Remembering Janet Napolitano

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano announced last week that she will be leaving the Obama Administration in September. She will become president of the California University System – a position which pays $750,000 annually, almost triple her current federal salary. The move has yet to be approved by the California Board of Regents, but approval is not in doubt. Napolitano was nominated by a secretive search committee made up of several regents.

Napolitano’s nomination culminated a process of unknown duration that considered over 300 candidates. Napolitano, who has no advanced degree other than a law degree and has no experience in academic administration, was selected, according to the committee chair Sherry Lansing, for her “passion for education and for being “a remarkably gifted candidate.” Are we talking about the same Janet Napolitano? Having spent 20 years in university academia I know how universities function. There are more big ego PhDs per square yard of university real estate than any other place on earth. Universities are as unlike government organizations as black and white or night and day or similes and metaphors.

Ms. Lansing continued,

While some may consider her to be an unconventional choice, Secretary Napolitano is without a doubt the right person at the right time to lead this incredible university. She will bring fresh eyes and a new sensibility – not only to UC, but to all of California. She will stand as a vigorous advocate for faculty, students and staff at a time when great changes in our state, and across the globe, are presenting as many opportunities as challenges.

Wow! What’s this California regent been smoking? Not only is Napolitano unfit to lead the California University System, she was unfit to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Her preparatory experience for the latter was one and a half undistinguished terms as Arizona’s governor unless stacking the state’s courts with radical judges counts as an achievement. Before that she was her state’s Attorney General for a term in which her only notable achievement was to ban Christmas decorations on public property. When Clinton became president, he selected her to be the US Attorney for the District of Arizona. And prior to that, she was a partner in the second largest Arizona law firm during which she represented Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hatchet job. David Brock’s book, The Real Anita Hill, reports that Napolitano interrupted the testimony of her own corroborating witness during the Thomas Senate hearings when the witness began disputing Hill’s version of the facts. After they conferred “off the record” for a few minutes, Napolitano's witness had a sudden attack of amnesia.

Napolitano is an anti-conservative zealot who early in her DHS tenure issued a report entitled Rightwing (sic) Extremism: Current Economic And Political Climate Fueling Resurgence In Radicalization And Recruitment, which admitting no proof, nevertheless opined “… that right wing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right wing radicalization and recruitment." It is unexpurgated garbage.

Napolitano's rationale for singling out conservatives was they prefer local to federal government, Christians  believe in the “end time,” and single-issue groups oppose abortion, illegal immigration, and embrace Second Amendment rights. She alleged they had “the potential to turn violent,” citing former veterans like Timothy McVeigh. They’re all from the same mold in Napolitano’s brain.

Is this the “remarkably gifted candidate” Ms. Lansing had in mind?

The Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11 by aggregating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and Federal Emergency Management Agency under a single agency oversight – allegedly to improve cooperation and information-sharing that helped allow 9/11 to happen. Notice that I said “aggregate” not “integrate.” The 45 agencies have been trying to integrate since 9/11 and a dozen years later have yet to accomplish it. Napolitano did little to provide the leadership it needs.

Instead she created a hyper-partisan agency that has done little to improve homeland security. Napolitano became Obama’s lap dog by expunging the word “terrorism” from the official lexicon as part of the Obama agenda to “understand” and “reflect” the grievances of local Muslim communities. Engagement became more important than counterterror policing. Experts who showed the connection of acts of terror and jihad were silenced or purged. An advisory board established by Napolitano looks like a “Who’s Who” of Muslim Brotherhood moles in this country.

While Tamerlan Tsarnaev was abroad getting his Boston bomb instruction – unknown to DHS – Napolitano was busy having her agency buy up hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition to keep them away from those bad old Second Amendment Right Wingers who fought and defeated Obama’s gun control agenda in Congress. Claiming they were only bought for target shooting training (that’s a lot of training), an unamused reporter noted these were lethal hollow points, not the type needed for practice. Facts are such pesky things.

