Posted on 05/05/2011 5:45:24 AM PDT by marktwain
CBS News is reporting that documents obtained by Congressional investigators looking into the Project Gunrunner scandal include a wiretap authorization from Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer dated in March 2010.
Read the CBS story by investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson here.
Also included in documents released by investigators is a January 8, 2010 “briefing paper” on Project Gunrunner from the Phoenix, AZ field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The documents were released earlier today as the Senate Judiciary Committee convened for an oversight hearing on the Department of Justice.
One document indicates a Holder Asst. Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, authorized a wiretap in the controversial gun trafficking case headquartered in Phoenix. In that case, called "Fast and Furious," multiple sources say ATF allowed thousands of guns to hit the streets, destined for Mexican drug cartels.—CBS News
As reported by this column today, Attorney General Eric Holder professed considerable lack of knowledge about the Gunrunner operation, and its links to the slaying of Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry last December. That prompted the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms to call for Holder’s resignation.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Watch for AG Holder to do a remarkable Sgt. Schultz impersonation.
Treason, per definition in the Constitution itself, might be a bit of a stretch, although I myself consider 'waging war' against the Bill of Rights to be 'waging war against the United States'. We may have trouble getting a court to agree to that premise.
Fortunately, the RICO act could be used, and since the BP agent *was* murdered, then any, and *all* involved in the conspiracy are opened up to a possible death sentence for their part in this conspiracy...
the infowarrior
Why do Hollywood studios do that? Create movie posters where the names of the stars are always in close proximity to the characters in the marquee—but they rarely match the actor’s name to the character they play correctly???
Is Lanny Bruer married to that odious Anita Dunn?
No, Dunn’s married to Robert Bauer.
Authorities try to keep guns from drug cartels - USATODAY.com
Updated 12/10/2008 11:15
U.S., Mexican and Columbian officials are taking new steps to stop U.S.-based gun-smuggling networks that arm violent Mexican drug cartels with guns, like these seized AK-47 assault rifles seen here.
By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY
[snip]
….. [DEA Intelligence Chief Tony Placido] says the "vast majority of guns" seized at Mexican crime sites come from the USA.
Violent crimes in Mexico have jumped 116% since last year, Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora says.
"The Second Amendment allows U.S. citizens to bear arms. The amendment was never meant to arm foreign criminal groups," he says. He adds that Mexican criminals take advantage of looser U.S. gun laws.
[snip]
Mexico's strict gun control laws make it nearly impossible for anyone who's not an officer to buy a gun legally, says William Newell, who heads the Phoenix field division for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Drug cartels set up networks in the USA to buy guns and smuggle them to Mexico, he says.
[snip]
About 95% of the guns recovered and traced in Mexico come from the USA, Newell says. Recent data show a surge in seizures of .50-caliber guns that can pierce armored cars.
Clinton: Mexico Violence Could "Mushroom" - The Early Show - CBS News
Secretary Of State Tells CBS News War On Border May Escalate If Arms, Drugs Trafficking Not Stopped
(CBS) CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports that the U.S. Secretary of State came to Mexico this week with a very deliberate message: that America is partly to blame for Mexico's crime wave and the war against the drug cartels.
"We have to recognize and accept that the demand for drugs from the United States drives them north," Clinton told Logan, "and the guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military - 90 percent of them come from America."
[excerpt]
The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S. - FoxNews.com
By William La Jeunesse
Published April 02, 2009 | FOXNews.com
EXCLUSIVE: You've heard this shocking "fact" before -- on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.
-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.
-- CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.
-- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ... come from the United States."
-- William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."
There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:
[snip]
In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.
What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S.
[excerpt]
The above articles are a sampling of sources used by the Obama Propogada Machine FACTCHECK (posting the entire article because it completely frames the why)
Counting Mexico’s Guns | FactCheck.org
Counting Mexico’s Guns
President Obama says 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns come from the U.S. That's not what the statistics show.
April 17, 2009
Corrected: April 22, 2009 Summary
There’s no dispute that thousands of handguns, military-style rifles and other firearms are purchased in the U.S. and end up in the hands of Mexican criminals each year. It’s relatively easy to buy such guns legally in Texas and other border states and to smuggle them across.
But is it true, as President Obama said, that "[m]ore than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States?" Government statistics don’t actually support that claim.
The figure represents only the percentage of crime guns that have been submitted by Mexican officials and traced by U.S. officials. We can find no hard data on the total number of guns actually "recovered in Mexico," but U.S. and Mexican officials both say that Mexico recovers more guns than it submits for tracing. Therefore, the percentage of guns "recovered" that are traced to U.S. sources necessarily is less than 90 percent. Where do the others come from? U.S. officials can’t say.
