Ace CBS Reporter Attkisson Nails OF&F and
Obama/ATF Corruption Assailing 2nd Amendment
Just when all appeared lost and it seemed like the mainstream media (MSM) was eternally in the tank committed to supporting an ultra-corrupt Obama administration come hell or highest seas, CBS News shocked us with some actual journalistic backbone! CBS News, which apparently has a White House informer blowing the whistle on the goings on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, has acquired documents showing that the original intent of Fast and Furious was to crack down on gun ownership and erode honest ordinary patriotic Americans’ Second Amendment rights. For the third time now the breakthrough in the “Gun Walking Scandal” has come courtesy of one CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson . . . .
While the rest of the MSM has gone out of its way to enshrine every Obama White House lie, red herring and false accusation as Gospel TRUTH, Ms. Attkisson has repeatedly attacked the beast in its lair. The latest E-mail and other earlier documents obtained by CBS News shows that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using Operation Fast and Furious (whose weapons have already killed at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent and at least 200 Mexican citizens) as a lever to gain tighter gun regulations in the United States.
The chronology begins in April of 2009, three months into the new Obama administration. Claiming that guns sold north of the border in America accounted for 90% of the weapons and 90% of the deaths from drug cartel violence**, Obama made a speech in Mexico alongside Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The President said, “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border. So we have responsibilities as well.” It was about that time that the administration brushed off an old Bush administration program, Operation Gun Runner, which conducted ongoing gun stings to crackdown on illegal arms sales and re-named it “Operation Fast and Furious,” (OF&F). And how exactly did OF&F differ from Gun Runner? Four great differences emerge . . . .
1) CBS’s Sharyl Attkinsson put it like this on the Early Show on CBS, “New e-mails that we now have . . . add to some documentation that we already had that show government officials NEVER planned to reveal publicly their role in letting those guns fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels but planned to use the end result to argue for new gun regulations that they wanted, and you can read more about that story on our website, CBSNews.com.” In other words, where Gun Runner was a real sting that netted illegal arms traffickers virtually immediately . . . OF&F deliberately adopted a “hands-off approach” that allowed its guns to cross the border UNIMPEDED with the goal of using later discoveries of these weapons as compelling reasons to crack down on the rights of legal gun ownership in America.
2) Whereas, Gun Runner had targeted all illegal gun sales, OF&F aimed directly at getting its guns into the hands of the Mexican Drug Cartels, the so-called “Big Fish” and did so very quickly instead of carefully building up actionable arrest justification, OF&F was aimed at getting the weapons into illegal hands as quickly as possible period. The ATF agents on the ground who were shocked by all this, christened the practice “Gun Walking”
3) With its emphasis on getting weapons to the cartels, OF&F put much heavier weaponry in these criminals hands. The never-shrinking violet, Rush Limbaugh, commented upon Attkisson’s revelations this way, “. . . We arranged for thousands of guns, long guns, automatic, semiautomatic, AK-47s, machine guns, bazookas, whatever, to end up in the hands of drug lords, right out of gun stores, gun shops in Phoenix, just walked outta there right across the border into Mexico, into the hands of the drug cartel and the cartel was supposed to do with those guns what drug cartel people do, start using them, bam, bam, you’re dead. They did. Hundreds of people died as a result of these guns being walked out of Phoenix gun shops and others along the border. And in this period of time our border agent got killed.” Two OF&F weapons were found at the agent’s death site; and later one of the heavier weapons Limbaugh refers to even brought down a helicopter carrying high-ranking Mexican drug officials killing everyone on board.
4) Unlike Gun Runner, the folks on the ground quickly became alarmed by what was going on. Criminals got weapons but then were NOT arrested, what the hell! Immediately this set off a chain of complaints and whistle-blowing that reverberated all the way to the Administration’s upper echelons, where the Attkinsson E-mails also came from. Somehow the Obama upper-level muckety-mucks never ever could imagine that the people working for them would be decent, honest folk shocked by such abuse of power and its results, thousands of ultra violent criminals being abetted by the U.S.A.
What’s the upshot of all this? Someone in the Obama administration engineered a program where some of the worst criminals in the world get hold of American guns that we just give them, but they (Obama, Holder, etc.) don’t tell anybody any of that. It’s made to look like either the drug cartel could just cross the border walk in anywhere in America and buy all the heavy arms in the world and walk back across the border or some really rotten Americans could walk into the gun stores, buy those guns, cross the southern border and sell them to the drug cartel. Then everybody would be surprised with the revelation that the guns were sold in America, lots of people would die, and the conclusion according to Limbaugh is, “See, we have got to have more control over guns. Look at what happened here.” Ms. Attkisson and some heroic whistle-blowers changed all that.
Yes, yes, FOXNews has been covering this story like a poodle with a slipper in its mouth for over fifteen months now. But everyone who understands real journalism expects that from FOX and then despite the facts that like so many other stories this one would be totally ignored by all the MSM. Real journalism, heroic journalism by CBS . . . that’s something new and wonderful. Attkisson didn’t just follow FOX’s lead, she dug deep and got her own leads and those leads have been devastating in their effect on the Obama circle-the-wagons efforts.
Oh, by the way, President Obama’s speech, in that joint press conference with Felipe Calderon in April, 2009, referred to “Gun Runner” by name and said we could “expect some good results.” This was when the first E-mails with the new name “Operation Fast and Furious” began to show up. The fact that Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, the ATF and Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security have all been stonewalling the Congressional Investigation into Fast and Furious tells you everything you need to know about how widespread this Obama corruption goes. The fact that AG Holder’s second in command, wrote a response to the investigators ten months ago that deliberately misled the investigators tells you where the probable heads will eventually roll from. After responding to congressional subpoenas with tens of thousands of pages of 100% blacked-out documents expect Holder to be impeached for obstruction of justice.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** Even counting the thousands of Fast and Furious weapons, current official U.S. government statistics put the actual number at 17% of the drug cartels' weapons originating in America.
