Benghazigate Breadcrumbs

In the movie Conspiracy Theory, actor Mel Gibson plays Jerry Fletcher, a quirky cab driver who believes that inexplicable world events are evidence of government conspiracies. He publishes his conspiracy theories in a newsletter which no one takes seriously, including the theater audience, until it turns out that one theory is correct. Because he has blown their cover, government agents track him down and try to kill him.

Most things are as they appear to be or as we’re told they are. Except conspiracies. They are secreted for a reason. And they remain undercover until someone suspends disbelief in the obvious explanation and considers other interpretations of the evidence that lead to a different conclusion.

I suspect that’s true of the emerging Benghazigate cover-up.

In early January, then former Secretary of State Clinton was called to testify before a Senate hearing looking into the government’s handling of the Benghazi attack before, during, and after it occurred. Her appearance before the Senate panel was destined to turn out badly because (a) Clinton doesn’t feel she is accountable to anyone, and (b) former Senator Clinton’s demeanor during the questioning suggested she was a bit torqued that she had to answer to those who were once her peers.

Her eruption occurred as Senator Ron Johnson questioned Clinton on what she knew and when she knew it. In view of the overwhelming evidence that the Benghazi attack was planned and perpetrated by al-Qaeda, Johnson was more than a tad interested in the cockamamie story floated by UN Ambassador Rice, Obama, and Clinton that the attack was a response to an online video lampooning the prophet Muhammad. A transcript and video of her barely contained fury with Johnson puts the lie to her apologists who claim the now famous “what difference does it make?” fulmination is quoted out of context. See for yourself. Here’s the text.

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Hmm. As Hamlet’s mom observed, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Nine months have passed since the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his security detail. We’ve heard the Obama administration’s explanations du jour. They are, like most things Obama, a work in progress. Predictably, no one is to blame for Benghazi. Like the IRS and Associated Press revelations, the people who are in charge strangely never seem in charge when incompetence or scandals are uncovered. Last month we heard the testimony of two whistleblowers who blew the administration’s cover story and were demoted when they unsuccessfully tried to have the Benghazi story told truthfully.

The Democrat Party leaders point out – at least once a day – that the failure of the Republicans to uncover a conspiracy is proof that there’s not one. Well, that’s the way it is with conspiracies, Sherlock; the breadcrumbs are usually hard to follow. But there are enough of them here to suggest that the entire story, if not the true story, is yet to be known.

Keep in mind that, as the administration’s story morphed from video to terrorist act, the attack on the Benghazi occurred on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. Hardly a coincidence in that date. Also keep in mind that this tragic debacle occurred within two months of the presidential election. Lots of self-serving interests in keeping that unfavorable story off the front pages. And why Benghazi? The Libyan embassy is in Tripoli 400 miles west. Benghazi is a consulate – a ramshackle building with a nearby annex. There are larger, more prestigious embassies throughout the Middle East and surrounding countries. Why not attack one of those?

Last year I blogged about the Benghazi attack and the deaths which Obama called “bumps in the road.” You can read that blog post to get the details. Today I will try to follow the breadcrumbs

The alleged reason for intervening in the Libyan uprising was to prevent a humanitarian crisis – i.e. a large scale loss of civilian lives caught in the crossfire of the uprising. If the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni uprisings taught anything, however, they taught that there are very few civilians around in an anti-government revolution. Everyone takes sides and there may be more than two sides, although it usually boils down to a ruthless government against everyone else. Everyone else is usually a loose federation of parties whose only common denominator is to get rid of the guy in power.

Such is the modern Middle East which is comprised of ancient tribes and sub-tribes many of whom hate each other. And let’s not forget that the guy in power is no outsider. He was a tribal leader in the bad old days and retains tribal identity once in power. The Arab spring, which Obama laughably calls an outbreak of democracy, is an outbreak of regional civil wars with bad guys on all sides. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to intervene in someone else’s civil war, especially when it’s hard to know who to cheer for. But it is seriously stupid to help destabilize or destroy a stable government without any thought – and certainly no control – concerning the power vacuum that follows … which so far hasn’t produced an outbreak of democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, whose ruler is still in place.

A world yearning to be free is a fanciful if not incorrect belief among western democracies. Democracy and representative government is hard work. Regional stability seems to me to be a more preferable goal even if achieved by means the west finds distasteful. Qaddafi is now gone, with the help of the west, and Libya has been made safe for outside interference, civil unrest, internal power struggles, violence, and the ever-present conflict between secular Sunnis and Shiite zealots. Absent the iron-fisted leaders that kept them in check, the Muslim Brotherhood is free to move about the Middle East – at least most of it.

So, what if humanitarian motives weren’t the real reason for involving ourselves in Libya? Of the more than 30 people rescued from the Benghazi compound only seven were with the State Department. The rest were with the CIA. The CIA, in fact, was the initial presence in Benghazi arriving in February 2011 just after the uprising began. It set up shop in the consulate annex, which it called an office of the State Department consulate. As a practical matter, the State Department presence in Benghazi was simply to provide cover for the CIA. Even Libyan authorities didn’t know the CIA was there.

As the Libyan authority began to collapse so did its weapons arsenal, including a substantial number of shoulder-fired heat-seeking surface to air rocket launchers. It’s estimated that Qaddafi had over 20,000 of them. Since the UN-sanctioned humanitarian effort created an alliance of US, British, and French air forces, the small Libyan air force was suppressed. Thus these weapons, now in the hands of the rebels fighting to topple Qaddafi, were of little value. What the rebels needed was cash and the CIA obligingly supplied it – in return for the weapons. It makes sense that the CIA would have established relations early on with rebel leaders whose palms could be greased to get these weapons.

