Holder Denies Guilt Over "Fast And Furious"

By Adrianna McGinley

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder today condemned federal officials for authorizing controversial “gun-walking” tactics under Operation Fast and Furious, but told lawmakers he is committed to investigating and holding accountable those responsible.

“I think that I acted in a responsible way by ordering the Inspector General investigation,” Holder said to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “On the basis of that report and any other information that is brought to my attention, those people who did make mistakes will be held accountable.”

Holder called the Operation “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution.” He said that its impacts will be felt for years to come since many guns that ATF agents allowed to be purchased and carried across the U.S. border into Mexico are still unaccounted for and some continue to appear at cartel crime scenes.

“This should never have happened, and it must never happen again,” Holder said.

While admitting that there were grave mistakes made during Fast and Furious, Holder said it was in fact “a flawed response to, not the cause of” illegal gun flow into Mexico and the violence that results.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked Holder if he has or would like to apologize to the family of deceased Border Patrol Agent Brian Terr, who was murdered last December. Weapons discovered at the crime scene were traced back to Fast and Furious.

“I certainly regret what happened,” Holder replied. “It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in Fast and Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry.”

Holder pledged that the Department of Justice is committed to punishing Mexican drug cartel members who have murdered American citizens. He also said that his agency is working with the Mexican government to curtail the violence caused by the cartels. To that point, Holder expressed concern that Republicans in Congress have proposed cutting DOJ’s budget for the coming fiscal year.

“Those proposed cuts are simply unacceptable and place this nation at risk…We are enjoying historically low crime rates…[DOJ cuts] put at risk the possibility that these historically low rates will not remain there forever.”

Holder suggested Congress take into consideration testimony from whistleblower agents who have called on Congress to support the fight against illegal weapons being trafficked into Mexico.

Officials Under Fire In Hunt For 'Fast And Furious' Blame

By Adrianna McGinley

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism questioned federal officials today about Operation “Fast and Furious,” and what measures should be enacted to prevent guns from “walking” into the hands of criminals in the future.

The program was carried out last year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and involved allowing guns to be obtained in the U.S. by straw-purchasers who then sold them across the southern border to members of dangerous drug cartels. ATF agents were supposed to track the weapons to find out where they ended up, but several hundred went missing.

The mishaps of “Fast and Furious” were eventually exposed by a whistleblower at ATF after it was discovered that one of the guns that was allowed to “walk” into Mexico was used to kill a Border Patrol agent in Arizona last December.

At today’s hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) hounded Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ Criminal Division, about Breuer’s self proclaimed “mistake” of not informing top officials of the connection between Fast and Furious and the 2006-07 gun-walking operation Wide Receiver, which was commissioned under the Bush administration.

“I regret the fact that in April of 2010 I did not [inform Attorney General Holder or Deputy Attorney General Cole],” Breuer said. “At the time I thought that dealing with the leadership of ATF was sufficient and reasonable.”

He criticized the fact that ATF “failed” to stop weapons that they had “both the ability to interdict and the legal authority to interdict.”

Grassley, who serves as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has co-led Congress’ investigation into the program along with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) criticized the “hunt for blame” surrounding Fast and Furious and called for a focus on the root problem: domestic gun laws that allow “anybody [to] walk in and buy anything”.

“I’ve been here 18 years, I’ve watched the BATF get beaten up at every turn of the road and candidly, it’s just not right,” Feinstein said. “We have more guns in this country than we have people and somebody’s got to come to the realization that when these guns go to the wrong places scores of deaths result.”

Breuer said that of the approximately 94,000 weapons recovered in the last five years in Mexico, 64,000 of them have been traced to the U.S. He added that the number one tool to stop gun trafficking would be the authority to forfeit the weapons of dealers who knowingly sell to criminals.

“It is clear that we need more tools to get those people who are buying the guns and illegally transporting them to Mexico,” Breuer said. “We cannot permit the guns to go knowingly and we cannot permit the guns to go unknowingly. We need to stop the flow.”

