Fast and Furious Seems Reasonable...

I don't believe it. I think it was a payoff or a bribe. We know the NSA was listening to everything. I'm sure they could have been listening to every cartel phone call. And they're not hard to find anyway. We know where they are. They control northern Mexico.

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Again, I know that it failed, but was it a crazy idea?

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I believe the plan was to use the violence associated with these weapons to justify greater restrictions on Americans' gun rights.

But, setting that aside, it is a terrible, terrible idea for a number of reasons:

1. It is never a good idea to arm the bad guys.

2. It is never a good idea to break your own system.

What do I mean by 2.? I've done threat vulnerability assessments and it is perfectly fine to stress test a system - i.e. I get one of my guys to try to access my facility without proper authorization.

It is quite another thing to get people on the inside of the facility to help him - or worse, tell them all not to worry about it - that deliberately breaks the system.

In this specific case, to specifically break the system in order to arm bad guys - and your own weapons come back and kill your own guys - if it wasn't so tragic, it would be laughable.

Ill-headed, ill-conceived and ill-executed - must be the ATF, right?

You and Ace have it right. There was never any attempt to track anything and if you remember in the MSM, every night they were talking about gun crime in Mexico, violence and gun control. As soon as F&F broke that all stopped.

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Does anyone really dispute the validity of the idea?

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The idea that the agency with the sole responsibility to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous criminals was in fact circumventing federal law to arm narco-cartels with high powered automatic weapons? That were used to kill no telling how many innocent Mexcians and even border patrol and U.S. law enforcement agents.

Yes I think it was a very reasonable idea

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every night they were talking about gun crime in Mexico, violence and gun control. As soon as F&F broke that all stopped.

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Yep. All you heard were how many thousands were being killed. Then find out a couple of massacres, and a ton of school age kids were killed in a mass shooting with one of the weapons they let go, and silence.

Comprehensive timeline by Sharyl Atkisson - best investigative reporter of any MSM

Univision video of their expose on F&F

On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

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I could be wrong, but did not Holder fully admit this and subsequently backtrack his comments?

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CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson report Holder made the difficult admission to Congress. "Any instance of so-called gunwalking is unacceptable. Regrettably, this tactic was used as part of Fast and Furious."


That also means the letter Holder's office sent Congress last February denying gunwalking was wrong.

"What I said was it contains inaccurate information," Holder told Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).


"Well, isn't that false," Cornyn asked.


"Well false, I don't want to quibble with you," Holder replied. "But false I think implied people making a decision to decieve.

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I don't have any real respect for the administration that started the program, or the one that continued it,

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Wanna bet you voted twice for the administration that you have no respect for?

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Would have to have the help of the host country in Mexico aid in surveillance, good luck .

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Well it's even harder when you don't even communicate with the country and keep this "program" secret from Mexico. It's almost as if they didn't want these weapons tracked, gee I wonder why that is?

I don't have time to pull up my old info, but the amount of guns moving into Mexico through straw purchases was not enough to fuel the violence seen in Mexico, but it was a good scapegoat. There were direct sells of guns from the US government to the Mexican government in very high numbers that started after Obama took office. It was known that 20% of these guns would end up immediately in the cartels hands...

If it would've involved providing and tracking something that couldn't kill people, it would've been a much, much better idea. Horribly foolish program.