For what purpose? To get them in the hands of the Syrian rebels who were getting mauled in their effort to topple the Iranian and Russian backed Assad regime. The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship carrying a 400-ton arms cargo docked in a Turkish port. Its cargo would be trucked over the border and into the hands of the Syrian rebels. Shortly after, the Syrian rebels began shooting down Assad’s murderous helicopters and jets – a capability they hadn’t had before.

The CIA, of course, denies its involvement in the Syrian uprising, which would be expected of a government agency whose business is spying. But questions are beginning to be asked by those in Congress who are following the breadcrumbs. Was the CIA the core of the US operations in Benghazi with the State Department as its cover, and was it involved in gun-running? The breadcrumbs indicate yes on both counts.

Conspicuously absent when the four caskets arrived at Andrews Air Force Base was David Petraeus, then the head of the CIA, even though two caskets contained the remains of his men. He says he stayed away to avoid revealing a CIA connection in the Benghazi tragedy. CIA careerists despised him for it.

The cover on the CIA’s role in supplying Syrian rebels was blown a year ago and the CIA most surely concocted the fantasy of the lampooning video, which Clinton, Rice, and Obama so willingly peddled as co-conspirators in the cover-up.

Those asking the breadcrumb questions are mostly Republicans. Those deflecting the questions as a non-issue are mostly Democrats intent on protecting Clinton, who will undoubtedly run for President in 2016.

But there is no way that Clinton’s ambassador, Chris Stevens, did not know about the weapons transfer. He was the face of the US government to the anti-Qaddafi rebels and he therefore had to know that al-Qaeda was fighting with the rebels – contrary to Obama’s recent assertion that al-Qaeda wasn’t involved in Benghazi. Stevens’ principal contact with the Libyan rebels was known to have met with Syrian rebel leaders after Qaddafi was killed. The Syrians crossed into Turkey for the meeting whose purpose was to negotiate how Libya could supply money, arms, and fighters to aid Syrian rebels. Stevens' last meeting on the day he was killed was with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, most likely in connection with weapon shipments through Turkey. How could Clinton not have known what Stevens, her subordinate, knew?

Democrats on investigative committees and the media are trying mightily to divert attention away from Obama – what he knew and when he knew it. He may have broken the law unless he can establish plausible deniability that he knew anything about the weapons shipments to the Syrian rebels. The exposure of the weapons transfer, therefore, raises serious problems for him. The transfer of weapons to al-Qaeda, who are known to be among the fighters in the Syrian uprising, is prevented under a UN arms embargo, which is binding on all member countries.

Moreover, Vladimir Putin has accused the US – Obama – of supplying weapons to “terrorists” who are trying to overthrow the president of a sovereign country. Obama has, of course, denied the charge, claiming US aid in Syria was limited to humanitarian help. What do you call something someone says knowing it’s not true?

The great imponderable here is why the Benghazi attack occurred. The existence of the CIA was unknown in Libya. Posing as State Department staff, the CIA pumped $40 million into Libyan rebel pockets to buy arms from the Qaddafi arsenal for Syria. Thus, the attack could not have been aimed at the CIA.
 

Was Stevens the target? Chris Stevens was very popular among Libyans, many of whom wanted their picture taken with him when he traveled in public. He refused a visible security detail when he was in public places making him more accessible. Those who say he wasn’t the target of the attack, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, ignore the larger question of the attack itself – why it happened at all.

This week, Obama announced that the US would begin supplying arms to the Syrian rebels because Assad had used chemical weapons against them. That’s a ruse allowing the US to do overtly what it has been doing covertly. For those who think outside the dots, a dot worth considering is this one. The Benghazi attack was a hit job – a Middle East tit-for-tat.

The Russians, Iranians, and Syrian government privately knew arms were flowing to the rebels from Libya. They knew the American CIA was involved, at least in Turkey. And they may have known that Stevens was involved in the illegal gun-running. It would not have taken a lot of effort to organize a hit squad in Syria and send them to Libya to do the deed. As fluid as Middle East borders are, a Syrian al-Qaeda group would have blended in with local Libyan militia and perhaps even been welcomed, whether the Syrian’s mission was known or not. The state sponsors of the hit squad would surely have known the gravity of their act. Wars have started over less. Maybe one has already started.

Those are some breadcrumbs worth following.

“If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”

When Obama is speechifying on the campaign stump before an usually receptive crowd, he often goes off script and his words reveal his true self. That happened a couple of weeks ago when he was stumping before a gushing crowd of adorers in Roanoke, Virginia – a must win state for Obama. His comments subsequently created a rage and backlash from entrepreneurs and small business owners around the country whom he let know deserved no credit for their business accomplishments. The government deserves the credit:

… look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Let me deal with the Internet lie straightaway – in fact, I may blog on “the government invented the Internet” horse hockey in the future and include Al Gore’s claim to have helped bring it into existence.

Gordon Crovitz wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal soon after Obama’s “government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off [it]” hogwash. The Crovitz editorial triggered teeth-gnashing among the “yes but” liberal bloggers, articles, and apologists with transparent government sympathies. To them and others who believe that a benevolent and enterprising government ever created anything so others could make money off of it, my offer a couple of blogs ago to sell them the Golden Gate Bridge still stands. My question for them is this: where would government get the capital for such an undertaking since the government possesses no money of its own? Private citizens, of course. Moreover, why and how would government find the economic motivation and managerial ability to create such a commercially successful project as the Internet? This is the same government that can’t run a postal service or Amtrak profitably! This is the same government that invested a trillion dollars of the people’s money in Solyndra, Beacon Power, Spectra Watt, Brightsource, Eastern Energy, Raser Technologies, and an unending list of snake oil schemes, all of which are bankrupt.

