ATF Project Gunrunner

Yesterday, the President had a "round table" with three reporters from Spanish-media news outlets. One of the reporters asked a question about Fast and Furious. His answer was pretty vague. Obviously it was bound to be - I didn't expect him to stand up and say, "Oh, ok, yes, it was all mine and Holder's fault and we're sorry." But even for a political answer, it was pretty weak.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/28/obama-evades-fast-and-furious-questions-from-latino-media/

It all boiled down to something along the lines of "it's hard to do the job" and "the ATF budget is too tight." Whew.
 
President Obama said:
"Part of the problem is budgetary [and] … we are going to have to figure out ways to operate smarter and more efficiently in investigations without a huge expansion of resources because those resources are aren’t there" Source
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Well, the good news is with the precedent established by Fast and Furious, you can cruise down to the local elementary school and get ideas that will easily qualify as both "smarter" and "more efficient" - and that isn't even hyperbole.
 
What corporate America learned decades and decades ago is that there are tremendous cost savings and efficiencies to be gained by consolidating.

If you have three corporations like three banks, each one of those companies has a management structure, their own marketing organization, their own IT department, etc...

When one bank buys the other two, they can reduce the number of people needed, they have only one marketing department, IT department etc...

Not only do we not need a federal law enforcement agency that specializes in drugs and another that specializes in tobacco crimes. But it’s actually counter-productive. Fast and Furious proves it.

They need to get rid of DEA, BATFE, and also fold the counterfeiting investigations that the Secret Service does – all into the FBI. When the presiden talks about ATF's budget I just think of how much waste there is in it - how many of those middle managers are just not needed if the personnel were folded into an existing management structure.

If they did this they would instantly realize some savings because they would have 2 less directors to pay.
 
What corporate America learned decades and decades ago is that there are tremendous cost savings and efficiencies to be gained by consolidating.

If you have three corporations like three banks, each one of those companies has a management structure, their own marketing organization, their own IT department, etc...

When one bank buys the other two, they can reduce the number of people needed, they have only one marketing department, IT department etc...
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That only works to a point until you run into the economic calculation problem and fall victim to smaller and more nimble competitors.
 
Maybe I'm an alarmist but I think I'd rather have ATF keep the records, do the FFL inspections, handle paperwork, but turn over this top secret stuff to the other agencies.
 
Maybe I'm an alarmist but I think I'd rather have ATF keep the records, do the FFL inspections, handle paperwork, but turn over this top secret stuff to the other agencies.
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Why does there need to be any paperwork? I don't recall many gun-specific problems until *after* 1968.
 
but turn over this top secret stuff to the other agencies.
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I prefer felonies involving death and chaos to occur far from the borders of our nation, say like the empty parts of the south pole...

Someone somewhere apparently had this agenda to make guns look bad with taxpayer money and it was done for a purely political purpose because I cant see a single mature educated adult even attempting to defend this lunacy. It never had a hope of convicting much of anyone but it had a great chance of creating deaths within our nation... with taxpayer money....

George Washington is turning over in his grave and wondering why he wasted all his time... Im prettty sure this was not what that constitution was meant to support...
 
publius42 closed with the following:

Who should be coordinating the activities of these agencies again? Eric Holder, who knew nothing about what his various agencies were doing and the laws they were breaking.
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Are you sure that Holder, in effect. hasn't a clue as to what is going on? Which of two possibilities might be worse. One being the above mentioned, the other being that he knows exactly what is going on, but simply considers himself to be above and beyond the law, which by the way he is sworn to enforce/uphold. By the way, that is just one of the things that Holder is sworn to do, another is, I believe, to "uphold and defend the Constitution".

Additionally, re the FBI, the DEA and ATF, do these people have that proverbial clue?
 
In a way, this reminds me of Iran-Contra.

Reagan's defense was that he was unaware of the actions of his subordinates. To me, that wasn't a defense; it was an indictment. I could have accepted Reagan saying that he and Congress differed on what privileges the Constitution afforded the Executive branch, as far as foreign policy constraints from Congress; I'd have respected a battle between Executive and Legislative in SCOTUS. But I'd have voted against Reagan, had he been eligible to run for a third term, because I was disgusted that he could be ignorant of such a large plan within his administration, or that he could expect me to believe that he was ignorant of it, yet competent to serve as President.

Seems to me the press was all over the Reagan administration over Iran-Contra....

My views on the current Administration, President, and AG are much the same in this instance as they were over Iran-Contra. If they were truly ignorant, then they are incompetent. If they were not ignorant of it, then they wilfully violated the law, and the public trust... So actually, it's worse than Iran-Contra, as I can't actually assign a potentially worthy motive nor justification.

Yet the press isn't really all over this. They might eventually be embarrassed into having to provide real coverage, as I agree with those posters who've theorized the MSM will realize they are being scooped left and right and are starting to look incompetent.
 
From Standing Wolf
Quote:
The letter outlines an amazing alleged failure of DEA and FBI to share crucial investigative information with ATF.

"Amazing?" Do I look amazed?
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I thought that, via The Patriot Act, that the "information sharing walls" had been taken down. Do I think wrong?
 