Among her several duties, Napolitano is responsible for securing the borders – a constitutional obligation. She met that duty with the same indifference she met most of her duties. She lied a lot. Claiming that the border was more secure than it had ever been, a member of the Senate pointed out to her that arrests of illegal border crossers (aka undocumented Democrats) increased on her watch. When ranch thefts and several border area murders moved Arizona Governor Brewer to pass enforcement laws for her state, Napolitano and Holder formed a tag team to defeat its enforcement, claiming border security was federal turfdom – which DHS and DOJ continued to ignore.

When Napolitano was the governor of Arizona she vetoed seven bills intended to fight illegal immigration. As DHS Secretary, she fought the border fence. “Show me a 50-foot fence,” she was known to say, “and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” The CBO reported that millions of undocumented Democrats will enter the country over the next decade if something isn’t done. The immigration bill being haggled over in Congress at the present would give the Secretary of Homeland Security sweeping discretion in how to implement it – including waiving sections of the law. The Gang of Eight wasn’t anxious to put that power in Napolitano’s hands. They are glad to see her gone.

Einstein once said that the main difference between intelligence and stupidity was that intelligence had limits. When Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear exploded on a Christmas Day flight in 2009, Napolitano pushed the limits of sheer stupidity in her public statement. “The system worked,” she claimed when reporters asked our principal protector of homeland security how this kid boarded a US-bound plane armed for an act of pubic terror. Abdulmutallab was on a terrorist watch list, being a known protégée of Anwar al-Awlaki. His father had warned US officials in Nigeria of his son’s radicalization. The kid bought a one-way ticket with cash and carried no luggage. The system worked?

The greatest invasion of personal privacy occurred on Napolitano’s watch. The intimate pat-downs, genital touching, creepy examinations of screaming children, women forced to drink their breast milk to prove it harmless, brainless examinations of breast cancer reconstructions, passengers forced to get out of their wheelchairs to show they weren’t faking, treating grey-haired grannies as potential terrorists, naked x-ray screening – all of this was Napolitano’s meat axe mentality in administering airline security.  She succeeded more in reducing airline travel.

Lawsuits dogged Napolitano’s incompetence. Her cronyism in placing personal friends in key agency positions was commonplace. One suit alleged discrimination against male employees who were passed over to promote less qualified female staff. Another suit involved Suzanne Barr, a woman who worked for Napolitano as her gubernatorial aide. Napolitano brought her to Washington and Barr managed to get her boss sued for sexual harassment. Affidavits stated that Barr, the chief of staff, cultivated a “frat house” working environment and on one occasion told a male staffer “you are a sexy (expletive)” before asking about the dimensions of his genitals. Lewd messages were sent on agency Blackberries and heavy drinking while on official business took on the nature of a Roman bacchanal. When a complaint was filed with the EEOC, Napolitano initiated investigations against the whistleblower. Barr got away with misconduct for three years before she was forced to resign.

Not surprisingly, Napolitano’s Secret Service agents were involved in well-publicized scandal last August when they “entertained” prostitutes in the rooms in a Cartagena, Columbia hotel prior to Obama's arrival for the Summit of the Americas. Prostitution is not illegal in Columbia and consorting with them is not specifically prohibited in Secret Service regulations. The incident was discovered before Obama’s arrival and the 12 agents involved were ordered back to Washington and put on unpaid leave. The investigation of a special inspector general was restricted by Napolitano who refused to let him travel to Cartagena for interviews. Moreover, at least one White House employee involved in the romp, the son of a powerful lobbyist, was protected. An investigating agent revealed this in his report and refused to redact it when ordered. Napolitano put him on administrative leave and refused to respond to inquiries about it from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) – another indication of the agency culture Napolitano permitted.