The tree of technology has many branches. Technology develops – indeed morphs – by borrowing the fruits of lower branches and using them to make something quite different than where the lower branch was headed. Henry Ford, for example, combined well proven technologies – the meat packing industry (disassembly), the canning industry (continuous flow production), cereals and granaries (conveyors and hoppers), and the machine tools industry (interchangeable parts) – to create the automobile and its continuous flow manufacturing process. That Ford had no government help doing this is notable. Moreover, by his own admission, he invented none of these technologies. Yet only a fool would deny that Ford’s borrowing from the technology tree and his reconfiguration of existing technologies into a new thing was not an “invention.”

That’s the way technology and business breakthroughs develop. If the meat packing or canning industry were to claim that they invented the auto and assembly line, it would be laughable. In like manner, the ARPANET and modern Internet are distant cousins, but it’s ludicrous to claim – as the government apologists do – that the ARPANET became the Internet and, therefore, since the government financed the development of ARPANET (for a totally different reason and with taxpayer money to boot) that the government should be credited as the creator of the Internet.

Continuing, it is outrageous for Obama to claim that entrepreneurial achievements pale because “somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.” Uh, say again? The “somebody” who invested in roads and bridges would be individual and business taxpayers last time I checked. The builders of the roads and bridges would be private designers and contractors. The rationale for building roads and bridges would be the over-regulated, over-taxed commercial activity created by the sweat and risk-taking of private businesses, last time I checked. Absent private demand for infrastructure, you’d have another Amtrak government boondoggle – a train that no one uses and whose continued losses are foisted on taxpayers.

Obama’s socialist worldview, which slipped out in the Roanoke speech, comes from his own experience. Obama naturally thinks others are the fount of every blessing because that’s the way it was in his life. Without well-heeled, influential, and often white sponsors to shepherd him into privileged opportunities, make doors open, arrange influencers to throw their connections behind him, where would he be? He has never held a real job. He has never accomplished anything of particular merit. He’s not even managed anything in government such as a city mayor or state governor must do. All of his life, Obama has been a taker, not a maker. All of his accomplishments – including fundraising and campaign management – were done by others. Even as President, he didn’t manage his own political agenda. ObamaCare was delegated to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and in effect Obama said, “Let me know when it’s done and I’ll sign it.” A guy for whom all the doors are opened and the heavy lifting is done by others would obviously think that that’s the way it is in business formation – all of the important work is done by others including the federal government.

Of course, realizing how politically and utterly stupid Obama’s Roanoke comments were, his handlers went into full damage control mode, telling the press that the outrage sparked by his remarks was due to “out of context” reporting by the media. No it wasn’t. The text of the speech is posted by the White House Press Secretary’s Office online. Inconveniently, the speech video is also online dismissing any argument that the text of the speech said one thing and the actual speech said another.

It’s plain to see in the video that from the outset, the adoring crowd and the gushing periodic interruptions of “Four more years” became the Siren’s Song that lured Obama into revealing the real deal Obama – the Obama without the fraudulent façade of his public persona replete with polished, teleprompter-fed rhetoric. Ah! Would that Obama had used beeswax as Odysseus and his fellow seafarers were encouraged to do, for he revealed that he really does believe business creators are undeserving of the success of their accomplishments – that lots of smart people and lots of hard working people labored out of sight, unrecognized for their contributions, and were exploited by the guy who gets the glory – Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Charles Schwab … you name them – because that’s the way Obama’s world works.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who believed that his success was a solitary accomplishment. Not only did they know that their success was helped by others, but also they made sure to reward the helping hands, in some cases making the key contributors very wealthy. But without Steve Jobs there would be no Apple, I don’t care how many smart, hard working people might have been employed there. Without Bill Gates, there would not have been a Microsoft despite the contributions of others. Without Fred Smith there would have been no Federal Express and who knows where American business would be today if his “Absolutely, Positively, Overnight” had not replaced the glacially incompetent performance of the postal service.

Curiously, Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor of Cherokee Nation fame, whose bush league senatorial campaign to oust Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) from Teddy Kennedy’s old seat is funnier to watch than old Laurel and Hardy movies, personifies the same anti-business instincts of Obama. A speech she delivered last September sounds as if Obama plagiarized it. Listen to her:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“The rest of us?” You mean there is one group that uses the roads, the educated workforce, the police and fire protection – the apparent “takers” – and then there’s “the rest of us” – the “makers” – who paid for these munificent blessings? Pray tell, Professor Full of Gas – or whatever you call yourself when imitating a real Cherokee – who paid for roads, education, and public safety? Uh? A little louder Full of Gas, I can’t hear you. Ah, the taxpayer, you say. Well, that eliminates half of the workforce because they pay no taxes. So “the rest of us” would be the other half, i.e. private businesses and the workforce they created – society’s real makers – wouldn’t you agree? In fact, half of “the rest of us” would include the 400 people who pay 50% of all taxes paid. Why, I could put 400 people in my office building, Gas, and still have room to spare.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I don’t think entrepreneurs need risible investment advice from Elizabeth Warren, who’s never created a single job or created wealth for others, to tell them to “pay forward for the next kid.”

The entrepreneurs I know feel an enormous debt to society and devote their wealth and expertise to generous giving for a good part of their lifetimes. Andrew Carnegie, who sold his steel business to J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel Company and became the richest man in the world as a consequence, gave most of it away before he died. In 1889, he wrote The Gospel of Wealth, whose homilies advocated that all personal wealth beyond what was needed to care for one's family should be regarded as a trust fund administered for the benefit of the community.

When I hear Obama, Warren, and people of that ilk talking about achievement, private enterprise, the economics of equitable distribution – subjects that are light years outside of their expertise – I’m reminded of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation of a dog walking on his hind legs – it’s not done well and it’s surprising that it’s done at all.

