The Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue, in Newspeak) is one of the four ministries that govern Oceania in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. As with the other Ministries in the novel, the Ministry of Truth is a misnomer and in reality serves an opposing purpose to that which its name would imply, being responsible for the falsification of historical events; and yet is aptly named in a deeper sense, in that it creates/manufactures "truth" in the newspeak sense of the word. -- Wikipedia.
"Nigger Hunting License" issued at the ATF's get-togethers in the '90s called the "Good O' Boys Roundup."They're trying to tone down the racist trappings of the "Good O' Boys Roundup" here in the Tennessee hills east of Chattanooga, where hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officers gather every spring to let off steam.
There was a lot to tone down. Gone, for example, are many of the crude signs that once greeted arriving officers, like this one: "Nigger check point."
The "Good O' Boys Roundup" is organized by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and it was held this year on May 18-20.
Also gone this year was the traditional Saturday-night skit highlighting the "Good O' Boys steak dinner." In one skit, an officer in fake Ku Klux Klan garb pulled a dildo from his robe and pretended to sodomize another officer, who was in blackface.
But according to law enforcement officers who attended this year's and other events, a whites-only police remains in effect.
Still on sale were T-shirts with Martin Luther King Jr.'s face behind a target, O.J. Simpson in a hangman's noose and white D.C. police officers with a black man sprawled across the hood of their car under the words "Boyz on the Hood."
"Nigger hunting licenses" also were available throughout the compound, consisting of motor homes, trailers, tents and pickups gathered around a large beer truck.
At this year's event, some black officers -- including ATF agents -- attempted to crash the party and were turned away after having "bitter words" with some of the white officers in attendance, the officers said. -- Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, July 11, 1995.
"Nigger Checkpoint" sign at the entrance to the "Good O' Boys Roundup. Photo from videotape taken by infiltrators belonging to the Gadsden Minutemen constitutional militia, 1994.In 1995, the ATF's Good O' Boys Roundup scandal broke into the open, thanks to a videotape provided by the Gadsden Minutemen, a constitutional militia formation here in Alabama. Boy did the excrement hit the rotary oscillator.
But just when the ATF prospects for serious chastisement looked most promising, the agency was bought some precious time by their own "white knight" -- Morris Dees of the ill-named Southern "Poverty" Law Center. In a Fox Butterfield story in the New York Times, Dees alleged that the Gadsden boys' videotape was a fake.
Of course it wasn't -- a fact proven later by none other than FBI master evidence technician
Frederic Whitehurst. But at a critical moment in the ATF's fortunes, Dees had bought the agency some precious time by virtue of a well-timed lie.
Why would Dees help screen obviously racist conduct when he was nominally the big "anti-racist crusader?" Why would he risk discrediting his gravy train?
Because, SPLC and ATF have always had a two-headed monster symbiotic relationship, and that relationship formed an integral part of his gravy train as well. He HAD to defend such reprehensible conduct, or risk his "intelligence" stream being cut off.
This was first proven to me in late 1994, if I recall correctly, when we made up out of smoke and mirrors the "Dogtown Rangers." We knew that the ATF was illegally sharing case information with SPLC and wanted to prove it, so we put that name on a list of Alabama militia formations and let it get into the hands of the ATF, just to see how long it took to show up in SPLC's equally mis-named "Intelligence Report." To back up the list, we began mentioning the "Dogtown Rangers" in phone conversations, always hitting on how uncompromising and dangerous they were. If explosives disappeared from a quarry, we would say, "It must have been those Dogtown Rangers again."
It took less than two months for the mythical Dogtown Rangers to go from ATF file to SPLC "Intelligence Report." This is why when it became necessary to flesh out the story of the equally mythical
Ramsey A. Bear recently, we made him an intelligence officer in, of course, the Dogtown Rangers. Once more, the ATF was tricked into chasing the elusive Dogtown Rangers.
Now, once again, the ATF finds itself in the middle of an even worse impossible-to-explain scandal. And who is their new "white knight" now that Morris is in semi-retirement in
his palatial digs?
Meet David Holthouse, serial paid liar, admitted libeler and SPLC employee.Long-time readers of Sipsey Street will recall Holthouse from
this story in July of last year and
this update from earlier this month.Holthouse is a now a demonstrated, indeed, a self-admitted, libeler. SPLC had to buy and apologize their way out of a law suit by one of Holthouse's victims.
Did this chasten Holthouse? Hardly.
Here is his latest effort at the Media Matters website entitled:
"Smuggler's Paradise: Guns, Drugs and Violence in the Southwest."You may recall that Chris Brown at Media Matters just finished sticking his male member in the factual wringer with
an attack on Larry Pratt of GOA, just before CBS validated everything Larry had to say.
Now comes Holthouse, who manages to write the ATF party line about "Gunrunner," even mentioning the death of Brian Terry, without mentioning the Gunwalker scandal that contributed to his death.
PHOENIX, Ariz.--The endless carnage of the Mexican cartel wars may seem a world away from the climate control and free Starbucks within the Phoenix Convention Center, where leading border security experts gathered this month for the fifth annual Border Security Expo. Yet it's only 150 miles from downtown Phoenix to the northernmost cartel war zone of Nogales, Sonora. Even closer are the badlands on the U.S. side of the border where last December a Border Patrol agent was killed in a firefight with Mexican drug smugglers. They were armed with AK-47s purchased legally from a gun store in Glendale, Arizona, less than a year before.
