DavidE

Apparently Ms. Atkisson has gotten some resistance from the Administration in her investigations of this one but some of the internal stuff is starting to come out.

The story is at:

Deputy AG received detailed Fast and Furious briefing - CBS News Investigates - CBS News

Internal documents are viewable from the main story, along with context, as well as here:

March 12. 2010 of Attorney General Holder where Phoenix area investigations were covered:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/DOJ_002817.pdf

3/12/2010 document tracing weapons allowed to "walk" over the border to seizures in Mexico, mentioning "Predicate (sic?) ??? ??? US link to the cartel" in context:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/DOJ_002818.pdf

A map layout of Phoenix with notations regarding firearms seizures:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/DOJ_002822.pdf

Annotated photograph showing rifles set to be traced after being" walked" into various bad actors' hands:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/DOJ_002823.pdf

bearcat6

Yet anothner video. Gunrunning Informant May Used Taxpayer Money to Buy Guns and Drugs

DavidE

Atkisson at CBS now reports that not only firearms were smuggled with direct knowledge by U.S. Law Enforcement.

Grenades that were illegally made were also shipped in large numbers, including shipments that occured with BATFE knowledge.

"Grenade-walking" part of "Gunwalker" scandal - CBS News

<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/14/earlyshow/main20120395.shtml>

This would seem a story that would be of interest on both sides of the borders. Attacks involving grenades have also reaped a terrible toll in Mexico lately.

Woman Survives Live Grenade Lodged In Face | Fox News

<http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/09/29/woman-survives-live-grenade-lodged-in-face/>

Mexican woman Karla Flores survives live grenade lodged in her face | News.com.au

<http://www.news.com.au/world/karla-flores-from-mexico-had-a-live-grenade-lodged-in-her-face-and-survived/story-e6frfkyi-1226151667369>

Addendum: Did Holder know when he said he did? President Obama's own CNN Espanol interviews provide a "Tale of the Tape" that says otherwise:

Obama Talked About "Fast & Furious" Months Before Holder Claimed He Knew | RealClearPolitics

<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/10/13/obama_spoke_about_fast__furious_before_holder_clai med_he_knew.html>

This couldn't be a harder thing to cover up. Why are they trying? I'd ask where the Million Mom March types, Chuck Schumer, Rosie O'Donnell and so on are on this matter, but that answer should already be abundantly obvious.

I would think that the last hope these groups and advocates would have for their cause would be to speak clearly on this matter, and soon, but that is just me.

CBS seems to have quite a bit of stuff beyond what we already know, and I would not be suprised if there's even more besides this. The only questions are if the Administration will move to disclose the facts before CBS does, and if the rest of the media is willing to question the wardrobe choices of an Administration that they once said had the finest robes in the land. Will CBS be met with silence or will other networks pursue this further as well?

TommyGunn

Good grief! This is incredible.

DavidE

It is definitely incredible. I'm going to go into speculation, which I have tried to avoid, but just wanted to float this before more information hopefully comes out. I hope it is an overstretch and is proven wrong by further disclosures. Of course, if the government types involved in this whole business would disclose more about it, I wouldn't be speculating as much.

Given the unwillingness of anyone in the gov't to talk, as well as photos of things like squad machine guns, grenades and so forth we saw coming out of Mexico a couple years back with allegations it was coming from the US, there is one final thing I have to wonder:

Was anything shipped out of US Military or Guard armories? There was a lot of stuff the druggies were using that can't be shipped out of a civilian gun store, or even modified from anything shipped from a civilian gun store. It is certainly possible they got military grade stuff smuggled from Mexican arsenals and other arsenals in Central and South America, but if so, why not be clear about that from the beginning?

The grenades were allegedly illegally made, according to the story, but where did the detonators and filler explosives come from? Filler can be improvised, and there are no details on what was used, but a detonator for a grenade has to be a bit tougher. They don't come with the "paperweight" mock grenades one can get in the average Army-Navy store. Unless they stuck in a firework style fuse by hand or something, one has to ask where the illegal manufacturer would get this stuff, and if the Government had the operation so deeply infiltrated, shouldn't they know? It doesn't seem to be specified in the releases yet.

The second paragraph might be straying a bit into the paranoid but grenade fuses are rather specialized, as are the explosives that are used to fill them these days. Knowing where they came from would seem to be a priority. Did the BATFE or Attorney General's office investigate those questions? What did they find out? If they aren't saying what they found out, why? Unless, again, they were fused with firework fuse like an improvised pipe bomb. If they were crudely fused, though, why not say so? That would cut back on speculation.

I would like to add a correction, to a prior post in the thread, the Mexican woman mentioned as wounded with a grenade in one of the links was not hit by a hand grenade but according to a Huffington Post story was apparently hit with a 40mm grenade of the type more often fired from weapons like the M-79 or M-203 grenade launchers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_986849.html

stand watie

to ALL,

TOO BAD that the "improvised grenades" weren't fitted with SMOKE grenade fuses, as some of us DID during "the mess" in SE Asia!

rotflmRao!

yours, sw

DavidE

There's an idea, intercept the stuff, fit fuses that go as soon as the pin gets pulled, and slip them back in. The Cartels get a surprise and the smuggler may even get taken care of in the bargain.

P.S. Thanks for what you did in that locale!

CBS Face the Nation today is on right now and Fast and Furious is leading the program.