President Ronald Reagan got it right when he said in a June 1983 speech to the National Federation of Independent Business

The character and conscience of small business built this nation. … They are the heroes of economic life and those who begrudge them their rewards demonstrate a failure to understand their role and their promise. Well wouldn’t it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America? Those who create most of our new jobs like the owners of stores down the street, the faithful who support our churches, synagogues, schools and communities. The brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America. That’s where miracles are made. Not in Washington DC.

Contrast Reagan’s view with Obama’s as shown in the farcical Life of Julia appearing on his election campaign website. Julia’s partner in life is not a husband, although she does decide to have a child; her partner is the federal government à la Barack Obama. The all-wise, ever-nurturing, deep-pocketed avuncular government cares for Julia from cradle to grave. Why, it’s just like “Whistle up a Rainbow”! Whenever you’re in need just clap your hands and the government Genie is there to help. This is the way Obama sees life – the Life of Julia, a production co-starring government and people incapable of taking charge of their own lives.

There’s no room in that picture for Howard Schultz, who took a commodity – coffee – and turned it into Starbucks, a multi-billion dollar business. There’s no room for András Gróf, a Hungarian Jew who survived Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the Soviet Red Army invasion of his homeland, the Hungarian uprising, and who came to the US at age 20 with essentially no money in his pockets and unable to speak English. He taught himself English, maneuvered his way through three college degrees, including a Ph.D., anglicized his name to Andrew “Andy” Grove, and joined Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore as the third employee of a start-up company that became Intel, which he would guide as CEO through its most productive years. About 90% of the computers made today run on Intel microprocessors.

In Obama’s view of the world there could never be a Clarence Birdseye who, at the beginning of the 20th century, was taught by the indigenous Inuit of Labrador and Newfoundland to ice fish in temperatures 40 degrees below zero. He noticed when he caught fish, they froze immediately in the frigid air and when they were defrosted, sometimes much later, they were as fresh as the moment they were caught. With $7 in capital he developed the process of flash-freezing, went bankrupt, and started over building a second company. Distribution was a problem because grocers had no way to hold frozen food, so Birdseye had to invent the entire distribution chain, including the refrigerated rail cars and retail frozen food display cases in order to have a successful venture. Clarence Birdseye pioneered the frozen food we eat today and his company is still with us as the Birds Eye Foods division of General Food Corporation.

People like Birdseye, Grove, Moore, Noyce, Schultz, Jobs, Gates, Schwab, Fred Smith – people who changed the quality of American life and with it the world – have no place in Obama’s world or speeches because they weren’t co-productions of government. In contrast theirs are stories of failure and determination, under-capitalization, and hard-earned success, often after combatting interference by incompetent government.

To wit:

As he waxed eloquent in his Roanoke speech, Obama claimed government credit for building the Golden Gate Bridge. He obviously hasn’t read Kevin Star’s book, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge. Not only did the federal government not build the bridge as Obama claimed but it did everything to prevent its building for almost a decade. It’s a tale that would make Kafka envious.

Most local San Franciscans wanted a bridge but the property for its logical end points was owned by the government – more specifically, the Department of War – which wouldn’t sell. Political pressure eventually forced the sale, but the government refused to sell to a private contractor. The only acceptable buyer would be a state commission. Federal unions held up the project even longer as they tried to elbow their way to the table for a cut of the action. The advent of the Great Depression of 1929 finally called a halt to government silliness as bond financing dried up and doomed the project. Or so it seemed. Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini, Chairman and President of the Bank of America, who made private capital available to build the bridge without union labor, which contributed to bringing it in under budget. Not a dime of government money was involved. Not an hour of government participation occurred. The Golden Gate Bridge was a production of private enterprise.

Now you know the rest of the story.

The novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, was strongly individualistic. She is best known for her works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In a lecture given in late 1961 she observed:

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

Vote November 6. And send this blog link to your friends asking them to do likewise.

Fast and Infuriating -- Part II

(continued from last week’s blog post, Fast and Infuriating – Part I. Please read it first if you haven’t)

With the testimony of the F&F whistleblowers complete, it was the government’s turn to face the Issa committee investigation. The committee’s questions centered on what and when did Holder and Obama know about F&F. More contradictions – or lies, take your pick. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) grilled Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich (DOJ). Again, space limits putting the entire testimony in this blog, but Representative Chaffetz seems to have captured his frustration nicely in this response to one of Weich’s evasions:

… what I don’t understand is, when you go back and look at the record, President Obama knew about it back in March. If the President knew about it, why didn’t the Attorney General know about it? And why are you issuing a memo in May, when the President of the United States, in an interview with, I believe, Univision, is saying we know that there were some mistakes made? How does that happen? The President makes this comment, and then, still, months later, you have the gall to issue a memo to this Congress saying that it is just false, it is not true. That does not add up.

In July, Issa received secret testimony from Acting ATF Director Melson who, after being blocked from speaking for months, was told by DOJ that he could testify outside of his official capacity with a personal attorney present. He confirmed DOJ’s knowledge of F&F, unauthorized wiretaps, and the gruesome details of F&F tactics his department had used. Much to Issa’s surprise, Melson became physically ill as he revealed the gritty details of F&F and he appeared to be distancing himself from DOJ. Melson revealed that the unwillingness to cooperate was because the "wagons were being circled around Obama’s political appointees."

But the Obama administration wasn’t ready to play softball. On August 15,2011William Burns, the Deputy Secretary of State reporting to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Mexico to meet with its Foreign Secretary. Pavlich would not reveal her source which gave her the content of the meeting, because it was provided on the condition of anonymity, but Pavlich says the source is credible. Burns gave the Mexican government an ultimatum. Mute its criticism of F&F or forego the $500 million that the US paid Mexico under the Merida Initiative to combat drug violence and traffic. After that meeting the official outrage from Mexico abated.