Ah, and then there are the sequestration cuts which Obama seems to have ordered his cabinet secretaries to make as painful as possible. Obama painted the bleakest of consequences, you’ll recall, including the early release of illegal detainees. Before the cuts even went into effect, however, Napolitano began releasing detainees from immigration jails. She and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement said only a few hundred had been freed. In fact an Associated Press report exposed an internal document stating that about 2,000 had been released for “budget reasons.” Napolitano disputed the AP report, calling it “not really accurate.” Unfortunately for her, a House oversight committee called ICE Director John Morton into a hearing and under oath he revealed that 2,228 people had been released.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) hit the nail on the head when he recently said, "Secretary Napolitano's tenure at the Department of Homeland Security was defined by a consistent disrespect for the rule of law."

Janet Napolitano is a partisan hack who is unqualified by experience, intellect, ethics, and judgment to serve as the leader of the university system of the largest state in the country. That the university system would even consider her calls the judgment of the Board of Regents into question. Perhaps the regents and Napolitano deserve each other. I predict their relationship will not last long. California may be the Left Coast, but academics are a weird lot and they don’t suffer fools gladly. Even qualified university leaders have ripped their pants on a faculty. Ask Larry Summers.

I for one am glad to get her off the Homeland Security payroll. She can and has done real damage there. Her record on terrorism has been abysmal – the Boston bombings killed three and injured 264. Abdulmutallab almost succeeded in doing more damage than turning himself into a eunuch. The Times Square car bomber made it all the way to a departing airplane seat before he was captured. Napolitano called that incident a “one-off” which showed how clueless she is in performing security work. All terror attacks are “one-offs.”

The timing of her resignation is odd, however. Cabinet level members of an administration leave after the president’s first term, even if they don’t have an immediate job to move into. The fact that she waited six months into a new term can’t be explained by a sudden opportunity coming up. Napolitano and the California search committee would have been discussing this opening for months. And even if that were not the case, she would not have been a less viable a candidate for the position if unemployed.

No, my guess is that something is about to hit the DHS fan that will be the largest scandal to date. One involving her directly.

Stay tuned.

Political Correctness Kills

The biggest impediment to source analysis – to a greater likelihood of connecting the dots – is the human or systemic resistance to sharing information. The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. When databases not usually thought of as “intelligence,” such as customs or immigration information, are included, the storehouse is immense. But the U.S. government has a weak system for processing and using what it has.

… information is available, and someone [must ask for it]…  [yet currently] it cannot be shared … a demonstrated “need to know” [must exist] before sharing. This approach assumes it is possible to know, in advance, who will need to use the information. Such a system implicitly assumes that the risk of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits of wider sharing. Those Cold War assumptions are no longer appropriate. The culture of agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayer expense must be replaced by a culture in which the agencies instead feel they have a duty to share the information – to repay the taxpayers’ investment by making that information available.
--- 9/11 Commission Report

Among the several recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission in its report almost a dozen years ago, this one put its finger on the major intelligence breakdown – petty intelligence turf protection coupled with bureaucratic incompetence. Since the publication of the recommendations, little has changed to keep America safe.

The Boston bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers could have been the plot for an old Mack Sennett Keystone Kops movie starring Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security and Robert Mueller of the FBI with a supporting cast of thousands. Not only was the bombing aided a breakdown in information sharing between the bumbling Napolitano and inadequate Mueller, either of whom could be Inspector Clouseau stand-ins, but this tragedy is only the latest chapter of political correctness gone amok and a flawed immigration policy.

The Tsarnaev family was allowed to immigrate to the US in 2002 and granted asylum from anti-Muslim persecution in Chechnya. The father spoke English poorly and had modest skills as a mechanic. The mother also had limited English and worked as a cosmetologist. Tamerlan, a son, was about 15. He had been named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror whose triumph over the infidels was commemorated by their skulls piled in pyramids. The other son, Dkhokhar, was about eight years old.