Rep. Darryl Issa was on, talking about a question about at least one gun that may not have been recovered at the Agent Terry murder scene. He is also raising the question that at least one firearm may have been recovered but not logged in the official reports he has recieved.

Heady stuff, he'd be taking a chance going on National TV and raising that idea if he didn't have a serious belief that may be possible.

Rep. Elijah Cummings is on now, agreeing with the basic evidence and saying it seemed that Fast and Furious was a "bottom up" operation that started in a local Southwestern field office. A story that doesn't seem to jive with the reports other offices like Tampa were doing similar things. Also if it was a local operation there is all the more reason for the AG's office to come down hard on them and disclose this stuff. Either way there is a lot left to shake out on this.

DavidE

Drudge is reporting a "Late Night Document Dump" Friday.

Hate to get off the CBS topic of this, but here are some links:

Drudge : DRUDGE REPORT 2012®

Justice Dept. Details how it got reports wrong:

Justice Dept. details how it got statements wrong - Yahoo! News
AP News: Justice Dept. details how it got statements wrong

Justice Withdraws Inaccurate 'Fast And Furious' Letter It Sent To Congress : The Two-Way : NPR

DOJ explains origins of false letter to Grassley:

Justice Department Reveals Origins of False Gun Letter To Grassley : Roll Call News

Issa says Holder ouster is up to the White House:

Issa says Holder ouster is up to White House - Washington Times

It sure took a while to get some movement on the earlier, inaccurate letter.

WaltGraham

Of course, we knew this all along, didn't we...

DavidE

That is simply thermonuclear.

CBS is to be commended for staying with this story while so much of the rest of the media, and not so coincidentally "Against Illegal Guns" types like Sen. Schumer, etc. do the Sgt. Schultz thing and say nothing.

The implications of this action, in terms of deaths in another nation as well as our own, are stunning, and the silence from so many is chilling. This needs to be on every nightly news broadcast. I have to give credit to CBS because they have faced a lot of heat from the Administration from sticking with this and probably from some of their media colleagues as well.

Diamondback

An attempt to Right Flank FNC, maybe? Or at least reach out to conservatives fed up with Lettertwerp's crap?

DavidE

I'm kind of hoping it is just a sense of journalism, and the reporter in question holding to a policy that reporters should dig for stuff like this no matter who is in office. It's a good sign out there.

Diamondback

David, the idealist who believes in 'The Way Things Ought To Be' who actually believed in Journalistic Ethics in me would like to believe that, but it has to win a shouting match with the jaded, cynical ex-journo who hung it up because of how seldom 'Journalistic Ethics' isn't an oxymoron.

DavidE

Points taken. I notice that CBS' voices aren't finding many echoes outside of Fox either.

The Anti-Gunners who are saying nothing will lose any leg to stand on, debate wise, but not many in the press are mentioning that either. The refusal of so many in the press to do the duty that comes with being in a free press is not healthy for the nation or for their institution.

Atkisson gets props, and I hope those in the media take up the chorus, not only from duty but because failing to do it ultimately hurts them so badly. If they're wondering where their audience has gone in the last 20-30 years, this is their chance to fix that problem some by playing one down the middle on this. I'll recognize your experience in this area.

stand watie

to all,

does anyone besides me think that the AG may soon be wearing BRIGHT ORANGE clothes?

yours, sw

Diamondback

Full disclosure, my tenure was brief: two years on a little community college newspaper, but almost all of us did join SPJ--I got lucky that my editor was one of the honest ones.

That said, the classes we took to go with it were rife with assignments that we specifically had to write skewed, biased, or otherwise bad stories and pass them around so we could see what we were supposed to NOT do.

DavidE

D-Back, one thing I have noted with national media outlets, much more so than with local, isn't so much what they report but what they choose not to. I hope you find your passion out there and are able to follow it, I am sure a lot of places and publications could use a straight arrow reporter.

To get back to the issue of multiple sales, I look back to the photo I originally linked to:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/DOJ_002823.pdf

It seems to have handwritten notations about multiple sales, and what firearms were or were not purchased in multiple sales. (I must also point out, again, that many of the sales, multiple or otherwise, were reported to authorities by gun store employees or owners, as one would hope would happen, and these warnings from store personnel as well as field agents of the BATFE were deliberately overriden by orders up the chain of command, who if this is to be believed were seeking to blame those same storekeepers and employees for what was likely to result from this program.)

Articles: Attorney General Milo Minderbinder

Diamondback

Actually, David, I have--once I break back into academia, my goal is a History professorship at a quiet little community college somewhere, especially if I can find one willing to let me do a specialized course on WWII. Other reason I left was my editor and I were a once-in-a-career working relationship--she actually gave me an entire page of our annual "Crime on Campus" special to write on personal protection, even letting me include a walkthrough of the process for getting a concealed-weapons permit. (Our school's policy was "concealed means concealed--if you have a permit and keep it discreet you're cool, but if someone finds out and freaks It Goes Or You Do.")

Back on topic, the Administration's document-dumps seem to be reminiscent of one of my father's bon mots: "If you can't astonish them with your acumen, bury them in utter bovine scatology." (Words he actually lived by...)

DavidE

The media has quieted a lot about this lately, sadly. There is some new stuff going on however - This story isn't being mentioned much on TV out there.

Darrell Issa threatens Eric Holder with contempt - Tim Mak - POLITICO.com