In 1986 Congress passed the Whistleblower Act and No Fear Act expressly to protect people who come forward to disclose corruption and illegality in government activities. The DOJ is responsible for enforcing these laws, but when it comes to DOJ misbehavior, we have a classic fox in the hen house protection system. DOJ, FBI, IRS, Homeland Security, Immigration, and the DEA rarely worked independently on the same case – each had members on the F&F team.

So when ATF Agent Jay Dobyns infiltrated the Hells Angels gang, dozens of its members were sent to prison, blowing his cover. A contract was put out on him which involved kidnapping him and injecting him with the AIDS virus, kidnapping and torturing his 15-year old daughter, and kidnapping his wife to videotape her being gang raped. Dobyns reported this to Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, asking for protection of his family. Newell refused. Newell had a reputation for punishing those who questioned his authority, so when Dobyns told others in ATF that he and his family were denied protection by Newell, Newell was determined to make Dobyns life a living hell since he couldn’t fire him.

Shortly afterward, Dobyns house was set on fire at 3a as his family slept inside. Although all escaped safely, Newell doubled down. He accused Dobyns of setting the fire. That served only to infuriate Dobyns’ friends who reported Newell to his superiors in Washington. Later investigation by the Inspector General confirmed that indeed Dobyns was denied reasonable protection from a work-related threat. Yet Newell was never reprimanded or removed from office. He remained head of the Phoenix office when Obama took office.

When John Dodson complained about the laxity of F&F operation, his rifle was taken away and every agent in the Phoenix office was told that if they expected to have a career with ATF they had best stay away from Dodson. He was no longer allowed to participate in operations. His supervisor, David Voth, required unnecessary written reports of his daily activities. Ultimately, his ATF badge was taken and he was transferred to the FBI. When Dodson gave testimony to Issa’s committee and refused to sign a retraction, he was confronted by a supervisor in a hall of the Phoenix office who screamed that any agent who communicated with Dodson would find it detrimental to his ATF career.

Vince Cefalu always wanted to be a cop. His hero was Frank Serpico, the New York cop who exposed police corruption in the city’s police department. A movie starring Al Pacino as Serpico was produced in 1973 and highlighted five years of torment that Serpico endured. Testifying before the Knapp Commission in 1971, Serpico said he hoped no future police officer would suffer what he had gone through at the hands of his superiors when he went public with police corruption.

Yet when Cefalu discovered the procedures for getting authority to wiretap were being circumvented by ATF and reported it to his superiors, they told him to forget it unless he wanted to be reassigned to Fargo, ND. He went over the heads of the Phoenix office and reported the infractions to Washington, which told him if he ever broke the chain of command again, there would be severe consequences. He was officially reprimanded on trumped up charges five times, ordered to get a psychiatric evaluation, given two termination proposals, sent on long assignments to separate his from his family – and all of this had the official sanction of his bosses. The worst part, Cefalu said, was that people in the bureau who had been his friends for 20 years ignored him. They had gotten the message that to be seen with Vince is hazardous to your career.

Cefalu co-founded CleanUpATF.org, an online forum to disclose corruption in the agency. Stories flooded in.

The Issa committee labored on summoning members of ATF, DOJ, and Homeland Security to appear and answer questions about the government’s role in F&F, who knew what and when, details, and names. Documents were so redacted that they made no sense. Some documents were totally redacted and thus useless. Most witnesses were uncooperative. One of the subpoenaed witnesses was "restationed" to Iraq, putting him well beyond the committee’s reach. Eric Holder’s testimony gave new meaning to the term buffoonery, at one point causing Issa to conclude:

It appears your latest testimony has reached a new low. You now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility into serious doubt.

The White House circled the wagons. Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, said in an October 2011 press briefing in which a question regarding F&F came up,

The bottom line is the Attorney General’s testimony to both the House and the Senate was consistent and truthful. He said in both March and May of this year that he became aware of the questionable tactics deployed in the Fast and Furious Operation in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly. He asked the inspector general to investigate the matter, demonstrating how seriously they took them.

Obama told reporters, "I have complete confidence in Attorney General Holder, in how he handles his office," causing Issa to respond:

The President has said he has full confidence in this attorney general. I have no confidence in a president who has confidence in an attorney general who has in fact not terminated or dealt with the individuals, including key lieutenants, who from the very beginning had some knowledge, and long before Brian Terry was gunned down, knew enough to stop this program.

Issa’s committee obtained emails that made hash of Holder’s testimony, causing him to go from "I didn’t know about the operation until a few weeks ago" to "I knew a year ago, but didn’t know any details" to "my aide was informed of the details right after Brian Terry’s death." But Holder has been consistent in refusing to accept responsibility for F&F. Asked by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, if he had apologized to the Terry family, Holder said he had not. Asked, then, if he had contacted them, Holder again said he had not. His rationale? "It is not fair to say the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry."

Both Terry and Zapata were ATF agents, both were killed, and both were part of Homeland Security headed by Janet Napolitano, former two-term governor of Arizona and familiar with the state’s Mexican drug violence. Yet in testimony before a Senate committee in September 2011 Napolitano denied knowing anything about F&F – despite the toll it had taken among her agents.

But Pavlich’s sources say otherwise. "When she says that [she] and Attorney General Eric Holder have not discussed it, that is a lie. That’s why they keep asking her those questions in the Judicial, Oversight, Homeland Security Committee hearings. They’ve asked her that same question twice and she’s lied twice," said an anonymous source. "There are five emails linking her to Holder. They go back to two days after it happened – the first email was two days after Brian was killed." The emails show Holder discussing Brian Terry’s death with Napolitano. Custom and Border Protection agents also report to her and would have to have had Napolitano’s permission to let guns cross the border. Moreover, parallel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports have to be written for every ATF report by the co-case ICE agent who briefs Napolitano. There is no way she could not have known about F&F.