Fox News has put the percentage of guns that have been traced to U.S. sources at only 17 percent, but we find that to be based on a mistaken assumption that throws its figure way off. We can’t offer a precise calculation because we know of no hard information on the total number of guns Mexican officials have recovered. But if a rough figure given by Mexico’s attorney general is accurate, then the actual percentage of all Mexican crime guns that have been traced to U.S. sources is more than double what Fox News has reported.
Correction, April 22: We originally concluded that Obama’s 90 percent figure was “not true” and based on a “badly biased” sample of recovered guns. We are retracting both those characterizations, and we apologize to our readers for this error. We have rewritten the article throughout to correct this.
Our error was to think we had confirmed that Mexican officials submit for tracing only those guns they believe likely to have come from the U.S. Law enforcement officials say they don’t know if that’s the case.
Analysis
In recent weeks, efforts by the United States and Mexico to stop the illegal transfer of guns and drugs along their shared border have been on the front burner. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to Mexico earlier this month to meet with their Mexican counterparts to discuss what can be done. And this week President Barack Obama traveled down south to continue talks between the two nations.
During a joint press conference with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Obama said of the raging violence by Mexican drug gangs:
Obama, April 16: A demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.
Obama would have been correct to say that 90 percent of the guns submitted for tracing by Mexican authorities were then traced to the U.S. The percentage of all recovered guns that came from the U.S. is unknown.
The 90% Claim
The president isn’t the first to make this mistaken claim; far from it. During an interview on CBS’ "Early Show" on March 26, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "We have to recognize and accept that the demand for drugs from the United States drives them north, and the guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90 percent of them come from America."
The 90 percent figure was similarly cited by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) during a March 17 congressional hearing on the subject. Durbin said: "According to ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], more than 90 percent of the guns seized after raids or shootings in Mexico have been traced right here to the United States of America." Feinstein added: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico used to shoot judges, police officers, mayors, kidnap innocent people and do terrible things come from the United States, and I think we must put a stop to that."
And it’s been reported by a phalanx of news organizations, including the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, NBC and the Chicago Tribune, that 90 percent of Mexico’s recovered guns come from the U.S.
Mexican authorities have made the same error: On CBS’ "Face the Nation" on April 12, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said: "Ninety percent of all weapons we are seizing in Mexico, Bob, are coming from across the United States."
Most who have used the statistic attribute it to ATF. Others attribute the figure to officials within the Mexican government. But that’s not correct.
Without A "Trace"
In a joint statement presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crimes and Drugs, ATF Assistant Director for Field Operations William Hoover and Anthony Placido, assistant administrator of intelligence with the Drug Enforcement Administration, clarified that the 90 percent figure is true of guns that were submitted and could be traced:
Hoover and Placido, March 17, 2009: Firearms are routinely being transported from the U.S. into Mexico in violation of both U.S. and Mexican law. In fact, according to ATF’s National Tracing Center, 90 percent of the weapons that could be traced were determined to have originated from various sources within the U.S.
And Mexico recovers a lot more guns than it submits to the U.S. In December 2008, Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora put the number of recovered crime weapons in the country over the past two years at nearly 29,000, according to USA Today. And figures given by ATF make clear that the agency doesn’t trace nearly all of those.
According to ATF, Mexico submitted 7,743 firearms for tracing in fiscal year 2008 (which ended Oct. 1) and 3,312 guns in fiscal 2007. That adds up to a fraction of the two-year total given by Mexico’s attorney general. He may be referring to a slightly different 24-month period, but that can’t account for more than a part of the discrepancy. The number is growing, and already this year, Mexico has submitted more than 7,500 guns for tracing, according to ATF. But even if all those guns are added in, the total submitted for tracing since the start of fiscal 2007 doesn’t come close to the 29,000 figure that Mexico says it has recovered.
The Myth of 17 Percent
According to a Fox News report, titled "The Myth of 90 Percent," only "17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S." But the 17 percent figure is a myth, too. The reporters made some mistaken assumptions about how many guns had actually been traced to U.S. sources.
Fox News reporters William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott note, quite correctly, that Mexico doesn’t submit all the guns it recovers to the U.S. for tracing. Furthermore, Fox News reported, this is "because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S." And it quoted a law enforcement official as to why:
Fox News, April 2: "Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.
