Katie Pavlich, who literally wrote the book on Operation Fast and Furious, delivered a very timely talk to the Accuracy in Media “ObamaNation: A Day of Truth” conference on September 21st. It was the day after the Justice Department’s Inspector General issued a report on the scandalous gun walking operation that resulted in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, and ICE agent Jaime Zapata, plus hundreds of Mexicans. She points out that it was mainly blogs that broke this story, but that Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, who AIM honored this year with a Reed Irvine Award, had done an “amazing” job covering the story.
Pavlich, who is the news editor for Townhall.com, said that the President lied about the origins of Fast and Furious. “You had President Obama go on Univision,” she told the crowd, “which was interesting, because Jorge Ramos, who has asked about President Obama’s involvement in Fast and Furious in the past, did the job that the regular mainstream media in America won’t do and asked him some tough questions about Fast and Furious. In particular, ‘Don’t you think that Eric Holder should be fired, whether he knew about this or not, whether it’s incompetence or he lied about his involvement?’ And then President Obama lied. He straight up lied on Univision and said that Operation Fast and Furious was a Bush administration program. Well, considering Fast and Furious started in September and October 2009, long after President Bush left the office, it’s not a Bush administration program.”
Fast and Furious is back in the news this week, as Univision, a Spanish language network, partnered with ABC News, filed a devastating report showing some of the tragic consequences of this operation which sent some 2,000 guns into the hands of Mexico’s notorious drug cartels. The report, which appeared on the ABC News website, but did not air on their evening news shows, said, “As part of Operation Fast and Furious, ATF allowed 1,961 guns to ‘walk’ out of the U.S. in an effort to identify the high profile cartel leaders who received them. The agency eventually lost track of the weapons, and they often ended up in the hands of Mexican hit men, including those who ordered and carried out the attack on Salvarcar and El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez where 18 young men were killed on September 2, 2009.”
This AIM conference where Pavlich spoke was the same conference where Patrick Caddell said that the media have become “the “enemy of the American people.”
You can watch highlights of Katie Pavlich’s talk here:
Or you can watch the full-length talk, along with Q&A here; or you can watch it here along with the transcript.
Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org.
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