Fast and Furious: What a Tangled Web They Weave

Tuesday October 18 proved to be an important day in the slow march towards justice for the families of murdered federal agents Brian Terry and Jaimie Zapata.

First, the U.S Senate unanimously voted in favor of an amendment prohibiting funds from going to any future gun-walking type operations. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the amendment in direct response to the 2009 Fast and Furious debacle. The bipartisan consensus prompted Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to join Cornyn in his demand for answers from Attorney General Eric Holder.

When I look at what happened in Operation Fast and Furious, I was fast to be furious about the bungled, botched occurrences that occurred. It was poorly planned, poorly executed, had flawed leadership, and it was definitely of questionable integrity and value.

The southwest border is America's border. Anything that happens down at your border affects us. That's the way we need to think about ourselves, we're all Americans, we all need to look out for one another.

Second, ABC'S Jake Tapper became the latest mainstream media reporter to focus on what he called "a big scandal." In a Nightline interview Tapper confronted President Obama on the controversy surrounding the "Justice Department, the ATF moving guns tied to crime scenes." Obama once again denied any prior knowledge of Fast and Furious.

Well I heard about it from the news reports. This is not something we were aware of in the White House and the Attorney General it turns out wasn't aware of either.

So this investigation will be complete, people who have screwed up will be held accountable but our overarching goal consistently has been to say we've got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we've also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico.

Wow. President Obama wants the American people to believe he and his top officials were unaware that low level agents were implementing a program to curb the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico. The same officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who visited Mexico in March and April of 2009 "to make sure" weapons bought in the United States were not crossing the border.

Has the President forgotten he and Secretary Clinton were in the news six months before the start of Fast and Furious contending that 90% of the guns crossing into Mexico were coming from the U.S., a figure later proved to be false? How could Clinton and Obama have been so aghast at the now-debunked number of American guns related to crimes in Mexico and yet remain clueless about the operation going on right under their noses?

If the "consistently" "overarching goal" Obama referred to in the Tapper interview was to stop the trafficking of guns from U.S. to Mexico then how could he, AG Holder, Secretaries Clinton and Napolitano be so out of the loop they did not hear about Fast and Furious?

Incredibly, around the same time Operation Fast and Furious commenced, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted to launch talks on a U.N. treaty to regulate the sales of small arms. In October 2009, the U.S. State Department released a statement overturning the Bush administration's previous stance against such a treaty.

Clinton supported the talks stating,"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly."

Later Former United Nation's ambassador John Bolton weighed in on the Small Arms Treaty warning American gun owners the UN "is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there's no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control."

The convergence of so many high-level actions at the same time of Fast and Furious cries out for an in-depth investigation by Democrats and Republicans. Mikulski's call for action on the Senate floor proves this well-planned operation isn't a witch hunt by conservatives, but an egregious series of events which have led to the horrific deaths of innocent people.

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report