Daily Mail Fast and Furious report repeats unsubstantiated claim

Curiously, in all his ‘Gunwalker’ testimony before Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder never detailed steps taken to “track” Fast and Furious guns. So why is the media so certain in telling the public that’s what happened?

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In a Thursday report on a 2011 Phoenix “gang-style shooting” in which a gun from the Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scheme was used, Mail Online repeats unsubstantiated claims that give cover to the administration and mask the government’s intentional uncontrolled release of guns into the criminal underworld. U.S. Political Editor David Martosko tells readers the purpose of the operation was to track the guns.
“[The] Phoenix gang-style shooting in 2013 was carried out with an AK-47 purposely sold to gun-runners under the watchful eye of the ATF,” a preface bullet reads. That much is true, with the reporting problem starting with the second point, claiming “[The] Obama administration tried to track 2,000 guns into Mexico to drug cartels.”
The latter claim is where the ubiquitous administration-serving media narrative falls apart. How does one track guns without making any attempt to do so? That, in turn, leads to the fraudulent, but often-repeated media claim that Fast and Furious was a “botched gun sting


That’s despite whistleblower sources claiming in early January, 2011, that guns were being walked “to pad statistics.” It was through these sources that the story was investigated and reported by citizen journalists while “legitimate news media” remained deliberately indifferent, until information coming to light could no longer be contained, prompting many “Authorized Journalists” to manage and spin it instead.
Undaunted by the facts, Martosko soldiers on with the wholly unsubstantiated “tracking claim.
“Fast and Furious was “an ill-fated Obama administration program that tried in vain to track firearms across the Mexican border to drug kingpins,” he asserts. “In vain” implies an exhaustive effort, does it not, as opposed to just letting guns go without even trying, and in fact, ordering agents to allow the guns to “walk” while intentionally keeping the Mexican government in the dark — in itself a violation of both U.S. and Mexican laws?
“’Operation Fast and Furious’ involved straw-buyers who sent 2,000 guns to Mexico (including these weapons) with help from the ATF, which hoped to track the firearms to drug cartels — but failed,” a photo caption accompanying the article reads. All evidence points to the hope being geared toward change — to U.S. gun laws. To date, the administration has had to content itself with requiring additional reporting of multiple rifle sales from Southwest border gun dealers, with the real goal, to justify banning misnamed ‘assault weapons,” thankfully still beyond their grasp.
How one ‘devises’ a program that completely omits the part where weapons are followed from gun stores to cartel leaders, and then expects any other result, is left unexplored by Mail Online and other “legitimate news media” apologists. How anyone can track guns without even attempting to, or botch a sting that has no mark, are questions those who spread such excuses never try to answer.
Perhaps the best analogy for challenging the “failed tracking/botched sting” theory was conceived by St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner Kurt Hofmann.
“We are … being asked to believe that the BATFE’s grand strategy for bringing down the drug cartels … resembled ‘South Park’s’ Underpants Gnomes’ business plan … with the BATFE adaptation going something like this: ‘Phase 1: Encourage gun dealers (and sometimes pay them, as confidential informants) to sell guns to known traffickers Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Humbly accept plaudits as Mexican drug cartel comes crashing down,’” he wrote.
To date, no one advancing the “failed/botched” apologia has even attempted to explain “Phase 2,” and provide documentation, or even a plausible hypothesis, on how the government — which according to all evidence kept their own attaché and Mexican law enforcement in the dark — intended to track any guns once they crossed the border.
Except, of course, to recover them at crime scenes after shootouts and deaths had occurred and then point fingers when serial numbers allowed them to be traced back to U.S. gun shops. Not that a public largely relying on “real reporters” from “mainstream” outlets would be likely to know.

http://www.examiner.com/article/daily-mail-fast-and-furious-report-repeats-unsubstantiated-claim?CID=examiner_alerts_article