More than 73,000 firearms have been seized in drug raids or recovered from the scenes of cartel gun battles in Mexico since December 2006. According to law enforcement officials, "90 percent of the weapons that could be traced were determined to have originated from various sources within the U.S." Weapons sold over-the-counter in the U.S., including thousands of cheap, military-style assault rifles, are being used in Mexico to commit horrific violence on a massive scale.
Conservative politicians routinely demand that the federal government to do more to secure the border -- often championing nativist and draconian anti-immigrant policies. Yet they reflexively oppose even modest efforts by law enforcement to better track the flow of high-powered weaponry.
Straight out of the meme, huh? This guy should be part of The Ministry of Truth. Oh, wait, maybe he is.
Standing at the Phoenix conference hall podium, U.S. border security expert Alonzo Peña, the former Deputy Director of ICE, called for America to own up to its responsibility for the bloodshed in Mexico.
"We are the consumers of the drugs and we are the suppliers of the weapons," said Peña. "The drugs come to America, the money and the guns go back. U.S. weapons are giving these cartels the firepower they need. Much more needs to be done. There is a huge gap between what we are capable of doing to stop illegal gun trafficking to Mexico and what is actually being done."
Last spring, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms proposed to narrow that gap with an emergency regulation that would require the roughly 8,500 federally licensed firearms dealers in the four border states to report the sale of multiple assault rifles to the same person in any five-day period.
This proposed new measure would neither prevent nor delay the purchase of any firearms. It's designed to thwart the common practice among gunrunners of deploying "straw purchasers" to buy assault rifles in bulk. The proposed regulation mirrors a law on handguns that has been on the books since 1993, requiring gun stores to notify law enforcement authorities whenever a person buys two or more handguns in the same week.
The recent indictment of 17 alleged gunrunners in Phoenix details the kind of buying patterns the proposed regulation targets. According to the indictment, Uriel Patino, a legal resident of the U.S., paid cash last Nov. 3 for two AK-47 rifles from Lone Wolf Trading Co., a Glendale, Ariz. strip mall gun store. A week later, he came back and bought 10 more AK-47s. Two days later, he purchased five more AKs. A month after that, he bought 20 more. In all, he bought 232 weapons -- 42 handguns and 190 assault rifles -- all from the same store, in 18 visits. With each purchase, Patino passed an instant background check and signed a form attesting the firearms were for his personal use.
His claims were no more ridiculous than the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby groups portraying the proposed anti-gunrunning measure as a serious attack on the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. But that is just what they did.
"This administration does not have the guts to build a wall, but they do have the audacity to blame and register gun owners for Mexico's problems," said Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the NRA.
Facing stiff opposition from the NRA and its allies, President Obama repeatedly delayed approval of the emergency regulation. Now it may be too late. Last Friday--three days after the ICE agent was murdered in Mexico--the House of Representatives voted 277 to 149 to block the Obama administration from implementing the anti-gunrunning regulation.
Two years ago, a Department of Defense study concluded that cartel violence had destabilized Mexico to a point that it was at risk of becoming a failed state, meaning a total collapse of its civilian government.
But when the U.S. law enforcement professionals who are tasked with securing the border ask for commonsense firearms regulations to stem the flow of high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels, right-wing forces put the interests of the firearms industry above those of national security and federal law enforcement officials in both nations.
"We are being outgunned," said Luis Carlos Nujera, the State Secretary of the Department of Public Safety in the state of Jalisco, whose capital, Guadalajara, erupted in violence in early February after two cartel leaders were arrested. "The aim of the cartels is to destabilize and create panic. To do this they are using better and more modern firearms than many of our state and local police agencies possess."
At the Border Security Expo, ATF officials made it clear that interdicting firearms bound for Mexico is a top enforcement priority for their agency. "We have 'Project Gunrunner' groups in Phoenix and Tucson that were created specifically to address the gun trafficking that directly impacts the level of violence in Mexico and the U.S. border region," said James Needles, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Field Division of the ATF.
Needles said that in May, the ATF will open a new anti-gunrunning office with seven agents in Sierra Vista, Ariz., just north of the border. "We're going after the Arizona-based distribution cells," said Needles. "The street agents know what's needed. Our biggest hurdle is Washington."
In the 48 hours after the House of Representatives voted to block the anti-gunrunning regulation, more than 40 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a border city about the size of San Antonio, Texas. Among the dead were four Mexican police officers, shot down with assault rifles.
Okay, let's revisit that money quote above:
"We have 'Project Gunrunner' groups in Phoenix and Tucson that were created specifically to address the gun trafficking that directly impacts the level of violence in Mexico and the U.S. border region," said James Needles, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Field Division of the ATF. Needles said that in May, the ATF will open a new anti-gunrunning office with seven agents in Sierra Vista, Ariz., just north of the border. "We're going after the Arizona-based distribution cells," said Needles. "The street agents know what's needed. Our biggest hurdle is Washington."
It is as if the whole Project Gunwalker allegations by ATF's own street agents, the letters by Senator Grassley, the documents appended to them, the FOX and CBS News pieces -- it is as if they never existed -- just went down the memory hole.
And once again, it is an SPLC stooge who runs interference for a beleaugered ATF.
Some things never change.
