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Congress votes contempt for AG Holder

June 20, 2012 16:39

In a vote 0f 23-17 Attorney General Eric Holder is held in contempt of congress for lying to and hiding documents from the committee investigating the botched gun scandal known as Fast and Furious.

In Operation Fast and Furious, the ATF allowed American guns — including AK-47 assault rifles and military-grade, .50 caliber sniper rifles — to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to violent drug cartels. The cover story was the goal of tracking the weapons after they’ve been used. Very few guns were tracked and no arrests were made.

The supposed goal of the operation was to track the guns in Mexico to the bigger fish. But does that make sense? Russ Vaughn writing at American Thinker points out the fallacy in that argument:

Here we had an operation mounted by the executive branch of the United States, an operation which had as its stated goal — after being outed, that is — the targeting of Mexican drug lords on sovereign Mexican soil. Yet this was done without the knowledge of anyone in the Mexican government. Quite clearly, a secret and subversive operation had been conceived and implemented against our sister nation to the south — subversive because, again, quite clearly, the American government was subverting the sovereign authority of Mexico without that nation’s knowledge. If the goal was, as stated later by DoJ, to track guns into Mexico to the purchasing sources in the cartels, then was there not some diplomatic requirement to notify the Mexican government that we were arming their most violent criminal elements? And what was the need for keeping our own BATF agents in Mexico — the only American agents with Mexican presence to conduct such surveillance and tracking operations on Mexican soil — equally in the dark?

The Obama administration deliberately allowed guns to go to Mexican drug cartels so that it could make the claim that a gun ban is needed in the US. The political operation turned disastrous when those guns also showed up in the murder of a U.S. border Patrol agent and other crimes in the U.S. Hundreds of Mexican citizens have died and much more violence will happen with the weapons still at large.

Early in their first term, Obama, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and various other anti-gun Democrats claimed 90% of the weapons used by Mexican drug cartels were American and therefore stricter gun laws were needed to stem the violence. This myth spread through the liberal media that loves stories that blame guns.

STRATFOR Global Intelligence showed the numbers behind the myth:

According to the report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican officials in 2008. Out of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them, (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.

This means that the 87 percent figure comes from the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by the Mexicans or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. The 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing.

Since the allegations of American weapons being the primary source of guns for the cartels proved false, Obama, Holder et al. needed more American guns to be used in the Mexican violence to justify executive order gun bans. They knew more restrictive gun laws would not get through congress even when Democrats had majorities in both the senate and the house.

The ends justifies the means. It’s the Alinsky way. And apparently it’s the Holder and Obama way too.