Yesterday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent out a report on Operation Fast and Furious. They promise two more after this. If those two are no better than this one, then they’ve lost already. Because they merely passed the buck. They blamed Fast and Furious on five underlings. True, they set out a mountain of evidence that confirms what CNAV has long suspected. The evidence shows the true goal of Operation Fast and Furious. And that is: “throw down” hundreds of assault weapons in Mexico, weapons that straw buyers bought in America. Why? So that the people will swallow more gun control. So why won’t Chairman Darrell Issa and his Committee say that?

Details of the Fast and Furious report

The report comes from the Committee and from Senator Charles Grassley, R-IA, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Its title:

Fast and Furious: the anatomy of a failed operation

Failed? The Committee’s own newsletter sums up. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) told American gun dealers in Arizona and three other States to let obvious straw buyers buy as many guns as they wanted. ATF told the gun dealers that ATF wouldn’t let the drug gangs get the guns. That was a lie.

In December, 2009, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told ATF they had all the goods they needed on Mexican kingpins. ATF had no need to carry Operation Fast and Furious any further. Not, that is, if all they wanted were “the goods” on the kingpins. That ATF went ahead anyway, means that they wanted something else. But Issa and Grassley won’t push the lumps out of their throats and say it!

[H]undreds of guns flowed to criminals while two of the trafficking network’s customers, who were its connection to the Mexican drug cartels, were already known to U.S. law enforcement.

In plain English: ATF’s sister agencies knew who the “big fish” were. Yet ATF went on!

The official summary does not have the “smoking gun.” The report itself does. From page 25 (of 211):

On November 24, 2009, [Special Agent-in-Charge William] Newell [of the Phoenix ATF office] informed Dennis Burke, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, of the large weapons recovery in Mexico a few days earlier.Burke responded,“Wow, frickin-A. They were already across the Border heading south?”

Wow, frickin-A? And this is failure? If Burke had not wanted to hear this, he would have said, “Oh, sh[oo]t!”

No, Fast and Furious was no failed operation. It was successful. Successful in “throwing down” hundreds of guns in Mexico. The problem was that it was too successful. People died. The dead included one American border patrol agent, the brother of Mexico’s Attorney General, and 300 innocent Mexican civilians. When the body count mounted up, suddenly the ATF people wanted to keep it quiet. Except that, thanks to men like David Codrea (Gun Rights Examiner) and Mike Vanderboegh (Sipsey Street Irregulars), they couldn’t.

Authorized Journalists

The US Constitution. Photo: National Archives of the United States

Issa and Grassley have all the evidence they needed to show, at least, that the ATF men were overzealous offers setting up the grandest throw-down of all time. Instead they repeat the narrative of well-meaning gun cops running a sting until it blew up in their faces. Oh, they ran a sting, all right. But the sting is on us, the American public, not Mexican gangsters and straw buyers. (And the sting is on those same gun dealers, as Codrea has followed closely.)

Codrea, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, “smelt a rat” today. Why? Because Issa and Grassley gave their report to The Los Angeles Times. Codrea dashed off an outraged letter to Issa. What, he wanted to know, did they think they were doing? After all, were not Codrea and Vanderboegh the first to suggest to Grassley, and then to Issa, that some dirty work was going on at the crossroads? Have not those two followed the story and laid information with Grassley, Issa, and their employees long before William La Jeunesse would file his first report for Fox News Channel? Why, then, ignore the alternative media and play the tired old game of “authorized journalists only”?

Codrea knows exactly what is going on:

Many outlets have either continually ignored the story or wrote it up with a spin designed to derail the investigation and advance an administration and “gun control”-promoting agenda.

Who should own guns?

For which, evidence abounds. Last week, John Lott (More Guns, Less Crime) told Laura Ingraham that he knew the putative President, Barack H. Obama, at the University of Chicago. While there, the two ran into one another:

The first time I ever met him, I went, introduced myself, he said, “Oh, you’re the gun guy.” He said to me, “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.”

Lott went on to say that Mesdames Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor don’t believe, either, that the law should let people own guns. That is telling. Even Mr. Justice Antonin Scalia bought into “limits” on guns. That remark prompted more people to buy guns even than anything that Obama ever said.

The point is that ATF career men don’t believe, either, that the law should let anyone they don’t like, own guns. Nothing will satisfy people like that, short of a law that restricts guns to law-enforcement offices and military members, and then only while they are on duty.

Dick Morris, today, released a reminder of an off-duty police officer who got involved in a shopping mall shooting in February of 2007 (the Trolley Square incident). One man with a gun, armed about as well as the putative Aurora, Colorado shooter, shot nine people, killing five. Then Officer Ken Hammond drew his gun and laid down suppressive fire until:

1. An on-duty officer could join him and help him out, and then:
2. The SWAT team could move in for the kill.

In Aurora, of course, no one opposed the shooter until far too late. And before the bodies were even cold, the usual suspects in the US Senate introduced new gun control measures. Furthermore, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) consistently dismisses any suggestion that ATF did anything wrong in Fast and Furious. Instead, she tells ATF witnesses what a good job they are doing by highlighting the “carnage” to which the American public “contribute” by letting people get guns too easily in America.

Issa and Grassley have two more reports on Fast and Furious to send out. They promise that Part 2 will cover the deputy attorney general, and Part 3 will cover Eric Holder himself. But Issa and Grassley have lost before they begin, if they don’t accuse Holder directly of trying to further Barack Obama’s agenda of not letting anyone own guns. Fast and Furious was no accident, and not a failure. From the point of view of someone who wants to come out with the “There-yasees” on “America’s gun culture,” Fast and Furious was a resounding success. The only problem was that, again from the Obama POV, it was too much of a good thing. Far too much.

Related Fast and Furious articles:

• A Journalist’s Guide to Project Gunwalker, Part Ten. Has links to nine earlier sets of updates.
• Lies
• Contemptible
• The Heart of the Matter
• Whom Are They Kidding?
• Law? What law?
• Treason?
• Too little, too late
• Where’s the outrage?
• Impeachment
• Embarrassment
• The next level
• More subpoenas
• Vindication
• Shell game
• Sacrifices
• Promotions
• Incriminations
• Felonies
• Cover-ups continue
• Death threats
• Subpoenas
• Fast and Furious is not Gunrunner
• Cover-up
• The unraveling
• Throw-downs

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