was it. Four federal agencies were involved in maybe as many as 10 cities in five states.

In contrast to Wide Receiver, the Mexican government was not notified the program even existed. They did not use tracking devices or aircraft to try to find and track the smugglers. The local ATF field agents were ordered not to follow the straw purchasers. Fast and Furious is as bad as everything you have conjured it to be in your mind. Wide Receiver has nothing in common, other than guns crossing the border. That's it. Federal agents, furthermore -- are you following all this, Snerdley? -- federal agents were not allowed to interdict the guns and they even ran interference for the smugglers with local law enforcement on multiple occasions to make sure those guns made it across the border.

No effort was ever made to arrest the straw purchasers, the smugglers, by local law enforcement or anybody else. And none were arrested. The program was closed down only after the deaths of at least 200 Mexican civilians and two federal agents, border agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata, were linked to the smuggled weapons. Now, it is important to understand that Wide Receiver had been tried and it had clearly failed before Obama's team decided to undertake Fast and Furious.

Fast and Furious used many more guns. They didn't track them. They didn't try to stop or interdict the guns. They knew that they were going to end up in Mexican drug cartel hands, which is what they wanted to happen. To me, it's almost an inescapable conclusion that they wanted to put American guns, American purchased guns -- the guns were not stolen, they were purchased at gun shops, and then the straw purchasers working for the drug cartels were allowed to take them across the border.

As I said earlier, local law enforcement was shoved out of the way if it tried to get in the way and stop this. So it looks to me like they wanted to put American-bought guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels in order to outrage the American public so that you, upon hearing of all this mayhem, would finally understand that our government laws are too lax and need to be tightened down. Particularly on these kinds of guns, assault weapons, because this had failed in Congress.

The assault weapons ban had failed, and that's not good enough for Obama and Holder and the rest of the Democrats who don't want you having guns. This was a way to change your mind. They created crimes. They facilitated the creation of crimes. There were two hundred Mexican deaths at the hands of drug cartels. You could not escape what was going to happen here. In fact, it was just the opposite. You had to know, if you were the regime, what was going to happen -- and you had to want it to happen.

Again, that is quite different from the goal of Wide Receiver. Remember the objective of the Bush plan, Wide Receiver, was the authorities wanted to build a case against the local drug cartels in order to put them out of business. It was a risky move, anyway. You allow guns to cross the border so you can track them. You find out where they go, find out where the cartel's headquarters are and what-all is happening. It was a risky thing to do. They shut it down. When the tracking devices and the guns were found, they shut the program down.

There were no tracking devices of Obama's guns.

There was no effort to find out where they went.

And Holder has lied so much about it. (summarized) "Oh, I didn't know about the program. When I came into office it was already underway. Nobody told me about it in months." It was dead! It died in 2007. There were two dormant years between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious. Wide Receiver was a sting operation. There doesn't seem to be any plan for any kind of a sting in Fast and Furious, at least not against the gun smugglers.

As I say, the simplest way to understand this is the Bush administration was trying to build a case (along with the Mexican government) against a violent group of Mexican drug smugglers. Fast and Furious was an effort to build a case against the Second Amendment and American gun dealers. Because after all, if Fast and Furious worked the way the regime wanted it to, guess who is in the crosshairs? The people selling these guns (in Arizona and elsewhere) that ended up in the hands of the drug cartel.

Don't think that wasn't part of the plan, either. So now, whatever documentation there is on this is under protection of executive privilege. It's got to be pretty bad. Whatever is in there, Obama has to be very worried about it -- and that's why he's hiding it. So the question here must always be: "What's Obama hiding?" And Dick Morris said a couple days ago that it must be pretty bad to bring this up now. Because Fast and Furious, before Wednesday of this week, everybody laughed at it. Other than us.

But the mainstream media and the Democrats laughed at it. They thought it was nothing more than a branch office of the birthers, a bunch of conspiracy kooks. But now? "My gosh! This is so big that the president has invoked executive privilege. What's in there?" In 2007, when the Bush administration closed down Wide Receiver, they said: Never again. My guess is that somebody in the Obama regime discovered this program, thought it was cool, and thought it might serve a different purpose.

And it's heinous.

It's heinous what they did.

END TRANSCRIPT


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Government
KEYWORDS: 2deadfeds; 300deadmexicans; atf; banglist; brianterry; dea; dhs; doj; ericholder; fastandfurious; fbi; gunrunner; gunwalker; holder; ice; jaimezapata; murdergate; obama; terry; zapata
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To: Kaslin

I used the shortened name for Wikipedia, not Wikileaks.


