The Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star exploit Brian Terry by waiving the bloody shirt to manufacture a scandal

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." – frequently attributed to Joseph Stalin.

It is also the modus operandi of the modern news media. When a catastrophe occurs, e.g., the killer earthquake and tsunami in Samoa in 2009, the killer earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the the killer earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, it will merit intense news coverage for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, before the news media deems its "newsworthiness" at an end and moves on to more important news stories, like royal weddings and the latest Lindsey Lohan scandal.

But the media loves to fixate on an individual tragedy. Nancy Grace at CNN Headline News makes a perverse living from such ghoulishness. Two recent examples in the media include Trevon Martin and Border Agent Brian Terry, both of whom have been politicized by the media. It is not enough that their families have lost a son to violent crime; the media has to victimize the family a second time by politicizing their death to manufacture a scandal that sells newspapers or to fill dead air time on the cable networks.

Both The Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday published editorial opinions shamelessly waving the bloody shirt of Border Agent Brian Terry, decrying documents held secret by the Department of Justice, and President Obama's assertion of executive privilege after the House Oversight Committee took the extraordinary step of recommending an order of contempt for Attorney General Eric Holder.

Both the Arizona Republic and Arizona Daily Star irresponsibly engage in wild speculation. The Republic asserts "what we do not know about this gun-running sting operation is astonishing." Really? The lie is exposed when the editors of the Arizona Daily Star take the exact opposite position: "The story of how the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost rack of 2,500 weapons is well-known. it is difficult to imagine what element of surprise or stealth remains for law enforcement to protect. The lid was blown long ago on Fast and Furious."

These provacateurs of manufactured scandal cannot even keep their story straight.

The Arizona Daily Star irresponsibly engages in wild speculation when it asserts "It opens the door to speculation that — as the old saying goes — the cover-up is worse than the crime." (Immediately followed by an admission that "We don't know of any evidence that Holder tried to cover up the indefensible actions of the ATF" — but we just wanted to throw that out there).

Maybe these editors should take the time to review the congressional record of testimony before the House Oversight Committee, before which Attorney General Eric Holder alone has appeared nine times. And maybe they should peruse the Department of Justice web site for the many press statements and reports about Fast and Furious on the site. And maybe they should review the almost 8,000 documents already provided to the House Oversight Committee by the DOJ. Taken together, there is very little that is not known about this operation as the Republic editors asserted.

The feigned ignorance of these editors in order to waive the bloody shirt of Border Agent Brian Terry in pursuit of their politicization of this case does not a scandal make. The scandal here is the shameless exploitation of Agent Terry and his family in pursuit of a political agenda.

The Republic at least concedes that Rep. Darrell Issa's investigation is driven in part, by the "GOP-favored conspiracy theory [which] argues that the slaughter in Mexico caused by mobsters' easy access to high-powered U.S. weapons would scandalize voters and further the cause of tight restrictions on gun sales," but then blames Attorney General Eric Holder for the GOP's wild-eyed conspiracy fantasies! (The Arizona Daily Star fails to even acknowledge this motivation.) Just produce the documents!

Uh-huh. Just like the GOP's wild-eyed conspiracy fantasies about President Obama being a secret Muslim  socialist born in Kenya were put to rest when he released the "long-form birth certificate" long demanded by the demented. Geezus, our own Secretary of State Ken Bennett, the state chairman of presidential candidate Willard "Mittens" Romney, is still going around engaging in this wild-eyed conspiracy fantasy. You see, that's the thing about conspiracy theorists: any evidence that contradicts their conspiracy is part of a broader conspiracy to silence them. They will never be satisfied, because they are not interested in the facts or the truth. This conspiracy theory is not going away.

The Republic also concedes that the documents not produced have nothing to do with Operation Fast and Furious, but rather as Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee's ranking Democrat has said, the committee is only focusing on Justice Department communications after Feb. 4, 2011. "There is merit to Cummings' argument." (Again, the Arizona Daily Star fails to even acknowledge this fact.) Just produce the documents!

