fast and furious (4)

Posted on the blaze...

A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.

It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.

The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges.

Sinaloa Cartel Operative Jesus Vincente Zambada Niebla Makes Explosive Allegation About Operation Fast and Furious

Jesus Vincente Zambada-Niebla (Source: MSNBC)

Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 — during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations — as long as the intel kept coming.

This pending court case against Zambada-Niebla is being closely monitored by some members of Congress, who expect potential legal ramifications if any of his claims are substantiated. The trial was delayed but is now scheduled to begin on Oct. 9.

Zambada-Niebla is reportedly a close associate of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the son of Ismael “Mayo” Zambada-Garcia, both of which remain fugitives, likely because of the deal made with the DEA, federal court documents allege.

Based on the alleged agreement  ”the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of defendant’s father, Ismael Zambada-Niebla and ‘Chapo’ Guzman, were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States and were also protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels which helped Mexican and United States authorities capture or kill thousands of rival cartel members,” states a motion for discovery filed in U.S. District Court by Zambada-Niebla’s attorney in July 2011.

A source in Congress, who spoke to TheBlaze on the condition of anonymity, said that some top congressional investigators have been keeping “one eye on the case.”  Another two members of Congress, both lead Fast and Furious Congressional investigators, told TheBlaze they had never even heard of the case.

One of the Congressmen, who also spoke to TheBlaze on the condition of anonymity because criminal proceedings are still ongoing, called the allegations “disturbing.” He said Congress will likely get involved once Zambada-Niebla’s trial has concluded if any compelling information surfaces.

“Congress won’t get involved in really any criminal case until the trial is over and the smoke has cleared,” he added. “If the allegations prove to hold any truth, there will be some serious legal ramifications.”

Earlier this month, two men in Texas were sentenced to 70 and 80 months in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to export 147 assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition to Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel. Compare that to the roughly 2,000 firearms reportedly “walked” in Fast and Furious, which were used in the murders of hundreds of Mexican citizens and U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry, and some U.S. officials could potentially face jail time if they knowingly armed the Sinaloa Cartel and allowed guns to cross into Mexico.

If proven in court, such an agreement between U.S. law enforcement agencies and a Mexican cartel could potentially mar both the Bush and Obama administrations. The federal government is denying all of Zambada-Niebla’s allegations and contend that no official immunity deal was agreed upon.

To be sure, Zambada-Niebla is a member of one of the most ruthless drug gangs in all of Mexico, so there is a chance that he is saying whatever it takes to reduce his sentence, which will likely be hefty. However, Congress and the media have a duty to prove without a reasonable doubt that there is no truth in his allegations. So far, that has not been achieved.

Zambada-Niebla was reportedly responsible for coordinating all of the Sinaloa Cartel’s multi-ton drug shipments from Central and South American countries, through Mexico, and into the United States. To accomplish this, he used every tool at his disposal: Boeing 747 cargo planes, narco-submarines, container ships, speed boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor trailers and automobiles. But Guzman and Zambada-Niebla’s overwhelming success within the Sinaloa Cartel was largely due to the arrests and dismantling of many of their competitors and their booming businesses in the U.S. from 2004 to 2009 — around the same time ATF’s gun-walking operations were in full swing. Fast and Furious reportedly began in 2009 and continued into early 2011.

According Zambada-Niebla, that was a product of the collusion between the U.S. government and the Sinaloa Cartel.

Sinaloa Cartel Operative Jesus Vincente Zambada Niebla Makes Explosive Allegation About Operation Fast and Furious

Soldiers and police officers guard packages of seized marijuana during a presentation for the media in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

The claims seem to fall in line with statements made last month by Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico who said U.S. agencies ”don’t fight drug traffickers,“ instead ”they try to manage the drug trade.”

Also, U.S. officials have previously acknowledged working with the Sinaloa Cartel through another informant Humberto Loya-Castro. He is also allegedly a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel as well as a close confidant and lawyer of “El Chapo” Guzman.

Sinaloa Cartel Operative Jesus Vincente Zambada Niebla Makes Explosive Allegation About Operation Fast and Furious

Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka "El Chapo" (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Loya-Castro was indicted along with Chapo and Mayo in 1995 in the Southern District of California in a massive narcotics trafficking conspiracy (Case no. 95CR0973). The case was dismissed in 2008 at the request of prosecutors after Loya became an informant for the United States government and subsequently provided information for years.

In 2005, “the CS (informant Loya-Castro) signed a cooperation agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California,” states an affidavit filed in the Zambada-Niebla case by Loya-Castro’s handler, DEA agent Manuel Castanon.