Breuer emphasized that few law-abiding citizens are looking to buy semi-automatic weapons, and the lack of a requirement to notify ATF when such weapons are bought is a large part of the problem.

“Information is the tool we need to challenge and defeat organized crime. We are not even permitted to have ATF receive reports about multiple sales of long-guns, of any kind of semi-automatic weapon or the like.”

Other officials from the Departments of Justice (DOJ), Homeland Security (DHS) and Treasury also appeared before the subcommittee.

Amnesty International Wants Cheney Investigated For War Crimes

Eight activists representing Amnesty International donned orange jumpsuits Tuesday and held a protest in front of the Department of Justice in hopes of convincing the Obama administration to investigate former Vice President Dick Cheney for alleged war crimes.

“[Cheney] was one of the principal architects of a policy that instituted the torture of US detainees,” Tom Parker, the Policy Director for Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA told TRNS. “That torture included threatening people with power drills, discharging weapons right near their heads, threatening to lock them in a box of insects, throwing them against the wall, heat exhaustion, sleep depravation, withholding food and water and of course, the most infamous of all, waterboarding.”

Although the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques have been controversial for years, they have returned to the spotlight with the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” in which Cheney describes different interrogation techniques used on detainees. 

“We’re here today to mark the publication of Dick Cheney’s memoirs and to present a copy of those memoirs to the Justice Department as exhibit A in a case to prosecute him for committing war crimes in the context of the global war on terror,” Parker said.

Cheney’s memoir was officially released Tuesday by Simon & Schuster

Click here to view a photo from today’s protest.

DOJ Voter Harassment Dismissal Raises Questions

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to throw out the majority of charges levied against militant activists accused of intimidating voters at a Pennsylvania polling location poses a concern for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights over how the DOJ will handle future voter harassment cases.

“The DOJ’s replies thus far raise new and serious questions about its civil rights enforcement decisions,” the Commission wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder approved Friday.

The case in question, in which several members of the New Black Panther Party brandished clubs in front of a polling place last November, received considerable media attention. A video of the incident on You Tube has received over a million views to date.

The letter went on to detail the Commission’s concern that the injunction against sole defendant Minister King Samir Shabazz is too “narrow”. The order prohibits Shabazz “from displaying a weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the city of Philadelphia.”

The Comission, which consists of 4 Republicans, 2 Democrats and 2 Independents, plans to further pursue the issue.

“We believe we are obligated to investigate,” the Commission wrote.

Constitutional Experts Discuss Law To Criminalize Presidential Lies To Congress

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

Legal experts on Monday offered their views on H.R. 743, the Executive Accountability Act of 2009 during testimony before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

The bill would place criminal penalties on the executive branch for willingly misleading Congress in order to persuade it to use armed forces.

Said Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) who introduced the legislation, “Members of Congress must be able to trust our President at his word, especially when making decisions to go to war."

Jones used the behavior of former presidents Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars as examples of “arrogance of power,” which he hoped could be mitigated by this legislation. However, Jones emphasized that “the bill is not about the past,” and emphasized that it would not be applied retroactively.

Dr. Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law, said that the founders who wrote the Constitution knew that “single executives go to war not for the national interest; they go to war for reasons of military glory.” He said that the authority to “take the country from a state of peace to a state of war was to be given to Congress alone.”

Bruce Fein, a legal consultant and constitutional expert who served in the Department of Justice under President Reagan, said that the President could avoid criminal penalties by simply "sharing all of the information he relied upon to Congress.”

Jonathan F. Cohn, a partner at Sidley and Austin who worked in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush, disagreed with the previous testimonies. He said that presidents should be “truthful and candid always, and especially in the context when the country makes the grave decision to send its children off to war.”

Cohn said the legislation could “impede inter-branch cooperation,” arguing that it could create a chilling effect due to the “fear of potential prosecution.”

“Punishing the ousted regime may be the preferred course of certain banana republics of the past, but with respect, this should not be the United States’ path in the 21st century.”