Monday, July 2, 2012

Cynical partisan politics in the Fast and Furious "scandal"

If it would ever turn out to be the case that Republican lawmakers are unhappy that Attorney General Eric Holder is targeting “programs” they approve of—like civil rights abuses by police, voter suppression laws, corporate malfeasance and fascist-style initiatives that use immigration as an excuse to disguise a racial agenda—it ought be mendacious for anyone to express any “shock” about this. On the other hand, neither should it come as a “shock” that Republicans would not admit as much publically, because it would expose the House’s contempt of Congress vote against Holder as cynical and politically-motivated—which, of course, it is.

Since Republicans only fool people who think that Fox News is “fair and balanced,” we shouldn’t waste time on their motivations; but if there is any justification for the contempt vote, and where the blame really lies in the case of the so-called “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking operation—which was initiated during the Bush administration—we ought to at least give it the fair hearing that Holder is not receiving. The accusation is that the operation conducted by Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents—rather than merely confiscating illegally-purchased guns—allowed “gun-walking” to take place, meaning that ATF agents literally gave guns to suspects running guns to Mexico, with the intent of tracking the guns to locate, identify, arrest and prosecute gunrunners and provide evidence against criminals and drug figures in Mexico. The accusation, however, states that those guns were not immediately recovered before they could be used in the commission of violent criminal acts—such as in the death of border agent Brian Terry in 2010.

The problem is that House Republicans cynically only want to view details surrounding a period in 2010, when there was allegedly disputes between cliques within the ATF offices about the efficacy of the operation; Republican partisanship in the matter is apparent in their refusal to examine documents dating from the Bush administration, because of their desire to only embarrass the Obama administration. Unlike his predecessors, however, Holder did apparently find the gun-walking concerning, and requested a “no bullshit” investigation of the matter. However, since House Republicans show only interest in what they want to know—and not in what they don’t want the public to know about their own complicity—Holder is correct in questioning the Republican’s true motivations. For now, the Justice Department claims that it is refusing to handover documents because if made public, they would compromise current investigations.

Also in question is the role of the National Rifle Association in the contempt vote. The NRA claims that the “gun-walking” was deliberately allowed to go awry by the Obama Justice Department in order to create public support for federal laws that restrict the kind of unlimited gun sales that take place in states like trigger-happy Arizona (where, as we see in the Daniel Adkins shooting case, anyone can get away with murder merely by claiming “self-defense”). But what the NRA is really afraid of is being exposed as an irresponsible entity that lobbied lawmakers to refuse to allow the ATF to institute an electronic tracking mechanism for gun sales. The president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Paul Helmke, who recently accused the NRA of being the “criminals best friend,” observed that "NRA allies in Congress have required ATF to meet extraordinary burdens of proof to prosecute gun traffickers and revoke law-breaking gun dealers' licenses, imposed severe restrictions on ATF inspectors and allowed largely unregulated gun show sales to flourish." Thus we may correctly infer that the NRA had a hand in the killing of Terry, which would explain its fanatical efforts to shift attention from the gun rights lobby and their political stooges to Holder.

Last month, Fortune Magazine published a scathing report of the politics surrounding the “Fast and Furious” scandal. Katherine Eban puts the problem in succinct terms:

“The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.”

Most ATF agents attempting to stop gun smuggling into Mexico are located in Arizona and Texas, but it is in the former where “buying three guns at a time is like buying a sandwich.” Agents like Dave Voth found many obstacles to stopping Americans who bought guns legally with drug cartel money and handed them over to drug traffickers. “Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney's office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.” For those confused about this reticence by prosecutors in or based in Arizona, it is useful to point out again that three months after police recommended second-degree murder charges against Cordell Jude in the Adkins killing, Maricopa County prosecutors are still reticent about drawing the ire of gun rights advocates by actually charging Jude with a crime.

Two weapons left behind in the Terry killing, by “bandits” after an attack on an “elite” border patrol outfit, were apparently purchased by a gun-walking suspect. Then in early 2011, weeks after the shooting, an ATF agent named John Dodson made public the “Fast and Furious” operation on CBS News. Of course, the operation was the brainchild of the Bush administration, and it was evident that Holder was not aware of all of the details of the operation, but Republicans and the media focused solely on the Obama administration’s “culpability.”

