False Flaggy Fake Whistleblowery

This is a rant about those who are suspicious of everything Obama does for reasons of racism/conservative paranoia who point to the perceived Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal as proof of the administration’s evil intentions to sell arms to the world’s most dangerous criminals in order to create a situation where they can call a national emergency, swoop in and take away everyone’s guns, and install martial law.

It is, of course, mass schizophrenia, considering that the most destabilizing illegal gunrunning operation ever carried out in the nation’s history was actually perpetrated by the conservative guru himself, Ronald Reagan, and his team of anti-communist, pro-Israeli, freekazoid neocons headed up by Robert McFarlane, Alexander Haig, and Paul Wolfowitz. It’s schizophrenic because, although lying and propagandizing during wartime has no political bounds, secret, illegal government arms dealing during times when no war has been declared has only been the province of the right ...at least in my lifetime.

There is a Fast and Furious scandal, but it doesn’t involve a policy of gun walking. The real scandal is the gross opportunism and sheer political theater drummed up by a bizarre coalition of neocons and libertarians. It’s bizarre because the neoconservative need for the United States to be a cowboy, kick-ass nation with a moral (and commercial) imperative to impose its will on the rest the world doesn’t jibe with the libertarian desire for less government. Neither does forcing Christian fundamentalist beliefs on everyone – wholeheartedly embraced by the Tea Party even more than by traditional conservatives – jibe with the idea of freedom. Just as with the boundless Benghazi outrage, it is difficult to find a real source to the over-amped outrage expressed by this league of super-patriots other than blind hatred and ingrained distrust.

The inane conspiracy theory about putting more guns on the streets so that there will be more gun violence so that the government will have an excuse to take everyone’s guns away is crazy enough, but what is really crazy is that even people who recognize how bat-shit crazy that is don’t realize, due to the way that the media likes to use catch phrases like “Fast and Furious Scandal,” that the gun-walking policy itself didn’t actually exist.

That’s right – according to a six-month investigation by Fortune magazine, the gun-walking that is so upsetting to those who are easily upset by anything that might be twisted around to suggest that Obama was born not in the state of Hawaii but into the state of villainy, was instigated by a rogue agent – the same rogue agent who then decided to take down the very agency he was working for, claiming to be a “whistle blower,” because he, like the prosecutors who would not prosecute all the straw buyers that were being tracked because that would limit the God-given right of U.S. citizens to purchase as many guns as they can shake an AK-47 at, is a rabid gun nut. This guy, John Dodson, has actually doubled down on his double-cross and sued Time Inc for libel because the article portrays him (as well as two cohorts) as an infantile, arrogant, lying douchebag with no respect for his boss, Dave Voth:

Dodson then proceeded to walk guns intentionally, with Casa and Alt's help. On April 13, 2010, one month after Voth wrote his schism e-mail, Dodson opened a case into a suspected gun trafficker named Isaiah Fernandez. He had gotten Casa to approve the case when Voth was on leave. Dodson had directed a cooperating straw purchaser to give three guns to Fernandez and had taped their conversations without a prosecutor's approval.

Voth first learned these details a month into the case. He demanded that Dodson meet with him and get approval from prosecutors to tape conversations. Five days later, Dodson sent an uncharacteristically diplomatic response. (He and Alt had revised repeated drafts in that time, with Alt pushing to make the reply "less abrasive." Dodson e-mailed back: "Less abrasive? I felt sick from kissing all that ass as it was.") Dodson wrote that he succeeded in posing undercover as a straw purchaser and claimed that prosecutor Hurley—who he had just belatedly contacted—had raised "new concerns." The prosecutor had told Dodson that an assistant U.S. Attorney "won't be able to approve of letting firearms 'walk' in furtherance of your investigation without first briefing the U.S. Attorney and Criminal Chief."

It was the first time Voth learned that Dodson intended to walk guns. Voth says he refused to approve the plan and instead consulted his supervisor, who asked for a proposal from Dodson in writing. Dodson then drafted one, which Voth forwarded to his supervisor, who approved it on May 28.

On June 1, Dodson used $2,500 in ATF funds to purchase six AK Draco pistols from local gun dealers, and gave these to Fernandez, who reimbursed him and gave him $700 for his efforts. Two days later, according to case records, Dodson—who would later testify that in his previous experience, "if even one [gun] got away from us, nobody went home until we found it"—left on a scheduled vacation without interdicting the guns. That day, Voth wrote to remind him that money collected as evidence needed to be vouchered within five days. Dodson e-mailed back, his sarcasm fully restored: "Do the orders define a 'day'? Is it; a calendar day? A business day or work day….? An Earth day (because a day on Venus takes 243 Earth days which would mean that I have plenty of time)?"

The guns were never recovered, the case was later closed, and Fernandez was never charged. By any definition, it was gun walking of the most egregious sort: a government agent using taxpayer money to deliver guns to bad guys and then failing to intercept them.

For all the conspiratorial accusations swirling about of false-flag operations – the Bush administration, supposedly being behind the 9/11 attacks so they would have support for their attack on Iraq, and now the Obama administration supposedly setting up fake gun-violence situations (see this article on Aurora and this great article on conspiracism in Slate) – the Fast and Furious situation looks a lot like just that: a false-flag operation. This guy goes and does this unconscionable thing, then reports it as something that he was forced to do against his good conscience.

It doesn’t really fit the “false flag” definition, though, because it doesn’t seem that Dodson had any evil plans when he went ahead and carried out the gun-walking operation. Rather, just as many, such as myself, believe was the case with George W. Bush, it was a lethal blend of incompetence and the audacity to take advantage of a tragedy for the most fucked up of reasons. Dodson only decided to become a “whistleblower” as an afterthought in the wake of the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, when two semiautomatic rifles that were found at the scene of his murder were traced back to a suspect in the Fast and Furious operation. It was a bit of retrofitted false flagginess, fake whistleblowery that was done so that Darrell Issa would have an excuse to go after Eric Holder and prove that the Obama was “the most radical and controversial president in our nation's history” just in time for the 2012 elections.