“Thereafter, I began to work with the CS. Over the years, the CS’ cooperation resulted in the seizure of several significant loads of narcotics and precursor chemicals. The CS’ cooperation also resulted in other real-time intelligence that was very useful to the United States government.”

Under the alleged agreement with U.S. agencies, “the Sinaloa Cartel, through Loya-Castro, was to provide information accumulated by Mayo, Chapo, and others, against rival Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations to the United States government,” a motion for discovery states.

In return, the United States government allegedly agreed to dismiss the charges in the pending case against Loya-Castro (which they did), not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel and not actively prosecute him or the Sinaloa Cartel leadership.

Taken directly from the motion filed in federal court:

“This strategy, which he calls ‘Divide & Conquer,’ using one drug organization to help against others, is exactly what the Justice Department and its various agencies have implemented in Mexico. In this case, they entered into an agreement with the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel through, among others, Humberto Loya-Castro, to receive their help in the United States government’s efforts to destroy other cartels.”

“Indeed, United States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The government has denied this and says the deal did not go past Loya-Castro.

Zambada-Niebla was arrested by Mexican soldiers in late March of 2009 after he met with DEA agents at a Mexico City hotel in a meeting arranged by Loya-Castro, though the U.S. government was not involved in his arrest. He was extradited to Chicago to face federal drug charges on Feb. 18, 2010. He is now being held in a Michigan prison after requesting to be moved from Chicago.

“Classified Materials”

During his initial court proceedings, Zambada-Niebla continually stated that he was granted full immunity by the DEA in exchange for his cooperation. The agency, however, argues that an “official” immunity deal was never established though they admit he may have acted as an informant.

Zambada-Niebla and his legal council also requested records about Operation Fast and Furious, which permitted weapons purchased in the United States to be illegally smuggled into Mexico, sometimes by paid U.S. informants and cartel leaders. Their request was denied. From the defense motion:

“It is estimated that approximately 3,000 people were killed in Mexico as a result of ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’ including law enforcement officers in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, the headquarters of the Sinaloa cartel. The Department of Justice’s leadership apparently saw this as an ingenious way of combating drug cartel activities.”

“It has recently been disclosed that in addition to the above-referenced problems with ‘Operation Fast & Furious,’ the DOJ, DEA, and the FBI knew that some of the people who were receiving the weapons that were being allowed to be transported to Mexico, were in fact informants working for those organizations and included some of the leaders of the cartels.”

Zambada’s attorney has filed several motions for discovery to that effect in Illinois Federal District Court, which were summarily denied by the presiding judge who claimed the defendant failed to make the case that he was actually a DEA informant.

In April, 2012, a federal judge refused to dismiss charges against him.

From a Chicago Sun Times report: “According to the government, [Zambada-Niebla] conveyed his interest and willingness to cooperate with the U.S. government, but the DEA agents told him they ‘were not authorized to meet with him, much less have substantive discussions with him,’” the judge wrote.

Sinaloa Cartel Operative Jesus Vincente Zambada Niebla Makes Explosive Allegation About Operation Fast and Furious

In this courtroom artist's drawing Jesus Vincente Zambada-Niebla appears before U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Verna Sadock)

In their official response to Zambada-Niebla’s motion for discovery, the federal government confirmed the existence of “classified materials” regarding the case but argued they “do not support the defendant’s claim that he was promised immunity or public authority for his actions.”

Experts have expressed doubts that Zambada-Niebla had an official agreement with the U.S. government, however, agree Loya Castro probably did. Either way, the defense still wants to obtain DEA reports that detail the agency’s relationship with the Sinaloa Cartel and put the agents on the stand, under oath to testify.

The documents that detail the relationship between the federal government and the Sinaloa Cartel have still not been released or subjected to review — citing matters of national security.

(Editor’s note: The impetus for this article came from author Reed A. Williams, whose upcoming book “The Weed That Just Won’t Die” delves deeply into the Zambada-Niebla court case. Get more details on the book here.)

Read more…

 

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.

Read more…
 
“Mexican attorney general, Marisela Morales, now estimates at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons -- among them, a powerful Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle that downed a Mexican federale helicopter.   Morales calls OFF a ‘betrayal’ of her country. In a Los Angeles Times story she said she first learned about Op Fast and Furious from news reports. American officials never briefed their Mexican counterparts on it, Morales says. Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Marisela, Eric Holder and the Obama administration has been quite calculating on stonewalling the world on this one.”
 