But there is a question of not just of motivation, but of the actual facts in the matter. Only in rare instances were weapons themselves “supplied” by the ATF in order to facilitate “straw” purchases; the weapons found in the Terry killing were indicative of the operation’s more usual procedure—identifying “suspicious” purchasers of guns, and recording serial numbers for future reference. The agents themselves had no power in Arizona to stop the sales and confiscate guns without court approval: “Five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic,” writes Eban. “They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn…Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies.” Republicans and the right-wing media have since used the case to distort the facts of the case, and use it as an indictment of the Obama administration. "Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," according to one former “Fast and Furious” agent.

The ATF does admit to making mistakes in oversight of the operation. Because of incidents like the Waco standoff in 1993, the ATF has a negative reputation from certain segments of the population. In the recent past it has avoided attention by focusing on “single defendant” cases. But the ATF’s operations could be nothing but hamstrung by the lack of resources it had to do its job, thanks to organizations like the NRA and its influence on lawmakers. Voth’s seven-person ATF unit was also hampered by personality clashes and division in how to conduct their operations. But “Even had they all gotten along, they faced a nearly impossible task. They were seven agents pursuing more than a dozen cases, of which Fast and Furious was just one, their efforts complicated by a lack of adequate tools. Without a real-time database of gun sales, they had to perform a laborious archaeology. Day after day, they visited local gun dealers and pored over forms called 4473s, which dealers must keep on file. These contain a buyer's personal information, a record of purchased guns and their serial numbers, and a certification that the buyer is purchasing the guns for himself. The ATF agents manually entered these serial numbers into a database of suspect guns to help them build a picture of past purchases,” according to the Fortune report.

Yet despite these difficulties, 20 suspects were identified as paying $350,000 for 650 or so weapons. But was there enough evidence to arrest the suspects and bring them to trial? Not according to federal prosecutors in Arizona:

“In a meeting on Jan. 5, 2010,” according to Eban. “Emory Hurley, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix overseeing the Fast and Furious case, told the agents they lacked probable cause for arrests, according to ATF records. Hurley's judgment reflected accepted policy at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona. ‘Purchasing multiple long guns in Arizona is lawful,’ Patrick Cunningham, the U.S. Attorney's then–criminal chief in Arizona would later write. ‘Transferring them to another is lawful and even sale or barter of the guns to another is lawful unless the United States can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the firearm is intended to be used to commit a crime.’"

Prosecutors in these cases claim that since the purchase of the weapons themselves was not illegal, even if such weapons were found at the scene of a crime (such as in a Mexican drug hit), the original purchasers could not be charged with a crime. The real problem with the “Fast and Furious” operation was that it took too long for the ATF to realize that they were wasting their time, that no matter how much of a case they had against a gunrunner, and even if it was obvious to everyone that the guns would be used to commit crimes, Arizona and federal law made it almost impossible to legally punish such persons. It should be pointed out, however, that the number of guns in the tracking operation represented but a tiny percentage of the total amount of guns that were run into Mexico, and if most of the guns used to commit crimes in Mexico are of U.S. origin, it would seem more than a little hypocritical to focus solely on the ATF operation.

House Republicans investigating the operation have jumped on the suggestion that ATF agents simply “allowed” guns they hoped to track to “walk” into Mexico. The problem is that according to Arizona or federal law, this is not technically illegal (especially to pro-gun prosecutors), and the ATF has no resources to track every one of those 2,000 weapons a day that make it into Mexico, only the relatively tiny number that were a part of the “Fast and Furious” operation. Thus it was just “bum luck” for Republicans to have the good fortune to find two weapons for which they could use to attack Holder with—while ignoring their own and the gun lobby’s culpability in the gunrunning activity. Federal attorney Hurley was a gun enthusiast who apparently blocked ATF requests for authorizing wiretapping of gunrunning suspects and their customers; Hurley proved an obstacle in other ways, according to Eban, “After examining one suspect's garbage, agents learned he was on food stamps yet had plunked down more than $300,000 for 476 firearms in six months. Voth asked if the ATF could arrest him for fraudulently accepting public assistance when he was spending such huge sums. Prosecutor Hurley said no. In another instance, a young jobless suspect paid more than $10,000 for a 50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle. According to Voth, Hurley told the agents they lacked proof that he hadn't bought the gun for himself.”