One thing to bear in mind, when it comes to information sharing, is that the problem hasn't always necessarily been one of blocking or fencing off information. Another major problem is simply the massive volume of information to be shared.

I can remember sitting watches where I would receive between 500-1000 messages on a given day... and that was information that had already been sorted down to that which was theoretically useful to that desk. Filtering through all multi-departmental messages and data, to find info that is actually useful, is a lot harder than some may realize.

In many cases, too, the information isn't recognizable as useful until after the fact.

For instance, how many people would have paid attention to twenty Saudis taking flying lessons, prior to 9/11?
 
I agree that information can be hard to sift through but it is clear to me and it seems others and maybe yourself that this was 100% a political play and not a plan to enforce laws or bring criminals to justice.

In the event a drug lord or whatever brought weapons into Mexico (which was supposed to be one of the premises of this operation) the U.S. had no assets in Mexico that could observe where the weapons were going, let alone make any arrest. No coordination was made with the Mexican government. It was stupidity and arrogance on the highest level and to my mind arises to the level of malice of forethought and willfulness. This wasn’t negligence because this required thinking to get to this level of stupidity, it wouldn’t have occurred to this level without politics involved.

This was a decision of a power player at whatever level that was high enough in the administration that even senior bureaucrats chose to look the other way on a operation that had a 100% chance of failure. Whoever it was it was very high on the totem pole to have this level of power.

The purpose was to create a situation that would support the administration’s stance on guns. The administration wanted to show death and destruction and chaos so that guns could be further banned, outlawed and restricted. The administration had already placed into the Media’s mind that US gun dealers were responsible for a majority of the weapons being imported into Mexico. This blatant lie was pumped into the general TV media who for the most part posed it as being factual, and I’m sure that’s still the general public perception.

In the political world and in the business world perception is always king, it trumps even factual information.

From an administration stand point I believe what the political goal was is this: What great press to say wow we have all these guns killing Americans and Mexicans and the guns are coming from licensed gun stores in the United States. Taking the existing incorrect perception that had been placed as the truth and using it for a basis for new policy.

I believe the endgame was to push for overburdening regulations that would burden not only the gun purchaser but more importantly burden the gun sellers to the point that doing business would be almost impossible. I think that is still an overall goal of the administration but it’s not palatable at this time because of 2012.

The beauty of the plan as always is how many decades of fighting would it take to get the regulations defeated in the courts and they would start to take the lead in public opinion on guns. In the meantime how many gun businesses would go under? Probably many....

Like I said a political move with a political motive... Astonishingly bad, horribly arrogant and a attitude that no one can or should ignore. Acts and deeds like this cannot be allowed to stand.. It is sadly unfunny how you or I as law abiding citizens would never willing give guns to murdering drug cartels and yet the mangement of the ATF could and did without so much as a blink..
 
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The local ABC affiliate in Phoenix is reporting that there will be more hearings into Fast and Furious, perhaps as early as October.

In addition, the next set of hearings will be joint hearings of both the House Judiciary Committee (which controls the purse strings for DOJ) and the House Oversight Committee. So DOJ will now be answering the people who write the checks directly.

Issa also indicated that eventually AG Eric Holder and AAG Lanny Breuer will be called to testify. Rep. Paul Gosar of the Oversight Committee also indicated that while Dennis Burke (US AG in AZ who had a major role in Fast and Furious, now resigned) has given private testimony to Congress, he would like to have him give public testimony on his involvement.

In somewhat related news, William Newell has now amended his July testimony before Congress which he says "lacked clarity." Based on the report, the amendment is really just more "See, this wasn't as bad an idea as it initially sounded" from Newell. He blames delayed reporting as being why ATF did not interdict more firearms, not the whole poilcy if deliberately not interdicting them.

In the same article, FOX reports that the FBI is also denying the existence of a third weapon at the Terry murder scene and says that there were only two weapons despite the audio tape from Howard and an ATF agent discussing the third weapon or the email also referencing a third weapon. The FBI claims the confusion came from it mistakenly identifying one of the AK47s made in Romania as an SKS made in China, causing the mistaken idea there were three rifles. They didn't discuss how they managed to misidentify only one of two identical rifles. Sen. Grassley noted he was skeptical of this explanation.
 
MLeake said:
So actually, it's worse than Iran-Contra, as I can't actually assign a potentially worthy motive nor justification.
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It has been theorized that OF&F was intended to arm favored cartels. Some would consider that a worthy motive or justification, considering that our country has previously armed enemies to fight those we considered worse enemies. Also, remember that some (and many in the media) did not consider the motives underlying Iran-Contra to be worthy.

MLeake said:
Yet the press isn't really all over this. They might eventually be embarrassed into having to provide real coverage, as I agree with those posters who've theorized the MSM will realize they are being scooped left and right and are starting to look incompetent.
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I have no doubt that MSM coverage of OF&F will increase. Unfortunately, I expect the coverage will follow the path of the New York Times in decrying an unfortunate situation resulting from the well-meaning but misguided actions of low-level government employees.
 
The White House today turned over documnts concerning the 3 staffers who were briefed on "Fast and Furious" but withheld an unspecified number of documents because "the White House has confidentiality concerns.". Yeah, I bet they do. That is kind of what we are concerned about.
 
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