Fortune Magazine, which can in no way be described as a bastion of liberal media propaganda nor an Obama friendly media organization, actually did the right thing. They assigned an unbiased and competent investigative reporter, who spent 6 months looking in to the so-called "Fast and Furious" gun trafficking "scandal," for which Darrel Issa (R - Car Thief/Arsonist) and Fox News' propagandizing of the so-called "Fast and Furious" gun trafficking "scandal," and actually got to the truth of the whole matter.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
It's a long read, but pretty insightful.
Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general's report is submitted.)
If I were to condense all of that into a few sentences, it would go something like this:
The ATF's Fast and Furious gun trafficking monitoring program was started under the George W. Bush administration, continued under the Barack Obama administration in it's existing form. As a result of some sloppy procedural mistakes in the program and lax U.S. gun laws, a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed by a Mexican drug bandit who was in possession of one of the guns the ATF had been tracking. Once the killing of the Border Patrol agent become publicly known, right wing bloggers, Darrell Issa (R - Car Thief/Arsonist) and Goebbels Inc. (aka Fox "News") decided to turn the unfortunate incident into an election year political football. Simple....As....That....!
Don't take my word for it though, go read the Fortune article if you are at all interested in the truth. If you are not interested in the truth and would much prefer to have your brain and thinking process pre-programmed by America's foremost political propaganda media outlet -- then by all means -- continue gazing starry-eyed at the Fox "News" bobble-heads on your television set.
----TFG
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