But even in the unlikely event that Holder kept her in the dark, which emails refute, she won’t get off without consequences. Lying under oath to a congressional committee carries perjury charges. "Let me tell you one thing about Janet," Pavlich’s informant said, "Janet will be lucky if she does not to go to prison."

In the final analysis, the lingering question is: What was the purpose of F&F? Only a fool would believe the government’s answer that it was to take down the drug cartels. How was it to accomplish that? Sure, the guns that walked across the border could be connected to a crime scene – after the fact, of course, but not before. But neither the guns nor the crime could be connected to a drug lord. If the purpose was to gather evidence against straw purchasers, why weren’t they arrested before they crossed the border with what has been estimated as nearly $700,000 worth of guns?

The one sure thing that F&F did is connect Mexican gun crimes to American gun shops, even though their illegal gun sales were forced by ATF under threat of losing their seller license. Was that the purpose – to make a case for gun control laws that otherwise would never make it through Congress? Obama and his coterie of Leftists are avowed opponents of the Second Amendment. While the F&F fiasco was happening, the Obama administration used it to expand the government’s gun database by requiring all of the 8,700 firearm dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to report all sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles within five consecutive business days, if the rifles are larger than .22 caliber and use detachable magazines. Obama would like to see this highly controversial executive order made the law of the land for all states.

An argument could be made – which is logically consistent with the known facts in F&F – that ATF was "deputized" by the Obama administration to sell guns to bad guys knowing they would use them to commit mayhem, and thus proving a lie that border state gun shops, particularly those selling assault weapons, are the cause of Mexican violence. The hoped-for public outrage would pressure Congress to reinstitute the assault rifle ban, which Holder says remains a policy priority of the Obama administration.

Suppose Obama is reelected in 2012. How might he advance his anti-gun agenda? Unless the Republicans and Second Amendment Democrats are routed in the fall – an unlikely possibility – Obama won’t have the legislature to help him. Nor will he have the country behind him. The NRA has four million members, one in three people owns a gun, and Gallup says reinstatement of the assault rifle ban, support for new gun laws and gun regulations, and public anti-gun antagonism is at an all-time low. But Obama has shown in his first four years that he doesn’t need Congress to get his agenda enacted. He uses executive orders – as he and Eric Holder have done in enacting the expanded gun registration database.

A reelected Obama can also structure the federal judiciary with more judges who are anti-Second Amendment. A Washington DC federal district judge upheld a suit against the Holder four-state gun database executive order. Obama can also stack the appellate courts. He has already appointed two Supreme Court judges – Kagan and Sotomayor – who oppose individual gun ownership. As Thurgood Marshall’s clerk, Kagan wrote anti-Second Amendment memos and drafted a Clinton executive order outlawing high powered rifles. Sotomayor has argued that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one, and that local governments have the authority to limit gun ownership.

Although Hillary Clinton has said she’s had it with a second term as Secretary of State, she and Obama support allowing the UN to regulate US gun laws. Shocked? Obama said his administration supports the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Its provisions extend even to accessories like scopes and magazines. President Bush refused to participate in this treaty, but Obama has said he’d like to see the treaty ratified as a way to show America’s respect for international norms – translated: to show that we Americans are civilized in a world that includes Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Islamic radicals, and other paragons of civilized behavior.

The UN’s definition of "criminal activity" in the treaty is so broad that an American gun owner in Tennessee could find himself prosecuted for owning a hunting rifle. Hunting weapons have not been excluded from the treaty. And even if it were, why would Americans allow the officials they elect to be dictated to by unelected UN bureaucrats, many of whom represent countries best described as thugocracies? If you don’t have enough to worry about, read the details of the ATT, which should be ready to go to press in July. This treaty will require every country to keep track of weapons sold or transferred and report transactions to the UN! Guess which countries won’t abide by this provision.

Finally, a second Obama term could bring us more F&Fs. In his 2013 budget, Obama stripped language that would prevent other F&Fs from happening. Wonder why?

There has been uncommon secrecy surrounding the murder scene of Brian Terry. When Napolitano’s aide, US Attorney Dennis Burke resigned to pursue a private sector career, the Terry case was transferred out of Arizona to San Diego where a federal judge immediately sealed it, preventing the Terry family or media from seeing any of the information in the case. Using a stunt only the federal judiciary would pull, the reasons for sealing the case are sealed.

Yet details continue to leak out. Two guns were found at the Brian Terry murder site which were traced to F&F. Eye witnesses say there was a third gun and the serial number of the missing gun was taken. But its existence has never been revealed. Why?

The investigations of F&F thus far have revealed that the FBI was working with at least six informants. These were truly bad guys – killers with shady pasts. They were able to infiltrate Mexican cartels because they once were – or still are – members of them. Senator Grassley and Darrell Issa believe one of the informants was a double agent who was communicating or conspiring with someone the ATF was observing. Pavlich has an anonymous source who allegedly told her that the third gun at the Terry murder scene was hidden by the FBI because it was linked to their confidential informant or his brother. If so, the ultimate tragedy for the Terry family would be that their son was killed by an F&F weapon provided by the country he served and fired by a man paid and now protected by a US government agency.

Fast and Infuriating – Part I

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve casually followed the news on the government program called Fast and Furious. I knew that it had something to do with gun-running and the US government’s attempts to track the flow of illegal guns into Mexico which were being used in gun-related violence in that country and ours along the border states.

Then I heard an interview of Katie Pavlich, the news editor of Townhall magazine. She spoke about her just-released book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up, and I was so shocked by what she had to say that I immediately ordered the book and spent this past Sunday afternoon reading it. My blood pressure rose with each of its 200-plus pages. I urge you and your friends to read it before voting in the 2012 election.

