Gun scandal skipping the big fish

by Doug MacEachern, columnist -
Sept. 17, 2011 03:05 PM
The Arizona Republic
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Anyone seen Attorney General Eric Holder?

No. Of course not. The attorney general is off discussing border security - with Canadians. His schedule is filled with photo-op chats with schoolchildren. He is loading up his calendar with anything that will render it just impossible for the AG to find time to answer more questions from congressional probers about the gun-running mess known as Operation Fast and Furious. No time at all.

But here's who will line up dutifully before the congressional inquisitors: everyone Eric Holder doesn't care about, which is beginning to look pretty much like all the little fish outside Washington, D.C.

Operation Fast and Furious is a classic Washington scandal in one important, bipartisan respect: The people truly responsible for what went wrong ultimately will write their self-exonerating biographies, usually after a slew of fundraisers have paid the lawyer bills.

Meanwhile, everyone downhill from them will spend the rest of their working lives writing checks to pay their lawyers and wondering what the hell happened to that once-promising career in service to their country.

As bungled operations go, the Fast and Furious sting cooked up at the Justice Department and in the offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives differs from others only in that it turned truly deadly. Like so many others, it is steeped in arrogance and vacuum-sealed ignorance.

Technically legal straw-man buyers were allowed to purchase thousands of weapons at Arizona guns shops, the theory being that ATF agents would track them to the end users, Mexican drug cartels.

It isn't exactly clear just yet whether the operation went awry, or whether, in fact, it worked out precisely as the geniuses 2,000 miles away planned for it to work. Either way, the agents quickly lost track of the weapons, including high-powered semiautomatic rifles and material for making hand grenades, most of which settled into the murderous hands of the cartels' gun boys.

Last December, two of the guns were left at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Other Fast and Furious weapons were used in an ambush that killed U.S. immigration Agent Jaime Zapata in northern Mexico in February. Several of the weapons have been tied to murders of Mexican officials.

You can imagine how fast the people who concocted this mess are running from it. But despite brazen stonewalling, the evidence suggesting that knowledge and approval went all the way to the White House is mounting.

At the start, Fast and Furious was just a part of an umbrella anti-cartel campaign known as Operation Gunrunner, which the administration proudly heralded as an action ordered by President Barack Obama "to fight these cartels."

At a March 24, 2009, press conference, then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden said that, on orders from the president, "Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration's comprehensive plan."

Ogden specifically identified an enormous buildup of ATF agents aimed at "disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico."

E-mails from March 2010 indicate the top officials of the ATF were briefed weekly about the progress of Fast and Furious. That same month, the deputy assistant director for ATF field operations received a special briefing on the plan's progress in Phoenix.

You think Fast and Furious was some rogue operation gone wrong? You think it was bungled somehow by local agents?

According to documents that have piled up on the investigating committee's desk, Kenneth Melson, then acting director of the ATF (and now safely parachuted out of harm's way), actually watched a live video feed as a straw buyer bought semiautomatic weapons at an Arizona gun store.

The evidence that knowledge and authority of Fast and Furious went all the way to the top may be unparalleled in the history of Washington, D.C., scandals. Barely more than a year ago, people at the top were crowing about how much they knew.

Now? All the focus is on the people at the bottom of the hill. The only person who has lost his job over Fast and Furious is Dennis Burke, who was U.S. attorney for Arizona.

Meanwhile, the committee's Republican chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, is sending demand letters seeking documents, e-mails and interviews from people in Arizona who, at best, may have been remotely aware of the ingenious directives being issued from Washington.

While Eric Holder chats with Canadians, careers and lives are being wrecked in Arizona, the direct result of his grand plans. And that is just monstrous and wrong.

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