February 4, 2011 was also the day that Attorney General Eric Holder announced a DOJ Inspector General investigation, which is ongoing. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also has an Inspector General investigation into ICE and the ATF. The DHS IG has told Congressional staffers it expects to have a final report ready to deliver to Congress in early October. These investigations taken together will yield a far more detailed picture of Operation Fast and Furious than the "GOP-favored conspiracy theory" motivating this political witch hunt by Rep. Darrell Issa.

The editors of both the Republic and the Star simply ignore the fact that some of these documents are prohibited by law from being produced. As Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee's ranking Democrat said in committee the other day, "For the past year, you’ve been holding the attorney general to an impossible standard, said Cummings during the proceedings. "You accused him of a cover-up for protecting documents that he was prohibited by law from producing." Rep. Cummings accuses Issa of holding Holder to 'impossible standard':

The Maryland congressman defended Holder, saying the attorney general had agreed to provide a substantive briefing and documents outside the scope of the committee's subpoena, as well as answer additional questions.

"It was a fair and reasonable offer, especially in the light of the partisan and highly inflammatory personal attacks you made against him throughout this investigation," Cummings said.

Indeed, Attorney General Eric Holder has been more than accommodating to the House Oversight Committee within the constraints of the law, given the highly inflammatory personal attacks made against him by Republicans (and the conservative media). Holder testified before Congress last week, Statement of Attorney General Eric Holder on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Vote:

“In recent months, the Justice Department has made unprecedented accommodations to respond to information requests by Chairman Issa about misguided law enforcement tactics that began in the previous administration and allowed illegal guns to be taken into Mexico. Department professionals have spent countless hours compiling and providing thousands of documents — nearly 8,000 — to Chairman Issa and his committee. My staff has had numerous meetings with congressional staff to try and accommodate these requests and yesterday, I met with Chairman Issa to offer additional internal Department documents and information that would satisfy what he identified as the Committee’s single outstanding question.

“Unfortunately, Chairman Issa has rejected all of these efforts to reach a reasonable accommodation. Instead, he has chosen to use his authority to take an extraordinary, unprecedented and entirely unnecessary action, intended to provoke an avoidable conflict between Congress and the Executive Branch. This divisive action does not help us fix the problems that led to this operation or previous ones and it does nothing to make any of our law enforcement agents safer. It's an election-year tactic intended to distract attention — and, as a result — has deflected critical resources from fulfilling what remains my top priority at the Department of Justice: Protecting the American people.

“Simply put, any claims that the Justice Department has been unresponsive to requests for information are untrue. From the beginning, Chairman Issa and certain members of the Committee have made unsubstantiated allegations first, then scrambled for facts to try to justify them later. That might make for good political theater, but it does little to uncover the truth or address the problems associated with this operation and prior ones dating back to the previous Administration.

* * *

[W]ell before Chairman Issa expressed any interest in this issue — I ordered the practice stopped. I made necessary personnel changes in the Department's leadership and instituted policy changes to ensure better oversight of significant investigations. And, I directed the Department's Inspector General to open a comprehensive investigation. That investigation is ongoing, and the American people and Congress can count on it to produce a tough, independent review of the facts.

“When Chairman Issa later began his own investigation, I made it clear that the Department would cooperate with all appropriate oversight requests, while still adhering to our legal obligations to protect information involving ongoing law enforcement investigations, legally-protected grand jury material and other sensitive information whose disclosure would endanger the American people or our agents investigating open cases.

Now, the editors of the Republic and the Star may not give a damn about the inconvenience of complying with the law, but Eric Holder is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, he has an obligation to do so. And the editors of the Arizona Daily Star may not give a damn about privilege or sensitive information in two ongoing Inspector General invetigations, but they would be the first to assert privilege in response to a demand to disclose the identity of an "unnamed source" in one of their reports. The editors' cavalier attitude towards sensitive investigations and the assertion of privilege demonstrates that they have no concern for the rule of law or justice.

This is about shamelessly waving the bloody shirt of Border Agent Brian Terry to manufacture a scandal, and the shameless exploitation of Agent Terry and his family in pursuit of a political agenda.