Around 2004 the father quit his job and the family lived on welfare. The family is dysfunctional. Anzov, the father, and Zubeidat, the mother, divorced. The father returned to Chechnya where he lives in no fear of the “anti-Muslim persecution” that got his family into the US.

Tamerlan, the older brother, was charged with domestic violence for beating up his girlfriend in 2009. He married another woman a year later and fathered a child, both of whom joined him on the welfare dole. Then he abruptly gave up smoking and drinking and became increasingly religious, praying five times a day. He irregularly attended a mosque in suburban Boston and was thrown out on one occasion for disrupting the service. In 2011 the FBI received notice from Russian intelligence that Tamerlan was a radical Islamic. The FBI interviewed him but concluded he wasn’t a threat and failed to keep him under surveillance.

The mother was arrested for shoplifting about $1,600 in clothing from a Boston-area Lord & Taylor in 2012. She left the country for Russia rather than appear in court. Her life too suffered no religious persecution after returning to her homeland.

With both parents gone, the brothers had to fend for themselves, not very well, I might add. Tamerlan, the older brother, had no job. He had a green card but was denied citizenship because of the Russian intelligence warning. The younger brother was still in his teens. His grades turned south with his mother’s departure. He failed two semesters and left school.

Despite receiving public welfare support and having no job, Tamerlan had money to return to Russia and live there for six months. In 2012 he left Dkhokhar in the US and returned for an undisclosed purpose to visit Russia and travel to Chechnya, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. He too suffered no religious persecution while he is abroad, defying the basis for asylum which admitted the family to the US. Upon his return from Russia, Tamerlan posted a YouTube video with his name which extolled al-Qaeda and terrorism.

On September 11, 2012 Dkhokhar became a naturalized citizen but he too had no job and remained on welfare with his brother’s family. An uncle living in Maryland called the pair “losers.” US immigration authorities didn’t know they existed.

Two weeks ago on April 15 two homemade “pressure cooker” bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. That they were homemade gives the misleading impression that they weren’t sophisticated. This is not true. No pair of “losers” could have assembled these two bombs or other bombs used by the Tsarnaev brothers against the police in the ensuing pursuit. In addition to the three people killed at the Marathon finish line, and hundreds maimed and injured, the Tsarnaevs murdered an MIT campus policeman, Sean Collier, as he sat in his cruiser. The apparent motive was to take his pistol because the brothers had only one. Because police side arms have three-way holster locks, the Tsarnaevs were unable to get the pistol out of the holster after shooting Collier in the head multiple times.

Their plan evidently was to hijack a vehicle and drive to NYC where they would set additional bombs in Times Square. Their plan worked to the point of hijacking an SUV and forcing the owner out unharmed. They told him they had bombed the Marathon and killed a police officer so “don’t f--- with us.” The victim’s cell phone was on and remained in the car, allowing police to pinpoint the brothers in the Boston suburb of Watertown.

A shootout with the Watertown police occurred which included tossing the pressure cooker bombs at the police. When Tamerlan ran out of ammunition, the police tackled him and were in the process of handcuffing him when Dkhokhar tried to run over the group with the stolen SUV. The police jumped out of the way and only Tamerlan was hit and his bullet-riddled body was dragged some distance before Dkhokhar abandoned the SUV and escaped in the night. Tamerlan died at the hospital. Dkhokhar was later found severely wounded and hiding in a boat under its tarp.

He was taken to a hospital and placed under guard as care was administered. Treating him as an enemy combatant would have given the FBI 48 hours to question him – not to get a confession – but to learn if he was part of a sleeper cell and how the pair produced the pressure cooker bomb.

It was not to be. After 16 hours of cooperative questioning, Federal Judge Marianne Bowler, a woman with known Middle East sympathies, and several public defenders showed up in Dkhokhar’s room. This could only have happened on Attorney General Holder’s orders. Over the protests of the investigators who wanted to continue their questioning, Bowler held a hearing in the hospital room and read Dkhokhar his Miranda rights. The terrorist ceased cooperating after that.

