ATF Project Gunrunner

Another difference is that the ATF in the Bush administration tried to track the the guns. They canceled it when they couldn't.

Yeah, the Bush administration stuff has been known for some time now but we should expect to keep hearing about it. As more of the mainstream press show interest, the more political this will be made to look. As others here have posted, wrong is wrong and if some of that falls on the previous administration, so be it.

In addition, this is becoming a bigger scandal because of the dodgy moves from the DOJ and Holder.
 
A long time ago I took some classes with a Zen guy who liked to use real-world examples to illustrate concepts. He said trying to keep a secret suppressed is like trying to hold an inflatable mattress under water. As long as you can devote ALL you attention to doing ONLY that, you might be able to keep the whole thing at least a little bit below the surface. But, as soon as you get distracted or start thinking about something else, sure enough a corner is going to pop above the surface.

Case in point ...
 
Another difference between the gun running operaration under the Bush administration - is that they didn't have the advantage of experience in having a failed operation that had gone before.

Since the BATFE, Holder and Obama had a clear blueprint on how succesful a straw buyer / gun running operation would be at building evidence for an indictment, it makes it hard to believe that the goal of F&F was indeed to build a case against high-ranking cartel members.

They already knew 100% for certain that such a plan wouldn't work. In fact, it had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would not work.
 
I was just reading one of the original bloggers to break the story at Sipsey Street Irregulars. He was promising that as crazy and outrageous as you think F&F has been so far, you haven't seen anything yet. Apparently, someone (Melson would be my guess) has clued the Oversight Committee about where the bodies are buried (I meant that figuratively but who knows with the way this is going?)
 
The Bush did it too theory is a bit like two cars speeding... One speeding car crashes and the other doesnt and the guy and the crashed car points at the one speeding down the road and claims it was ok for him to do it because the other guy did it...

If you do something wrong IMHO grow up and take responsibility for it and quit pointing at others trying to lessen your crime.

Doesnt really matter what bush did because as far as we know it didnt result in any deaths (or at least none I personally have heard of) and they got smart enough to stop it without having to wait for lots of innocents to die...
 
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If you do something wrong IMHO grow up and take responsibility for it and quit pointing at others trying to lessen your crime.

Doesnt really matter what bush did becuase as far as we know it didnt result in any deaths (or at least none I personally have heard of) and they got smart enough to stop it without having to wait for lots of innocent to die...
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Burn 'em both! They're all the same kind of scum.
 
Burn 'em both!
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If laws were broken, then prosecute without prejudice those accused of committing crimes. That's what our court system is supposed to be for. Doesn't matter when (baring statute of limitations) or who.
 
I hope someone hammers them everytime they say "Bush did it too"

Given that Operation Wide Receiver was an admitted failure and was shut down, and produced no high-level indictments – how was a repeat of that operation in the form of Fast and Furious going to produce any different results?

Given the known outcome of Operation Wide Receiver, how could Fast and Furious be anything but a failure?

Given that Operation Wide Receiver was an admitted failure and was shut down, and produced no high-level indictments – why would anyone attempt a similar operation such as Fast and Furious?

Those are the questions Holder should get hammered with everytime he engages in blame-shifting and drawing the Bush administration into it.
 
Given that Operation Wide Receiver was an admitted failure and was shut down, and produced no high-level indictments – why would anyone attempt a similar operation such as Fast and Furious?
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There's your answer right there. "Why not do it, nobody got in trouble for doing it before."
 
pnac said:
There's your answer right there. "Why not do it, nobody got in trouble for doing it before."
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I think countzero meant "produced no high-level indictments of weapons smugglers not working for the federal government directly." Wide Receiver only resulted in 7 straw-purchasing indictments, which weren't brought until several years after the investigation ended (from what I've read, the FFL involved alleges ATF lied to the AUSA about the success of the weapons tracking and when the AUSA learned he refused to prosecute. So no charges were brought until a new AUSA came in with the election of the current Administration.)

Personally, I don't see how contrasting "Wide Receiver" and "Fast and Furious" is going to make anyone feel better about "Fast and Furious." You've got many of the same people involved at the ATF level. The big difference is Wide Receiver used tracking devices and attempted to interdict the weapons on this side of the border. When it became clear more weapons were getting away than being interdicted, the program was ended.

By contrast, Fast and Furious didn't use any tracking devices (with the exception of a single frustrated agent trying to jury-rig a GPS device out of Radio Shack parts) and instead of interdicting the weapons, agents were ordered to stand down and NOT interdict weapons on several occasions.

If Wide Receiver was so unsuccessful it had to be shut down and couldn't even be prosecuted, then you've got to ask yourself why you would remove two of the safeguards in Wide Receiver and then run the same operation on an even bigger scale?
 
One further difference, if I understand what I've read correctly, is that Wide Receiver was conducted with the knowledge and cooperation of the Mexican government. (Which may have contributed to its failure, but that's another story for another discussion on another day.) F&F not only did not involve tracking devices, it also left both the Mexican authorities AND the U.S. agents in Mexico completely out of the loop.

I don't understand how any of these twits expect us to believe that the goal was to track the weapons to cartel big-wigs when there was NO mechanism in place, no ASSETS in place, to do any tracking once the guns left the store. The only follow-up was tracing the guns back to the U.S. after they were recovered at crime scenes, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that's exactly what the purpose of the program was -- to inflate the number of crime guns that could be traced to sales in U.S. gun shops.
 
Along that line of thinking, Aguila Blanca, if we believe that the goal of the operation was to recover "walked" firearms from crime scenes in Mexico in order to build a case against the drug cartels, the philosophy that "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" comes into play.

I mean, if that's what the goal was, then the guns were sent across with the knowledge that people were going to die. Certainly innocent people, given the level of violence in the border towns and in Sinaloa. Draw your own conclusions about the state of mind of the approving officials.
 
breaking eggs to make an omelette

No other motivation makes sense for F&F except that BATFE wanted to inflate the numbers of U.S. weapons recovered at crime scenes.

Maybe the BATFE wonks who thought this up really didn't connect the dots and think through the fact that a crime scene means a crime has been committed.

maybe they didn't think that a U.S. agent would get killed with their weapons... that thinking is akin to homicidal negligence - I'm not trying to excuse it.

But maybe they were thinking that Mexico is awash in violence anyway, and if the cartels don't get their guns from the U.S. they'll just go missing from Mexican Army military arms depots anyway... Sort of the philosophy that the cartels are going to get their weapons no matter what so it doesn't matter if the Fast and Furious supplies them...

I don't know.

Listening to Newell's testimony though... I think he is one cool cucumber, it takes some stones to look a senator right in the eye and say that he didn't think guns walked across the border during Fast & Furious.

If Newell was the genius behind the resurection of Operation Wide Receiver version 2.0, I can see Newell not caring if some Mexicans got killed because of it.
 
I believe the Count has it right. I don't trust the gummint for a minute. I think our masters in Washington not only look down on us serfs, I think they view Mexicans as being even lower on the social scale, so if they had to break a few Mexican eggs to make their anti-2nd Amendment omelette, I think they just viewed that as acceptable collateral damage.

What I don't think they anticipated was that one (or two, or three) of their "walked" guns might be used to kill an American LEO -- on this side of the border.
 
Auguila,

I disagree with only one part of your statement, if the plan was to let guns walk to increase the number of guns traced back to US gun dealers, then their use against US LEO would just be the thing they are looking for. Sadly I see that as part of the plan, except they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
 
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