In any event, the guns found at the Terry crime scene were purchased legally; their sale had been reported as “suspicious” by a gun dealer, who provided the ATF with serial numbers. But because the information was faxed to the ATF office over a holiday weekend, by the time the ATF received the information, it was unable to do a follow-up investigation and never discovered the trail of the weapons’ movements. The real problem, of course, was that the sale had been made to a “suspicious” person at all—a transient who could hardly have been able to afford three WASR-10 rifles, let alone have any legitimate use for them. According to one agent, such purchases made in other states (like California and New York) were taken as possible crimes much more seriously than in Arizona, where guns seem to be merely an extension of one’s arm (one may recall the David Cronenberg film “Videodrome,” where the James Woods’ character shot the villain with a gun that was literally part of his own flesh).

ATF agents hoped to derive greater interest from the Arizona state attorney’s office in prosecuting gunrunning suspects. However, although state prosecutors rather mendaciously accused the federal government of delaying action by insisting on even the minutest detail, in fact it was state law that seemed to make it as difficult as possible for federal prosecutors to pursue most cases. All we have to do is look at the way the Adkins case has “progressed”: A “special committee,” set-up to satisfy gun rights advocates in order to “investigate” whether Jude had acted in self-defense or not, has still not revealed its “findings,” insisting that local police provide them with more “evidence” that Jude did not act in such a way.

In any case, the “Fast and Furious” operation was concluded in July 2010, with evidence provided against numerous suspects. But prosecutors refused to go forward in most of the cases until the Terry killing brought unwanted publicity to their inactivity. It also brought attention to “Fast and Furious,” which was predictably employed by the right-wing media and congressional Republicans, who would deliberately distort the facts and their own culpability.

But before that occurred, Voth’s ATF unit received authorization for a wiretap of one suspect, not from Hurley but after a briefing of officials in Washington DC. However, agents pettily complained about what shifts they would serve in, and why they had to do it at all; the wiretapping operation turned out to be short-lived in any case, after the suspect changed his phone number. Then one renegade agent who seemed to have a disdain for management and preferred to do his own thing—the aforementioned Dodson—decided to conduct his own gun-walking operation, purchasing some hand guns and delivering them to a suspect; unfortunately, rather than ensuring that the guns were interdicted, Dodson went on vacation. In his “exposé” to CBS News, Dodson portrayed himself as “opposed” to gun-walking, but he was clearly being disingenuous about his own actions and motivations for coming forward. A memo written by Voth—in which he criticized petty squabbling and juvenile behavior by a few disgruntle agents like Dodson—was deliberately misconstrued by the media as “evidence” that there was wide disagreement about “Fast and Furious” within the ATF. Dodson’s dislike of Voth and his supervisory policies seem to be his principle complaint, but the fact is that it was the “whistleblower” Dodson’s own irresponsibility that has brought “Fast and Furious” into such disrepute.

In any case, it is this incident—and not the Terry killing—that Republicans have largely rested their “case” against Holder and the Justice Department. Meanwhile, Voth reportedly has received death threats; an investigation seems to suggest that this is coming from fellow agents, who have chosen to blame him for Terry’s death and any other agent killed in the line of duty. The Fortune Magazine report also revealed that many of the “Fast and Furious” suspects are paid FBI informants, further muddying the plot.

But no one should be fooled by the true motivation behind this “scandal” and its partisan politicking: The gun lobby’s petrification that the public will become wise to the reality of unrestricted gunrunning from the U.S. into Mexico, and demand a change in gun sales laws. To counteract such a possibility, Republicans and the gun lobby have attempted to paint the ATF as the solely “responsible” for the problem. Such an accusation cannot possibly bear close examination if the news media actually reported the facts instead of Republican propaganda.

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