On a hot summer night not well suited for sleeping, I spent the late night, early morning hours downstairs where the air conditioning is watching the rebroadcast of the Congressional hearing into the Contempt charges of Eric Holder.
This is a simple case of the Obama administration witholding evidence that Congress asked for as they continue to investigate the ATF’s actions in the operation now called “Fast and Furious”. An order to produce documents was given in Oct, 2011 and those documents where not handed over. It’s that simple. The deadline for turning over those documents was up almost 8 months ago which is the basis of the contempt charges now filed against Attorney General Eric Holder. Who IS in contempt of congress.
It’s important that we realize what it is that is taking place. But more important is the sickening background of the entire affairs of the Fast and Furious from day one.
A quick background for those who still seek an understanding. The ATF for many years dating back several administrations, run illegal guns programs to criminals. They use legal gun dealers to sell criminals and illegal gun runners illegal guns, assualt riffles, machine guns, small arms.. ect. in mass quantity. The idea is to track those weapons and collect them again as they are used to commit crimes or in drug deals, sometimes they are confinscated in raids of crime families and drug cartels. The problem is, many times a crime has been cimmitted as they get them back and since they are weapons, generally people are killed by them just before they recover them. They wait till they are used.. If they in fact don’t lose their wearabouts to begin with. Which is the case in the Fast and Furious. They know where they last saw them because they sold them to the criminals to begin with. They know where a particular gun ended up, because they recovered it. What they are trying to learn and piece together is how that weapon got from person A to person B. Build the chain of travels to get infrastructure and criminal activity data for conspiracy charges. Not that anyone has been charged with conspiracy.. Well aside of the Obama administration.
So what happened and why does it matter? Well, A US border patrol guard was shot in a gunfight with drug trafficers and lord and behold a weapon sold to drug trafficers by the ATF was recovered and balistics showed it was the weapon that killed one of our own Mexican border guards. It needs to be noted here that these programs of gun tracking target other nations outside of our own. In the Fast and Furious case it was 2000 weapons give or take when you listen to Congress and as low as 1608 when you read other sources. The number of weapons isn’t all that important and we can reffer to it as “over $1 Million worth of firearms” all sold and turned lose on the Mexican streets. Mexico has issued a statement claiming that 300 Mexican citizens have been killed with the firearms sold by the ATF in Fast and Furious.
Some key notes to the matter. Operation Wide Reciever run under Goerge Bush was a similar ATF operation in the fact that it sold guns to criminals in Mexico and collected data as they guns moved about. Wide Reciever was a joint operation done with the help of the Mexican government and we put a reported 600 weapons into the hands of Mexican criminals and tracked their movement. For the most part, we knew and the Mexican government knew who, what, where and when the guns moved as they moved. Under the Obama administration no such cooperation was used. Not a lot of people even knew that Fast and Furious was taking place, even less knew once a US citizen was shot and killed. All of the sudden, nobody knows nothing. Eric Holder denied knowing, ATF denied involvment outside of a “collective knowledge” of Fast and Furious. President Obama knew nothing, even though he now claims executive privileges on the documents Congress seeks. If these people really knew nothing, then what are they hiding from?
Which is the basis of the Congressional Contempt charge. The documents they seek show who knew what and when they knew it. This isn’t a matter of declassifing sensative documents. It’s a matter of emails and inter-office communications. It’s the un-intentional conspiracy that the ATF didn’t want to record but did. Their own chain of command and the conspiriters that lead to 300 Mexican’s deaths and 1 US Border Patrols death.
It’s a cover-up by the Obama administration of the facts related to the events subject to a congressional hearing. But it gets worse.. much worse.
U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry lost his life protecting our nation and the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defending the actions of President Barack Obama and A.G. Eric Holder didn’t even know the mans name. During the proceedings that resulted in a Contempt of Congress charge on Eric Holder the 16 Democrats in those proceedings voted lockstep for all proposed amendments to the charges eventually charged to Eric Holder. They wanted the Bush administration put under the same review as the Obama administration even though the entire Operation Fast and Furious was started in 2009. They want to claim that the proir Operation Wide Reciever was in fact Operation Fast and Furious. They say it’s one in the same with a new name and want to investigate the entire ATF operation. (from what i gathered) Which is all fine and good, but this isn’t about a hearing into the operations of the ATF, it’s about the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and they had to be reminded of that fact several times during the contempt vote. While the GOP fights to seek justice for a murdered man by criminals armed by the ATF, Democrats are more worried about the loss of elections and protecting their own.
Nobody is talking about the strain this F&F operation has put on our relations with Mexico. Who too have learned of the secret operations Obama and Holder have run under their noses. The lack of cooperation the Obama administration has offered and respect given them. Does this kind of operation and policy foster trust and working relationships with other nations? Give me one reason why the Mexican government should trust the United States now that they know we planted 2000 weapons into the hands of their criminals behind their backs.
And what of the Democrats refusal to work together to close our border to Mexico? Doesn’t all this sneaky mess stem from their bleeding heart lefts fighting of any and all restrains on boder crossing? Don’t they kinda own the fact that so many Mexicans are concentrated on our border lines and crossing them? Would Brian Terry be alive today if we did as other countries do and make border catches mean something instead of a nice try and a slap on the wrist.. only to have the same catch retry in a few days.
What price are we as Americans to pay for a little bit of data on criminals that we could easily take care of by stationing some Gitmo guards along Texas and California.
The worse is, the curruption and the cover-ups by now President Obama.