41 posted on 06/22/2012 2:59:07 PM PDT by bcsco
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To: dragnet2

None of your damned business where I’ve been. I’ve answered. Get lost.


42 posted on 06/22/2012 3:00:05 PM PDT by bcsco
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To: Kaslin
Post the entire thing next time Ms.

I don't care how ya chop it up, or who did it, sending weapons in the violent corrupt black hole of Mexico was an insane idea.

BTW, I'd like to see Obama removed from office, prosecuted and imprisoned over F&F.

43 posted on 06/22/2012 3:01:27 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: bcsco
No, I don’t deny guns were lost in Wide Receiver.

Then why did you allege doubt or attempt to discredit multiple sources?

I had one guy up thread suggesting/implying I was a liar, saying in caps, "NONE OF THE GUNS IN OPERATION WIDE RECEIVER NEVER MADE IT INTO MEXICO? (See post#21)

Who's the real liar or the one who is completely uninformed here?

44 posted on 06/22/2012 3:07:20 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: Kaslin

But Jamie Zapata, who was investigating F&F, was murdered in Mexico in Feb 2011 . Gun smuggled through Texas branch of the “project” killed him, So even if the AZ segment was stopped other part of the country continued it.


45 posted on 06/22/2012 3:07:58 PM PDT by hoosiermama ( Obama: " born in Kenya.".. he's lying now or then?)
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To: bcsco

I know wiki is the shortened name for Wikipedia, but I didn’t see anyone posting something from that site on this thread


46 posted on 06/22/2012 3:10:09 PM PDT by Kaslin (Acronym for OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America)
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To: opentalk

“F & F was shut down only after the death of a border agent.”

IMHO, F&F was stopped because word about it got out, not so much because of Terry’s death. Someone got PO’d.


47 posted on 06/22/2012 3:12:42 PM PDT by combat_boots (The Lion of Judah cometh. Hallelujah. Gloria Patri, Filio et Spiritui Sancto.)
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To: Kaslin

The information posted in post #26, the post I replied to, came from Wikipedia.


48 posted on 06/22/2012 3:15:03 PM PDT by bcsco
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To: hoosiermama; Kaslin
But Jamie Zapata, who was investigating F&F, was murdered in Mexico in Feb 2011 . Gun smuggled through Texas branch of the “project” killed him, So even if the AZ segment was stopped other part of the country continued it.

Yes, and it's sad that a lot of attention is given to Brian Terry and his family (and rightly so), yet Jamie and his family are only mentioned occasionally. Both deserve a full and complete accounting from this administration.

49 posted on 06/22/2012 3:19:06 PM PDT by bcsco
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To: Kaslin; bcsco

Perhaps you should read this.

And there are more sources.

_______________________________________________________

Regarding William Bill Newell, Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Field Division and Federal Firearms Licensee, Mike Detty, owner of Mad Dawg Global Marketing and a confidential informant for the Tuscon ATF office

“I first heard of Fast & Furious back in spring of 2010 - though its code name was not mentioned. A field agent told me, “I have no idea on why they are letting so many guns go to Mexico or what they are hoping to do with the information but it makes your case look like small fry,” he said referring to the 450 guns that were allowed to walk over the border in Wide Receiver.”

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/11/ssi-exclusive-atf-washington-post.html


50 posted on 06/22/2012 3:25:32 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: NEMDF

You are welcome but it should not surprise anyone that the lame steam media is not interested


51 posted on 06/22/2012 3:25:59 PM PDT by Kaslin (Acronym for OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America)
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To: CodeToad
Either you haven’t read THAT NONE OF THE GUNS IN OPERATION WIDE RECEIVER NEVER MADE IT INTO MEXICO, our you are a liar trying to bash Bush. Which is it?

It's amazing what some of you people will do and say.

BTW, ya want to show us all a link/source for that?

52 posted on 06/22/2012 3:29:08 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: dragnet2
Bush did it, is getting old.

Bush is not in office. Imagine if the next post-Obama administration uses what Obama has done to set the bar. (WR is not F&F)

53 posted on 06/22/2012 3:40:53 PM PDT by opentalk
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To: dragnet2
From your link in Humanevents.com

1. Wide Receiver was less than one-quarter the size of Fast and Furious, involving about 500 guns. About 450 guns made it across the border into Mexico. Not only was Fast and Furious much larger, but it was only one of several gun walking operations launched by the Obama Administration. In fact, intrepid CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says she has “found allegations of gun walking in at least 10 cities in five states.”

