05 Dec 2011, 8:56 am
I doubt it. Should he?
For those who may be tempted to think this is much ado about nothing: an ATF agent and many in Mexico have been murdered with weapons supplied by a US government program. Okay, maybe "supplied" is an overstatement. The government knew about the smuggling of weapons and allowed it because . . . well, because they thought there was a noble purpose.
Then, the Justice Department lied about it to Congress. They have also sought to blame it on Bush, since a similar program ran under his Presidency (note "similar," not "same").
Given all the incompetence from Holder--this, the announced trial for KSM in NYC that never took place, suing State governments for trying to enforce laws on illegal immigration he will not (even offering that he had not read the short AZ law before suing!), going after Gibson guitars, getting but a single guilty verdict against Ghailani, and innumerable other mistakes, how does Holder have a job?
It was all a lie. The angry denials, the high dudgeon, the how-dare-you accuse-us bleating emanating from Eric Holder’s Justice Department these last nine months.
Operation Fast and Furious — the “botched” gun-tracking program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — did, in fact, deliberately allow some 2,000 high-powered weapons to be sold to Mexican drug cartel agents and then waltzed across the border and into the Mexican drug wars — just as Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, who are leading the congressional investigations, have charged all along.
That’s the conclusion we can draw from Friday night’s nearly 1,400-page document dump, which gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Justice Department as it struggled earlier this year to come up with an explanation for the deadly mess — and “misled” Congress.
Now the man who supervised it, Attorney General Holder, will appears before Congress again Thursday to testify in the exploding fiasco. But there’s really only one question he needs to answer: Why?
Why did Justice, the ATF and an alphabet soup of federal agencies facilitate the transfer of guns across the border — without the knowledge of Mexican authorities — when they knew they couldn’t trace them properly?
The scandal erupted late last year, after at least two F&F weapons were found at the southern Arizona scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder. Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Justice for an explanation.
The response was a Feb. 4 letter from assistant AG Ron Weich, who insisted, “The allegation . . . that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons . . . is false.” The ATF, Weich went on, “makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.”
That letter has now been formally withdrawn. “Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies,” wrote deputy attorney general James Cole on Friday.
Nice to finally see the government admitting what we’ve known all along — that according to ATF whistleblowers, Fast and Furious was an ill-advised, poorly supervised mess that was doomed from the start.
Fox News recently unearthed a Feb. 3 memo in which ATF agent Gary Styers recounted to his superiors his conversations with Grassley’s investigators: “It is unheard of to have an active wiretap investigation without full-time, dedicated surveillance units on the ground,” he wrote, adding that objections by agents were “widely disregarded.”
For those who may be tempted to think this is much ado about nothing: an ATF agent and many in Mexico have been murdered with weapons supplied by a US government program. Okay, maybe "supplied" is an overstatement. The government knew about the smuggling of weapons and allowed it because . . . well, because they thought there was a noble purpose.
Then, the Justice Department lied about it to Congress. They have also sought to blame it on Bush, since a similar program ran under his Presidency (note "similar," not "same").
Given all the incompetence from Holder--this, the announced trial for KSM in NYC that never took place, suing State governments for trying to enforce laws on illegal immigration he will not (even offering that he had not read the short AZ law before suing!), going after Gibson guitars, getting but a single guilty verdict against Ghailani, and innumerable other mistakes, how does Holder have a job?