If that’s true, then the guns given to ATF for tracing constitute a badly biased sample of all crime guns seized in Mexico. But the ATF officials we contacted don’t confirm that. What an ATF spokesperson would say is that the agency could trace more than 90 percent of all the guns submitted by Mexico to the U.S. – they either originated in this country or were imported here before heading south.
However that may be, the Fox figure of 17 percent is based on a misreading of some confusing House subcommittee testimony by ATF official William Newell. The Fox reporters come up with a figure of 5,114 guns traced to U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 2008. That figures to 17.6 percent of the 29,000 figure for guns seized in Mexico, as given by the country’s attorney general.
The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: "3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008." Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell’s testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico’s attorney general is correct.
Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.
The mistake the Fox News reporters made was to focus on some numbers given by Newell and Hoover in separate testimony, regarding numbers of guns traced to specific states. But not all guns traced to the U.S. can be traced to specific states. The Fox numbers are "a subset" of the actual total traced to U.S. sources, one official said.
An Elusive Number
Given the lack of hard data from Mexico, we can’t calculate a precise figure for what portion of crime guns have been traced to the U.S. Based on the best evidence we can find so far, we conclude that the 90 percent claim made by the president and others in his administration lacks a basis in solid fact. But we also conclude that the number is at least double what Fox News has reported, based on its reporters’ mistaken interpretation of ATF testimony.
Whether the number is 90 percent, or 36 percent, or something else, there’s no dispute that thousands of guns are being illegalIy transported into Mexico by way of the United States each year.
– by D’Angelo Gore
[complete list of sources for this article can be found at link]
When President Obama took office there was a renewed push to renew the ban on assault weapons which” Bush and Cheney stubbornly refuse to renew." (Kerry Camoaign 2004)
(from wiki)
Urban policy agenda of President Obama
Shortly after the November 4, 2008 election, Change.gov, the website of the office of then President-Elect Barack Obama, listed a detailed agenda for the forthcoming administration. This includes "making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent."[16] This statement was originally published on Barack Obama's campaign website, BarackObama.com.[17] When President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the agenda statement was moved to the administration's website, WhiteHouse.gov, with its wording intact.[18][19]
On February 25, 2009, the newly sworn-in Attorney General, Eric Holder, repeated the Obama Administration's desire to reinstate the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.[20] The mention came in response to a question, about 20 minutes into to a joint press conference with DEA Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart, discussing efforts to crack down on Mexican drug cartels. Attorney General Holder said: "[...] there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons."[21]
However on April 16, 2009, President Obama stated that he will not push for the reinstatement of the Assault Weapons Ban in the United States even though he still believes that it "made sense". Obama has proposed instead to ratify an inter-American treaty known as CIFTA (Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials) to curb international small arms trafficking. The treaty makes the unauthorized manufacture and export of firearms illegal and calls for nations in this hemisphere to establish a process for information-sharing among different countries' law enforcement divisions to stop the smuggling of arms, to adopt strict licensing requirements, and to make firearms easier to trace.[22]
(excerpt)
So when did Operation Fast & Furious start?
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) used asked Holder when first knew about the controversial Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) operation known as "Fast and Furious." Though documents indicate Fast and Furious was started in 2009, Holder told Congress he only learned of it a "few weeks" ago.
IMO, Fast & Furious had nothing to do with drug cartel violence, but a tool to help renew the ban on assault weapons. Fast & Furious was politicala political operation. One of two options are probable:
1. The President’s reversal on the renewal of the assaut weapons ban was part of a dog & pony show meant to give him cover for Fast & Furious of which he had full knowledge.
2. Holder was so disturbed by the President’s reversal he started this program as a way of gathering the proof needed for the 90% number
Either way, the end game had everything to do with the war on the 2nd Amendment. The left’s wet dream is to disarm the citizens in this country.
Possibly. I hope so
Assuredly not! The only thing that *might* concern them is that the internal strife of the US caught in a Civil War might reduce the demand for their drugs to nil... on the other hand, it may also boost demand as people seek them for to indulge in escapism.
Thanks.
I trust the Devil more.
Yep. That’s about the size of it.
My gut feeling is that they wanted the guns to start showing up at crimes in the U.S. as a prelude to a larger gun registration/confiscation plan.
i watched most of the congressional hearings on C-Span when Eric Holder testified before congress > this issue was center-stage for me and during questioning about this, Holder contradicted himself (lied) and was called out in that gentle republican way. He looked like that perennial deer caught by the headlight.
You can probably find the testimony on CSpan
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