Holder and Obama could have filed an immediate suit to block Bowler. They didn’t because, as they have in other acts of terror, both consider these as criminal offenses. Dkhokhar’s new lawyers now have access to anything the FBI learned and can effectively neutralize its intelligence value by introducing it in open court. Bowler’s CV can be found on the Internet. Her guest lectures in Middle Eastern countries not hospitable to women, not to mention women in positions of authority over men, is extraordinarily telling.

Against the background of the Boston bombing story, consider the role the Keystone Kops played in facilitating this tragic act of terror. In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week Napolitano testified that her department’s "system pinged when [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] was leaving" en route to Russia. Homeland Security didn’t bother to share that information with the FBI and CIA. The FBI had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011 after being told by the Russian intelligence that he was an Islamic radical with ties to underground groups. The FBI decided he wasn’t a terrorist and dropped the matter – something they didn’t bother to tell Homeland Security or the CIA.

It was 9/11 déjà vu all over again. Buildings and thousands of lives had been destroyed in 2001. This time we have the Russians doing our intelligence work and our FBI ignoring their warnings. Russia doesn’t have American scruples about human rights and privacy. They learn what they want to learn. So who’re you going to believe? The FBI or the SVR? And where will the next intelligence tip come from – Iran?

Forgetting the millions who are in this country illegally, let’s focus on just the Tsarnaev family and ask this question: What does it take to get deported from here? The Tsarnaevs came here as refugees from religious persecution. Yet Papa returned home a few years later and faced none. Mama returned home to escape a theft charge and faced none. Tamerlan the older brother left for six months to live there and faced none. Evidently lying about your immigration status isn’t cause for deportation – that awful “D” word so despised by the Obama administration.

How about getting a job and not living off of the good charity of the American taxpayer? If you fail to work and become self-supporting is that cause for deportation? Apparently not.

How about behaving yourself … should an immigrant be expected to follow the law as a condition of remaining in this country? I guess not. Tamerlan’s domestic violence and Mama’s theft didn’t result in deportation. Mama fled a trial that could have had consequences. Had she stayed and faced the music, would she have been deported? Not likely.

One final question. As a guest of this country should you be deported if you threaten to disturb the domestic peace and tranquility? It seems not. The FBI was warned Tamerlan had ties with radical jihadist groups, he posted YouTube videos that were the equivalent of a neon sign flashing “Look at me” in terms of his anti-western sympathies, but he wasn’t deported. He was allowed to stay and kill.

Deportation and illegal immigration is the elephant in the room when it comes to keeping Americans safe as they go about their lives every day. The Boston Marathoners and their cheerleaders along the way thought they were out to have a good time that afternoon. It was just another afternoon. Until the bombs went off and changed lives forever.

And then we come to the biggest threat to the security of every person in the US – political correctness. In the hours following the Boston bombing, Obama couldn’t bring himself to use the “T” word and admit this was an act of terrorists.

On his orders the FBI has expurgated the words “terrorists” and “radical Islam” and “jihad” from its training materials because American Muslims affiliated with the militant Muslim Brotherhood are offended by the use of “terrorist.” The anti-Israel Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America, and advocates for American Muslims say it offends them too. These organizations, which have never taken a formal stand against violent Islamism, have forced us to censor ourselves and our language.

Isn’t it ironic that while all Muslims aren’t terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim? Yet we will wand a blue-haired old granny while a Muslim man (or increasingly woman) passes through airport security without screening. Profiling, you know.

Major Nidal Hasan shouted “God is great in Arabic” and killed 13 people, wounding another 30. The Army brass knew he was a radicalized Islamist – they had read his emails to Anwar al-Awlaki, an American who had fled to Yemen and has since been vaporized. Hasan asked al-Awlaki for guidance in killing Americans. That he was in contact with a member of al-Qaeda should have waved a red flag. It did. The Army however didn’t want to violate his “rights”! Instead of calling his murderous Ft. Hood killing spree an act of terror, Obama called it “workplace violence.” And this is the smartest man ever to be president?

