Wednesday, June 27, 2012

 

Two Sides of the Coin

Here is Ann Coulter repeating what I believe about the porpose of Operation Fast and Furious. Here and here are smart guys saying: Naaah.

Here was my first post on the Fast and Furious fiasco.

Money quote from Ms. Coulter:

Right about the time the 90 percent lie was unraveling, the Obama administration decided to directly hand thousands of American guns over to Mexican criminals. Apart from the fact that tracking thousands of guns into Mexico is not feasible or rational, the dumped guns didn't have GPS tracing devices on them, anyway. There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to such a program.

This is what we know:

(1) Liberals thought it would be a great argument for gun control if American guns were ending up in the hands of Mexican criminals;

(2) They wanted that to be true so badly, Democrats lied about it;

(3) After they were busted on their lie, the Obama administration began dumping thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican criminals.

We also know that hundreds of people were murdered with these U.S.-government-supplied guns, including at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Here is the money quote from VerBruggen:

Fast and Furious is a horrific scandal. The public deserves answers as to who devised the operation and what they hoped to accomplish. But the theory that Fast and Furious was devised to promote gun control goes far beyond the evidence, as Issa basically admitted to ABC this weekend, and it does not withstand scrutiny.
[...]

Even if we assume the Obama administration places no value whatsoever on human life, it’s hard to see how the gun-control scheme would have passed a cost-benefit analysis.

First, the benefits are negligible. The Obama administration and its accomplices in the media have already been more than willing to twist statistics in order to claim that most guns involved in Mexican drug violence come from the U.S. Content with their falsehood, why would they need to inflate the real numbers to back it up?
Moreover, if the goal was to increase the overall use of U.S. guns in Mexican crimes, Fast and Furious wasn’t nearly large enough...
[...]

It was always just a matter of time before Fast and Furious became public knowledge, and at that point the statistics and anecdotes become useless as gun-control propaganda — and a scandal is born.
Money quote from Mirengoff:

The theory cannot be ruled out. However, I don’t find it persuasive.

First, Fast and Furious does not appear to have been the brainchild of President Obama or Attorney General Holder. Rather, the program reportedly was formulated by the ATF in Phoenix in response to an edict from Washington to focus on eliminating arms trafficking networks, as opposed to capturing low-level buyers, as had occurred under traditional interdiction programs. If Fast and Furious had been the product of a conspiracy by the administration to promote gun control legislation, the program would have come from the top down, not from the bottom up.

Now, it’s possible that a thorough review of documents would show that, contrary to current understanding, the plan originated in the White House or with Eric Holder. But it seems unlikely. For if this had happened, those who have been blamed for the program would likely have said they were following edicts from the highest reaches of the government.
Eric Holder’s claim that he knew nothing about Fast and Furious is implausible. But this doesn’t mean that he and/or the president came up with the idea. As far as I know, there is no evidence as of now that either did.

Second, Obama and Holder probably would not have believed that increased violence in Mexico could lead to tougher regulation of guns in the U.S. Americans simply don’t care enough about Mexico to alter domestic policy based on what occurs there, especially when it comes to an issue as passionately and endlessly argued as gun control. Americans view violence in Mexico the way they viewed violence in Colombia – unfortunate, typical, and not our problem at any fundamental level.

It was always possible that a few Americans, especially some involved in law enforcement, would be killed with guns that were part of Fast and Furious. But in this event, the probable consequence is what we have witnessed – major embarrassment for the administration, not an effective vehicle for advocating more gun control. On balance, it seems unlikely that the administration would come up with a program this risky in the pie-in-the-sky hope of incresing gun control.

OK.

But I can't answer this question and neither can Mirengoff or VerBruggen: If they weren't trying do do what Ms. Coulter and I think they were doing (providing raw material for reimposing the idiot assault weapon ban) what were they trying to do?

What was the purpose of facilitating straw purchases in America so the guns purchased would be smuggled into Mexico without any surveillance or tracking? What were they trying to achieve by allowing American guns to flow into Mexico?

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Comments:
Read this:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/?iid=SF_F_River
 
Did. Read this:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/304142/did-fast-and-furious-not-happen-robert-verbruggen

Do you think it would help to have some contemporaneous DOJ documents on the matter? I do too. DOJ and the President disagree. What, if anything, does that tell you?
 
State Secrets suck. that's what that tells me. But I've been consistently saying that for a long time. You seem a bit selective about it. The piece I linked seemed to justify it though (pending investigations or whatever).
 
Andrew, a country has to have secrets. We cracked both the Nazi and Imperial Japanese secret codes during WWII. Rhey didn't crack ours. We knew what they were going to do and they didn't know what we were going to do. We beat them. Had we revealed that we had cracked their codes (either by announcing it, or over using it so they caught on) or if some then metrosexual poser started printing stolen state documents in the newspaper (you know to whom I am referring),the Japanese and Nazis would have changed the codes and more Allies would have died. You have to have state secrets and your inability to see that deals a serious blow to me taking your opinion seriously. Now if you want to talk about over protection of government documents not for real reasons but to hide embarrasing details, we can talk, but the FOI Act is a good counterbalance to such overprotection.
Finished Reamde. Liked it a lot but someone needs to stand up to Stephensen and edit 400 pages out of the next 1000 plus page book he writes. See 'ya, son.
 
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