A House panel voted Wednesday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into Operation “Fast and Furious,” just hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege to hide potentially incriminating documents about Holder.
Voting along party lines, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23-17 to hold Holder in contempt for failing to disclose documents and be honest about his knowledge and involvement in the operation carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives between 2009 and 2011.
The operation facilitated the sale of weaponry to Mexican drug cartels in a flawed effort to locate criminals. Over 2,000 guns went virtually unaccounted for and the guns ended up at deadly crime scenes on both sides of the border.
The Committee’s vote will be reported to the full House, where a floor vote has been scheduled for next week unless Holder hands over the documents before then. Holder wants the documents hidden from the public and Congress, presumably, because they would expose his lies, while under oath, to Congress last year.
President Obama decided early Wednesday that he would invoke executive privilege to keep some of Holder’s documents secret. This was done upon Holder’s formal request. But asserting executive privilege is only legally allowed under certain conditions, which many argue are not met in this case.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), along with other members of Congress, are skeptical of Holder’s testimony last year that he had known about the program for only a few weeks, while Republicans say that memos show he knew of the program as early as July 2010.
The wisdom of dispersing arms and deadly weapons to violent Mexican drug cartels has been questioned, especially since the violence associated with these groups has been on a dramatic rise as of late.
Adding to the heightened militaristic nature of the drug war, the primary US efforts at curbing drug production, trade, and violence has been to empower Latin American armies and paramilitary groups and expand domestic law enforcement roles to abusive new levels. This, of course, has had deadly results.
Secrecy — Root cause of all corruption in government
The Congress, President and Supreme Court were created equal, a perfection that can only prevail if the corruption of secrecy is kept out of government.
So, why is it that both Congress and the Supreme Court allow the President to lock them in ignorance, starving them of the knowledge needed to act independently, in essence making themselves slaves to the President?
Because you cannot have a secular solution to a criminal government, until after you have a moral solution to an immoral society. For to be enriched upon the misery of those less educated, to support the corruption that less income must be given to those less educated, this is the standard for pleasure and dominant paradigm in Empire USA.
Seems like obstruction of justice to me. Time for a special prosecutor.
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/9893…
Maddow on "Fast and Furious," AKA "What Your Uncle Who Watches Fox News All Day Is All Worked Up About"
Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow did progressives a solid by explaining to us what the deal is with the "Fast and Furious" controversy, AKA "What your uncle who watches Fox News all day is all worked up about." Bless you, Rachel Maddow. We all have that uncle/father/brother-in-law/high school friend.
"This is one of those days when what happened today in politics means something totally different to the portion of Americans who watch Fox News than it does to everybody else in the country," she said. If you get your news from right-wing media, today was a "five-inch-tall headline, day that will live in infamy, huge deal in American politics!" And if not? "Today might not have made much sense." Indeed! Maddow describes Fast and Furious as one of those stories they tried to "drag…out of the conservative media world, where it's been cooking for a year, and they tried to drag it into the mainstream….to see if it could survive outside the right-wing world in which it was incubated." So what exactly are right-wingers talking about with this Fast and Furious thing? Watch the segment below for Maddow's explanation.
UGH!!