 
AG Eric Holder Caught in OFF Lie
By Earlier-Dated Memos
 
            It’s an oft repeated truism of political life that the “crime” might get you; but it’s the cover-up that always nails the lid on the case . . . so let it be for scurrilous Obama administration bad-boy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Here’s just one more story that the mainstream media (MSM) has been hiding from you for months now as Eric Holder has been playing a rearguard, stonewalling hand for three months now . . . the facts keep slowly dribbling in to Darrell Issa . . . just last week a third gun from “Bordergate” was implicated and has now been linked to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, whose death in Arizona last December at the hands of Mexican bandits created the crack now threatening to break the scandal wide open and destroy the career of Eric Holder and his so-far “mum” underlings.
Holder -- who’s denial of knowledge about Operation Fast and Furious (OFF) in July of this year (OFF is the rogue and ill-conceived Obama administration offshoot of the Bush Administration’s less well-known Operation Gunrunner), is plastered on internet videos all over the world – the AG received at least two e-mails updating OFF information nine months prior to stating that he’d only recently learned of OFF in October, 2010 and even before that in July, 2010 and . . . worse luck for the AG, both memos indicate prior knowledge can be assumed since they are operational updates not presentation memos.
            The denials by Holder and the recent revelations, of course, spurred California Representative Darrell Issa to ask for a special (outside, non-DOJ) prosecutor to look into OFF and the involvement of Holder’s Justice Department. The festering mess known as “Bordergate” in some circles took an ongoing and successful Bush sting program to capture illegal gun sales and went two giant steps too far by deliberately seeking to sell automatic weapons (34,000+ so far) to members of Mexican drug cartels and then, instead of making an arrest . . . just allowed the guns to cross the border. So far about a hundred of those guns have turned up at crime scenes including the death of two U.S. Border Control agents and several dozen Mexican citizens.  Tidbits of information suggest great involvement by the Homeland Security Office and by the Whitehouse itself.
            It seems also that Holder’s DOJ manipulated knowledge so that FBI information about the identities of the gun buyers was kept away from Department of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives and Tobacco members who had been running Bush’s Operation Gunrunner for several years. Many ATF agents who have become “whistle-blowers” tell stories of their great upset when they found that guns sold to known Mexican criminals were being deliberately allowed to cross the border. Several ATF agents and administrators have already lost their jobs as Holder’s DOJ casts about wildly for scapegoats. Mexican officials meanwhile have been conducting their own investigations of American gun-supplying to drug cartels. 
To say that the stench in Washington is getting stronger is to repeat the obvious. Besides OFF; Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform committee is also investigating the Solyndra and Light-Squared scandals . . . but it’s hard to imagine that either of those corruptions will catch up to OFF’s reeking stupidity and malfeasance. The insanely idiotic idea was to trace cross-border arms trafficking, and allow the gun-hating Obama administration to then prove the oft-repeated claim that 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexican drug war zones originate in the US.  Well, their efforts DISproved it; the actual statistic is closer to 17 percent. But, as Issa’s committee continues its investigation a major international scandal has been born.
Mexican attorney general, Marisela Morales, now estimates at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with Fast and Furious weapons -- among them, a powerful Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle that downed a Mexican federal helicopter.   Morales calls OFF a “betrayal” of her country. In a Los Angeles Times story she said she first learned about Fast and Furious from news reports. American officials never briefed their Mexican counterparts on it, Morales says.
Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Marisela, the Obama administration has been quite calculating on stonewalling the world on this one. Eric Holder’s DOJ has inflamed Issa’s committee -- turning over subpoenaed documents only ultra-slowly and heavily redacted (sometimes only words like “the,” “a,” “and,” “an,” and “that” NOT being blacked out in long memos turned over to Issa) and also making witnesses unavailable and transferring or retiring implicated officials such as former “temporary” ATF head Kenneth Melson. Issa has publicly accused Holder , et. al of “gaming” congressional investigators. “There is an ongoing cover-up of a pattern of wrongdoing,” Issa noted last week. “Even though I have subpoena ability, I don’t have the ability to lock people up for contempt until they fess up and give us what we want” hence the call for a special prosecutor.
As noted in a blog two weeks ago, there have now been 76 serious Obama administration scandals about which Rajjpuut has informed his readers . . . and now the MSM is finally covering three of them. The only other one of those 76 scandals touched lightly upon by the MSM so far in the first two and a half years under Obama was their pseudo-journalistic expose of problems associated with environmentalism related to the Gulf Oil Spill (they deliberately missed the whole scandalous part of the story that Obama himself and Interior Secretary Salazar both knew of critical problems with Deep Horizon up to two weeks before the explosion). Now the MSM is really looking hard at Solyndra and Light-Squared and trying NOT to get involved with OFF, but slowly, slowly they’re finding themselves dragged into Bordergate as the evidence mounts and the circle of corruption** expands.  
Solyndra, of course, is a story of monumental incompetence and crony-capitalism that’s already cost the taxpayers $535 million.   Malfeasance is still a very strong possibility as the Obama administration agreed to a deal in which last-minute Solyndra investors would be paid first in case of bankruptcy, before the taxpayers.   The Light-Squared scandal involves the Obama administration seeking to pressure and change a Four-Star Air Force General’s testimony about the dangers of a communication invention sold by an Obama supporter’s broad-band company which mal-affects other battlefield communications and global positioning and thus would have made in-close bombings and artillery very risky for our soldiers in the field. Yes, the “hits” do keep coming . . . and finally the MSM is starting to play them.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
** We feel like a broken record here, but about a dozen FAR more serious scandals from 2009, 2010 and earlier this year have all gone totally UNreported by ABC, NBC, CBS, and Cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Headline News. Only FOXNews is looking into Obama’s corruptions. Whole books someday will be dedicated to the “Journ-O-List" scandal; the Carbon-Trading Scandal known as CCX which even FOXNews barely covered; and whole encyclopedias can be filled up with the “Cloward-Piven to Wiley to ’73 Crash to NYC bankruptcy to Rathke to CRA ’77 to ACORN to Clinton to Obama to meltdown” scandal . . . . Rajjpuut (who was once a pretty fair country feature writer and also his J-school’s Academic Excellence Award winner lo’ these many years) blames 97% of the country’s present horrific state and ongoing predictable future financial problems on the MSM which is picking winners and losers in politics and refusing to do its time-honored job in keeping the country aware of government corruption, incompetence and malfeasance.
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The whole of government consists of the art of being honest.”
Thomas Jefferson
 