This story hasn’t developed legs because, predictably, no Fast and Furious investigative reporting has been done and published by the mainstream media. The exception is Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and three reporters with the Los Angeles Times. Pavlich compares this scandal to Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, but unlike those scandals, we don’t see the non-stop reporting, heads rolling, a presidential apology. No, we see the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major metro papers giving Obama the cover he needs in a close election year. If this scandal becomes widely known and believed, Obama will not be reelected and the Democrats will lose both houses of Congress.

To keep within the word budget of my blog, I can only give the highlights of the Fast & Furious scandal, which is unfolding as I write. A Contempt of Congress resolution has been prepared this week to be served on Eric Holder. Two Democrats have signed on and 31 Democrats wrote a letter to Obama asking him to order Holder to testify and produce documents. It’s risen to that level of seriousness in a showdown between the legislative and executive branches. Let’s hope Speaker Boehner has the guts to bring the resolution to the floor of the House for a vote. 

This blog will cover two weeks. Even then I’m leaving out a lot of important detail. I hope these two blogs will whet your interest in reading the book. Full disclosure: I have never owned a gun in my life and I have never been a hunter.

Fast and Furious (F&F) began as a program under the Bush administration except it was then called Operation Wide Receiver. Its purpose was to interdict the illegal flow of arms into Mexico. When the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) lost track of some of the guns that crossed the border, the program was shut down.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is an avowed opponent of Second Amendment gun ownership rights. In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote of stories his grandmother had told him about white men with guns who terrorized the Kenyan village of his ancestors. Moreover, Obama was mentored by Lawrence Tribe, the liberal anti-gun Harvard law professor who influenced Obama’s positions on many social issues. Candidate Obama famously spoke derisively of Southerners (who are more likely than Northerners to grow up with guns) characterizing them as “clinging to their guns and Bibles.” It’s hard to read Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up without believing it was part of a larger plan to scuttle or severely limit Second Amendment rights from the start.

Years ago the ATF was staffed by people whose careers had started as street cops but transitioned their career to wear the gold badge of an ATF officer. They worked their way up the organization by hard work, not influence and politics. But somewhere along the way, all of that changed. The old bosses who wore cheap suits from Sears and stuck an old six-shot Smith and Wesson in their rear waistband were replaced by guys who wore monogramed shirts with French cuffs. The last thing they wanted was gun oil on their Armani jackets. The old dogs who spent decades on the street perfecting their craft as ATF agents were gradually replaced by wunderkinds with little in the way of street smarts which comes from shoe leather police work.

In 1995 Time magazine described ATF as “the most hated federal agency in America,” no doubt helped by Janet Reno’s use of ATF to engineer the infamous Ruby Ridge killings of Vicki Weaver and her teenage son and her later incineration of 75 Branch Davidians including 20 children and two pregnant women. Within Reno’s second-rate mind there was always a third-rate mind struggling to get out. As her tenure thankfully drew to a close in 2000, her mismanagement of the Elián Gonzalez affair showed us what happens when stupidity and power are combined in one person. ATF was shifted to Homeland Security when that agency was created partly to resuscitate its fouled-up image.

Another change in ATF came with the Obama administration’s redefinition of who the bad guys are. Under Wide Receiver they were the straw purchasers who bought the guns as agents for the drug lords. And they were the drug lords who wreaked havoc in Mexico and the US border states. But as we shall see, over time under F&F, the bad guys became the gun dealers who not only sold the guns to the straw purchasers but, knowing the sales were illegal, were ordered by ATF to make the sales. The dealers were told that ATF was after the big fish, not the couriers. And the dealers were reminded that their licenses and livelihoods could be taken by the ATF at any moment if they didn’t play ball.

During one of his visits with Obama, Mexican President Calderon and Obama had a joint news conference. In it, both presidents had the gall to ignore the cartels that were making billions from illegal drug sales in the US, they had the gall to ignore the corrupt Mexican police, who many times were in cahoots with the drug lords, they had the gall to ignore the Mexican politicians who were bribed by the cartels to look the other way … and instead both presidents pointed their fingers at the American gun dealers who had been set up by F&F.

The Phoenix lead case agent for F&F was Hope MacAllister. One of her direct reports was John Dodson, a straight shooter, former Virginia state patrol officer who had joined ATF in order to work on big federal cases and see them through to the end instead of having the feds take away jurisdiction. MacAllister gave Dodson the names of 45 straw purchasers who would be visiting local Phoenix gun shops to make illegal buys. Dodson was told that he was allowed to observe and follow, but he could not arrest an illegal guy buyer. He could tap cell phones, but not text messages – which was the way the drug lords communicated with their straw purchasers. The gun buys were allowed to “walk” right over the border into the hands of the cartels. Dodson was stunned by the operation. In his training he was told no one left for home and hearth until an illegal gun purchase was found and firearms were back in enforcement hands. But F&F was different.

One of the purchases Dodson observed from an unmarked car over a live video feed – but was prevented from interdicting – was made by Jaime Avila in November 2009.

On December 15, 2010 an alert was issued by the US Attorney’s office of the ATF that shots had been fired in a shootout near Nogales, AZ and that a border agent was down. The agent was Brian Terry. He was dead. The gun that killed him had been purchased by Avila and was one of two found at the murder site. Although ATF agents had been told to keep their mouths shut, some had had enough of the incompetence in ATF and the F&F operation. Whistleblowers and two bloggers revealed the existence of F&F to the public at CleanUpATF.org. Moreover, they disclosed that guns were allowed to “walk” into Mexico without the knowledge of the Mexican government.

Anonymous users of the website were livid in their comments. They had protested that Mexican authorities were intentionally kept in the dark, but their protests had been overridden by the Gucci-shod bureaucrats in the Phoenix ATF office and ultimately their higher ups in Washington. These were not hare-brained conspiracy theorists. Bloggers Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea used their network of ATF informants to vet the information that was anonymously passed to them. The F&F genie was out of the bottle.