As if that weren’t bad enough, Army Chief of Staff George Casey made the breathtaking statement that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” I once admired Casey when he was a commander of the war in Iraq. Now I’m glad he’s not wearing an Army uniform.

Even as he was telling investigators that he’d worked with al-Qaeda to explode his underwear on a flight into Detroit, Obama was calling the bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, an isolated extremist. Months later, Faisal Shalizad attempted to explode a car bomb on Times Square and Keystone Kop Napolitano called it a “one off” attack.

Are these people operating with a full deck? Do they believe we are in a war with Islamic terrorists? No.

The Boston bombing was the most photographed crime scene in history. Could anyone living outside a padded cell look at the bombing photos and mug shots published later and not believe the Tsarnaev brothers were the thugs who did it? Was there any connection between the shootout with the Watertown police, the murder of the MIT police officer, the bombs thrown from the hijacked SUV, the murder of one Tsarnaev by his own brother, and the capture of a shot-up survivor – any connection between all of that and the Marathon bombing? Yet the New York Times started an article shortly afterward with the words, “The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week ...” What’s this “alleged” stuff?

Political correctness is going to get a lot of people killed! Why don’t we call things by their right name?

The words we use either engage or suspend our critical thinking. Yet the Associated Press came out with a pronouncement early this month declaring that its stylebook would no longer include the term “illegal immigrant” or use “illegal” to describe a person. No human being is illegal, according to the AP editor’s Sinaitic pronouncements. “Illegal” should describe an action such as living “illegally” in a country. Well, I sure wouldn’t want to damage an illegal immigrant’s self-image by calling him an “illegal immigrant.” 

Moreover, the stylebook continued, no one should hereafter be called “paranoid” or a “schizophrenic.” Instead, they should be described as a person “diagnosed with paranoia or schizophrenia.”

For those of us who believe in the omnipresence  of evil – i.e. that it exists both before it manifests itself and after its full fury is plainly seen in the inexplicable actions of some humans – this kind of word silliness removes the moral anchor that gives words meaning. We can fancify abortion by calling it “pro-choice” but the actions of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist, were so heinous that I’ve been unable to follow the details of his trial. It sickens me. Can a human soul exist in a person like him or has its light gone out?

I watched the pathetic performance of John Brennan at his Senate hearing for Director of the CIA when he tried to glorify jihadism as a “holy struggle … an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose … not the murder of men, women, and children.” Really? Go tell that to the family of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was decapitated by the jihadist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

I am offended by the political correctness that calls religiously motivated killings “workplace violence.” I’m not at all concerned about offending terrorists by characterizing them as such because of what they do. An illegal immigrant does not become less a criminal by separating his act from his label. And does anyone believe a human life is any less unspeakably terminated by benignly calling the act a “choice” instead of the malignant procedure called abortion?

Mark Twain famously said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” The advocates of political correctness are tolerant of everything except an opposing viewpoint. They appeal to high-minded tolerance by sanitizing our words of their moral gravity. This cripples society’s ability to argue the issues that confront it.

Judgment of right and wrong is, after all, what separates us from animals. Blaise Pascal wrote 400 years ago that man is a reed, easily crushed, but he is a thinking reed. Thinking is what gives him dignity. For that reason alone, the philosopher said, we should strive to think well because it is the offspring of morality. I would add that morality equally compels us to argue well with words of unmistakable clarity.

When our words are robbed of meaning, we are no longer able to engage in honest debate because we fear being labeled a hater or racist or homophobe. That path leads to a less tolerant society, not a more tolerant one. If we follow it, how could we possibly hope to make Americans fundamentally different, indeed better, than the fanatical adherents of Islam?

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)