by David Safier
The tragedy of Operation Fast and Furious is the death of Brian Terry. The travesty is the witch hunt by Reps. Issa and Grassley who want to use Fast and Furious against the Obama administration while they distract from the genuine problem of gun running due to our lax gun sales laws.
But the part that makes you slap your forehead and wonder what the hell goes on in government agencies is the story that the ATF was going after targets who were FBI informants and therefore unindictable.
Fast and Furious was a wildly flawed operation, but its intentions had a certain amount of logic to them -- to try and move up the gun running food chain and take down people at the top. But if the people you're going after are working with the FBI . . . doesn't anyone in these government agencies talk to anyone in other agencies?
The end of Tim Steller's Star article tells the sad truth. Too often, government agencies are trying to burnish their records, regardless of the value of what they're doing.
The agencies know they can't actually "win" the drug war, so they often fight for "attaboys" and "gold stars," even if it means acing out another agency, said [retired border agent Terry] Nelson, who now acts as a spokesman for a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
The "drug war" is one of the most wasteful and costly (in money and lives) battles we're never going to win. Operation Fast and Furious was a tiny outpost in the government's senseless and destructive attempts to try and control drug use by stomping out profitable criminal operations which will continue to thrive so long as there is big money to be made.
[Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, according to its website, is "an international organization of criminal justice professionals who bear personal witness to the wasteful futility and harms of our current drug policies. Our experience on the front lines of the 'war on drugs' has led us to call for a repeal of prohibition and its replacement with a tight system of legalized regulation, which will effectively cripple the violent cartels and street dealers who control the current illegal market."]
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