Vanderboegh and Codrea contacted the offices of three senators known for their steadfast support of the Second Amendment – Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). The senators were shocked that a government agency charged with preventing illegal gun trafficking would actually perpetrate it. Despite the risk to his career, John Dodson came forward and gave closed door testimony to Grassley and his staff. He gave the grisly stats – hundreds of Mexicans had been murdered with guns bought illegally in the US with the cooperation of the ATF. Dodson was granted whistleblower protection. But being the straight-up agent he was, he reported to his ATF superiors what he had done when he returned to Phoenix. His bosses called him into a private office and ordered him to write a repudiation of his testimony. He refused.

Grassley demanded an explanation of F&F from the acting director of the Phoenix ATF office, Ken Melson. Melson refused. Grassley reminded him that interfering with a congressional investigation is a felony. He also reminded him that interfering with or retaliating against a whistleblower, such as demanding a retraction from Dodson, is also a felony. Melson sought advice from Attorney General Eric Holder’s deputy, Lanny Breuer who assured Melson that the DOJ supported him 100%. When a response was finally sent to Grassley, it repudiated the claim that ATF supported the sale of weapons to straw purchasers. The letter went on to lay down a marker that the DOJ would not cooperate further because ongoing investigations were in process which conveniently prevented further revelations.

But the hits just kept on coming.

On February 15, 2011 two special immigration and customs enforcement agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were driving on a busy Mexican highway, headed back into the US after a meeting in Mexico City. Their Chevy Suburban was armored and the car carried diplomatic tags, but the agents weren’t armed because Mexican law prohibits it. A car pulled up beside them and gestured that they should pull over. They refused. After a brief car chase, they were forced off the road, disabling the vehicle. A man approached carrying an AK 47. Zapata lowered the window slightly to show his diplomat badge. Ignoring it, the assailant shoved the barrel of the gun into the car and let loose with a hail of bullets, killing Zapata instantly and wounding Avila severely in the legs. The AK 47 was traced to an F&F purchase.

Now the mainstream press, specifically Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, got interested. She first reported the existence of F&F and then interviewed John Dodson on air. He told Attkisson all of the details of the F&F operations, and then he added that she now had the testimony of a first-hand eye witness and he dared anyone listening to say he was not telling the truth. When Attkisson asked if Dodson had any words for the family of Brian Terry, tears welled in his eyes as he said that he was sorry for their loss and by coming forward he had now done all he could for Brian.

After months of her digging up details on F&F, the White House decided it was time to give Attkisson a piece of its mind (if it has one.) Communications Director Tracy Schmaler contacted her by phone and screamed at her. White House spokesman Eric Shultz let fly a stream of expletives at her. Why couldn’t she be reasonable like the New York Times and Washington Post, they asked?

“I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it,” Attkisson said later. The New York Times and Washington Post weren’t being “reasonable” they were acting like the press secretaries for the White House.

Because the Democrats have the majority in the Senate, Senator Grassley has no subpoena power to compel the DOJ to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee of which he is the ranking minority member. However, the Republicans have the majority in the House and since the 2010 election which gave it to them, Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform has used his subpoena power to make a number of Obama administration officials sweat in his committee room. He planned a “no holds barred” investigation of F&F. “It’s going to be acrimonious, there’s no question. [Obama] has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” Issa said on the Rush Limbaugh show just before the November 2010 elections put him in the Chairmanship. Now he intended to prove it.

On March 16, 2011 Issa wrote a letter to the head of the ATF giving him until the end of the month to provide the documents he and Grassley requested. ATF did not comply. Two weeks later Issa issued his first subpoena – to Melson. Issa demanded details about Terry’s murder, the weapons found, emails, internal memos – a laundry list of documents – so that he could get the names of the DOJ officials who authorized this “fatally stupid” program. ATF remained uncooperative, citing “ongoing investigations” that, if you can believe it, prevented elected representatives of the people from overseeing the activities of unelected bureaucrats. Issa would not be put off. If DOJ failed to comply with a congressional subpoena, Eric Holder would be held in contempt of Congress – something the Obama administration doesn’t need in an election year.

Issa was determined to get Holder on the record under oath and on May 3, 2011 he found his opportunity. Holder was to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, of which Issa is also a member, about routine activities of DOJ. The day before he was to testify, Holder and Janet Napolitano (Head of Homeland Security which includes ATF) visited the White House. Since both are cabinet officers, the procedure for their visits is to sign the log and give the purpose of the visit. The log for their visit has no purpose. It shows only that they were to meet with Obama in the East Room. It’s inconceivable that F&F was not discussed nor that Obama was not briefed on their appearance on Capitol Hill the next day.

It would take too much space to include Holder’s testimony before Issa in this blog. You can read it for yourself in pages 94 through 100. Suffice it to say that Holder was evasive and contradictory. One could conclude that his testimony under oath was not truthful, which is a polite way of saying he lied.

The next month on June 15, 2011 Issa set a committee hearing of the F&F affair. For the first time some of the whistleblowers would publicly tell what they knew about the ATF and DOJ involvement. Dodson was summoned. The day before his testimony was to be given, he was handed a gag order from DOJ forbidding him to speak about F&F lest he compromise an “ongoing investigation” – the same canard DOJ cooked up to stonewall congressional investigation of this operation. Dodson ignored the order and testified anyway, saying F&F was not a botched “sting” operation, it was mandated from the outset to put “loads” of weapons in the hands of criminals. Agent Peter Forcelli, also a whistleblower, said murders will be committed for years to come because of F&F. Brian Terry’s mother and family testified that to this day, the government had refused to give them the details surrounding Brian’s death. Dodson wept as he listened to the Terry family speak about a man he never knew.

(Continued next week)