 
Obama Lies 26 Times in Friday’s,
Saturday’s Speeches on Debt-Ceiling Debate
Holder’s Lies May Bring Administration Down
 
 
  
                As the pressure mounts on the economic front and in the debt-ceiling debate with the loyal opposition, President Obama is becoming more and more comfortable unabashedly piling up “Frequent Liar Miles.” Mr. Obama is now well set to fly non-stop around the globe for the next 84 years. Allow us to present some of the low-lights of our mendacious Liar-in-Chief’s recent utterances: the big picture about the Debt-Ceiling argument according to Mr. Obama is that he says he believes “in a balanced approach.” That single lie should, in all honesty, be worth about a three hundred normal, old fashioned cross-my-heart-hope-to-die-lies while crossing all ten fingers behind your back . . . but propriety demands we only count it as one puny lie, alas! 
Of course, Mr. Obama when a senator told us that the attempt by then President Bush to raise the debt-limit indicated an ineptness in government . . . so Mr. Obama talks to the American people out of both sides of his mouth . . . often at the same time . . . but that’s not surprising anyone anymore . . . just par for the course. President Obama most definitely does NOT believe in a balanced approach. Mr. Obama is the most radical occupant ever to sit in the Oval Office. He has displayed tunnel-vision and one-track loyalty toward rapid expansion of government at any cost. Where is Mr. Obama’s ballyhooed “balance” with regard to energy policy?    As you can verify in the links below: he has sworn in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that his energy policies will “bankrupt the coal industry”; and will “necessarily cause electricity prices to skyrocket” . . . is that balance? 
http://www.
http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4
americanthinker.com/2010/07/carbon_cronyism_why_capandtrad.html
 
And make no bones about it, energy costs and the cost of DEpendence upon foreign oil is a big part of our economic woes and our debt and spending woes.
            He has taken $787 Billion from the taxpayers to create a stimulus program that produced one job for every $678, 000 in subsidies but refuses to consider leaving the taxpayers holding their own money and allowing the free market to create jobs for, oh say, $180,000. Is that the balance he’s talking about? He has given us the most swollen bureaucracy in the history of the country producing one new government job for every 2.3 jobs lost because of the subsidies’ negative effect on the economy . . . surely he’s not calling that “balance.” Rajjpuut is feeling so UNbalanced by all the president’s lying that in this blog he’s only been able to deal with one among all the recent false Obama output . . . Ouch!   Mr. Obama believes we can spend, borrow, and tax our way to prosperity . . . that is surely the product of an UNbalanced mind, eh? Speaking of UNbalanced minds    . . . .
            By the way as the link above shows, President Obama seems to have no monopoly upon lies within his administration.   According to charges raised by Black freshman Florida Representative Alan West, Obama’s attorney general and incompetent-in-chief, Eric Holder, on April 2, 2009 (was he writing this speech on April Fool’s Day?) in Cuernavava, Mexico, told a Mexican audience about a "major new effort” to deal with the violent Mexican drug cartels.
 I would like to thank the Mexican and U.S. experts who have worked so hard on this issue.  On our side, Secretary Napolitano and I are committed to putting the resources in place to increase our attack on arms trafficking into Mexico.

            Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion.  DHS is making similar commitments, as Secretary Napolitano will detail.
 
          Holder, of course, recently lied to House Chairman of the Oversight Committee Dan Issa and said he had no knowledge of the badly bungled “Operation Fast and Furious” which altered the Bush game plan in “Project Gun Runner.”  Holder admitted to only learning about Operation Fast and Furious seven weeks after its role in the deaths of two Americans (one Immigration agent and one Homeland Security officer) was going viral on the internet.
Project Gun Runner, which was in effect when Obama and Holder took office, was an ongoing sting operation which caught Mexican and Americans in the middle of transacting arms deals and arrested them. The ill-conceived and badly botched Operation Fast and Furious (OFF) actually allowed the purchases of tens of thousands of weapons to take place and attempted to follow the guns into Mexico. Of course with almost no variance, once the guns crossed the border, all trace of them was lost unless they wound up at the scene of a crime . . . as they did in the deaths of the two American officers. Mexican officials are enraged, as they suspect that the sharp recent rise in deaths on their side of the border was exacerbated by OFF weapons. They claim that thousands of Mexican citizens may have died from bullets sprayed from OFF weaponry.  If you’ll re-read the Holder quote above from April, 2009, you’ll notice that it appears that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and President Obama were aware and complicit in the creation of OFF as well. 
Besides its obvious stupidity, OFF featured Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Holder’s Justice Department deliberately withholding information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF or just ATF) which had been conducting Bush’s Project Gun Runner so that the ATF spent huge amounts of time trying to piece together information already in the hands of the other three federal departments (such as the identity of the arms traffic ringleaders in Mexico and the U.S. Was this by design? It appears to be so, because it took ATF a long time to figure out that OFF was dramatically different (and flawed) from Gun Runner. Once ATF discovered this the agents in the field began to howl like stuck pigs about the foolish operation. Of course, right now the ATF is turning tons of documents proving all this to Chairman Issa’s Oversight Committee even while Holder and the Obama administration is trying to push the blame upon the ATF and stonewalling Issa’s committee.  Notice:  not only does it appears that OFF began not later than early April, 2009, notice that in the link above on the second video clip which is President Obama meeting with Mexican President Felipe Caldero`n and answering a reporter’s questions by referring to “gun tracing” initiatives. It appears that President Obama was in on this from the start. Ah, lying, it gets contagious doesn’t it? 
Rep. Allen West has revealed all this and added:
"Eric Holder has to be brought before an investigative committee and if those charges are warranted he needs to be held accountable but at least the President needs to realize that Eric Holder needs to be removed from the Department of Justice or else I believe President Obama is complicit and in approval of the actions of his Attorney General."
 
 The $64,000 Question is, of course, WHY?  Why was Operation Fast and Furious created?  Why was the temporary head of ATF never replaced by the Obama administration?  Why was temporary ATF Director Ken Melson and the entire ATF deliberately kept in the dark about what exactly OFF was and what was going on in OFF?  Why was Holder referring to "Project Gun Runner" in his speech; why would he publicly alert anyone about a sting project created by the Bush administration?  Why was OFF designed to allow weapons to get all the way into Mexico where we have no jurisdiction?  Is there a logical answer to these questions?
The problem solving principle known as "Occam's Razor" (lex parsimoniae -- "the simplest explanation requiring the least assumptions is most likely the correct one") holds the likely answer to all these questions.  Melson was left in charge of the ATF and he and the ATF were not kept current on exactly what OFF was because they were being set up as scape goats.  Even as late as last week, the ATF whistle-blowers who'd been complaining loud and long about what was going on in OFF and about the change in emphasis and tactics were still referring to OFF by its name under the Bush administration (back in the days when it worked and made logical sense) "Project Gun Runner."  The purpose of all this:  to give Obama data backing up the left's claim that 90% of the guns owned by the Mexican Drug cartels came from American gun sales.  Obama has long been promising the anti-gun fringe of his supporters that he would outlaw automatic weapons . . . apparently thinking that the best way to do this was by helping the Mexican drug cartels get their hands on thousands of automatic weapons -- your tax dollars at work corrupting the world!
Let's see how long it is before the mainstream/lame-stream media begins to cover this boondoggle and the cover-up!
 
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
 
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