2. Unlike the Obama Administration programs, there actually was a serious attempt made to track the Wide Receiver weapons. Some of them were fitted with radio tracking devices. The cartel gun buyers figured out how to defeat the tracking system by driving around in circles, until the tracking planes ran out of fuel and were forced to return to base. Also, some of the tracking devices were damaged when ATF agents improperly inserted them into the guns.

By contrast, one of the signature features of Obama gun walking is that absolutely no effort to track the guns was ever in place. ATF agents have testified they were expressly ordered to stand down when they tried to follow the cartel straw purchasers. Whatever mistakes were made in Operation Wide Receiver, there’s no way to argue that Operation Fast and Furious was not much worse… because they should have learned from what happened in Wide Receiver.

3. And by “they” I mean “Special Agent In Charge Bill Newell.” That’s right – the same Phoenix ATF supervisor who became famous during the investigation of Fast and Furious was involved with Operation Wide Receiver. He’s also the ATF agent that originally told Congress that he mentioned gun walking in a roundabout way to his old buddy Kevin O’Reilly of the White House national security staff, who he communicates with maybe three or four times a year… only to be exposed as a liar when the same document dump that put AG Holder in jeopardy of perjury charges revealed a constant stream of emails between Newell and O’Reilly, lasting over a month.

4. Operation Wide Receiver was, by all accounts, shut down after its weapons dropped off the grid, and the ATF realized it had blundered. Operation Fast and Furious was only shut down because two of its weapons were discovered at the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. According to congressional testimony, the Terry shooting - along with the mistaken suspicion that Tucson mass murderer Jared Loughner might have been packing a Fast and Furious gun – panicked top ATF brass into halting its gun walking operations.

5. The Obama Justice Department cobbled together significant inter-agency co-operation for its huge gun walking programs. As Kurt Hofmann of the Gun Rights Examiner notes, “At this point, we don’t seem to have any evidence that earlier ‘gunwalking’ involved the FBI, the DEA, DHS, the State Department, the IRS, and even the White House Security Council.”

6. And, of course, there was no massive cover-up of Wide Receiver. No senior Administration officials committed perjury to distance themselves from it. The ATF was not exactly advertising the existence of the operation, or its unhappy conclusion, but that’s very different from the thick stone wall Obama and his people tried to build around their far larger and deadlier operations.

54 posted on 06/22/2012 3:48:36 PM PDT by Kaslin (Acronym for OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America)
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To: hoosiermama

Yeah I know, but I could not remember the name of of the agent. I figured someone would. Thanks for posting


55 posted on 06/22/2012 4:08:41 PM PDT by Kaslin (Acronym for OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America)
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To: bcsco

I realized it after rereading the post and taking a closer look at it.


56 posted on 06/22/2012 4:15:24 PM PDT by Kaslin (Acronym for OBAMA: One Big Ass Mistake America)
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To: bcsco; Kaslin
As we were gathering information yesterday the thought: Congress hasn't mentioned Zapata case because they know the material requested will blow everything wide open in that case. OTOH the two branches AZ and TX are too similar not to be connected at the root who in this case is at the top not at the bottom. IF Terry's murder was a set up by an Informer, then I'd bet the farm that Zapata was also arranged. The root just never thought they'd be called on it......After all a community organizer from Chicago that organized in the same territory ElRukn plied their trade of drugs, male and female prostitution and murder for hire, I'm sure understands how those things are done.........
57 posted on 06/22/2012 4:16:02 PM PDT by hoosiermama ( Obama: " born in Kenya.".. he's lying now or then?)
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To: Kaslin
Maybe you should read your own thread.

My point was guns were sent into the corrupt black hole of Mexico by *two* administrations. Then I had the guy in room#21 basically calls me a liar and says in caps:

"""Either you haven’t read THAT NONE OF THE GUNS IN OPERATION WIDE RECEIVER NEVER MADE IT INTO MEXICO, our you are a liar trying to bash Bush. Which is it?"""

We all know F&F was worse, but as you know, that wasn't my point.

Read back.

58 posted on 06/22/2012 4:18:53 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: Kaslin
This was totally excellent.

I'd like to see a full article on this,with sources. Anybody know where that can be found? The facts are probably all on Sipsey, but a direct comparison in one article, with sources cited, I have not yet seen. Please,,,SOMEBODY.....do this!

59 posted on 06/22/2012 4:26:21 PM PDT by cookcounty ("We're all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young." -J Goldberg)
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To: Kaslin
Then, if that wasn't enough, the guy in room #21 after calling me uninformed and or a liar, never even bothered to respond back, apologize....Nothing, after being told he was incorrect...

Ya didn't notice that Kaslin?

60 posted on 06/22/2012 4:28:02 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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