Sipsey Street Irregulars: Alan Lengel: "There’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called 'Justice.'”

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Alan Lengel: "There’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called 'Justice.'”

Alan Lengel, writing at Tickle the Wire on yesterday's hearing, complains: We Didn’t Learn Much New from the Hearing on Controversial ATF Program.

“This is not a love-making process,” Charles Tiefer, former counsel to Congress, emphasized during testimony. In other words, Congress doesn’t have to play too nice.

Rep. Issa already knew that. But he’s very very frustrated.

“The administration has not yet to come to recognize the role this committee plays in preserving the rule of law to eliminate waste and fraud and abuse in the federal government,” Rep. Issa said during the hearing. ”I’ve worked closely with Sen. Chuck Grassley to get to the bottom of the strategy by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to allow heavy duty arms to traffic into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

“ATF field agents opposed this reckless program, which has been responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Mexico and even responsible for the death of a 40-year-old border patrol agent named Brian Terry.”

In the end, we need to know a few things: How was such a poorly thought out program approved and by who? And how many guns were released and how many ended up being used in crimes, including murder?

It’s hard to believe the Justice Department hasn’t yet coughed up that info. Finding out which crimes are linked to the program may take a fair amount of investigative work — something that can’t be produced in a little hearing. And there may be no way of definitively figuring out every crime. Still, investigators can come up with a snapshot.

But finding out who ultimately approved the program ain’t that hard. Really.

Give me a few hours. Let me wander the inner sanctum of the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue and I’ll come up with some answers and eliminate some of these hearings.

Sure, Monday’s hearing may lay the foundation for the committee to get even tougher.

But there’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called “Justice.”

Lengel has excellent sources in DOJ, to be sure, but I rather think that if he approaches any of them in the hall and asks them about Gunwalker, they'll run the other way as if his hair was on fire.

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"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Alan Lengel: "There’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called 'Justice.'”

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