Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

Forbes

James Taylor

Editor’s note:  An update from the author has been added to this article on September 20, 2012.

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.”

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.

Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

Update:  To provide more perspective on global warming and Antarctica, I would like to update this column with some additional information:

As meteorologist Anthony Watts explains, new data show ice mass is accumulating on the Antarctic continent as well as in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. The new data contradict an assertion by global warming alarmists that the expanding Antarctic sea ice is coming at the expense of a decline in Antarctic continental ice.

The new data also add context to sensationalist media stories about declining ice in small portions of Antarctica, such as portions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula (see here, for example). The mainstream media frequently publish stories focusing on ice loss in these two areas, yet the media stories rarely if ever mention that ice is accumulating over the larger area of East Antarctica and that the continent as a whole is gaining snow and ice mass.

Interestingly, a new NASA study finds Antarctica once supported vegetation similar to that of present-day Iceland.

“The southward movements of rain bands associated with a warmer climate in the high-latitude southern hemisphere made the margins of Antarctica less like a polar desert, and more like present-day Iceland,” a co-author of the NASA study reports.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Linked to Nuclear Technology Smuggling Ring - FBI Files

PRNewswire

The following is being released by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy -- The FBI partially declassified and released files linking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuto a nuclear technology smuggling ring that targeted the United States.  The declassified files are now publicly available online athttp://www.IRmep.org/ila/krytons/06272012_milco_mdr.pdf

FBI agents interviewed indicted American smuggler Richard Kelly Smyth on April 16-17, 2002, at the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. The secret interview report details how during trips to Israel Smyth's handler placed him in contact with Benjamin Netanyahu at Heli Trading Company. The FBI report suggests that "Smyth and [Netanyahu] would meet in restaurants in Tel Aviv and in [Netanyahu's] home and/or business. It was not uncommon for [Netanyahu] to ask Smyth for unclassified material."

Smyth was indicted in the mid-1980s for smuggling 800 dual use "krytrons" without proper export licenses through a multi-front company network.  Smyth fled the U.S. and lived abroad, supported by unknown means, until he was captured by Interpol and returned to the U.S. in 2001.  He was convicted in 2002.

During the 2002 Smyth counterintelligence debriefing, the FBI learned that the Israeli Ministry of Defense ordered and paid an Israeli company called Heli Trading for krytrons. Heli in turn sourced them from California-based MILCO in a clandestine operation codenamed "Project Pinto." The report reveals how MILCO illegally shipped other prohibited military articles under general Commerce Department export licenses rather than smuggling them out via Israeli diplomatic pouches.

Released on the Internet on July 4, 2012, the files have been the subject of reporting in the Israeli press, including Israeli National News, Ma'ariv and The Marker.  Some U.S. alternative media also explored the implications of the formerly secret files including Antiwar.com, Tikkun Olam,  Mondoweiss and CounterPunch.  WBAI radio and the Scott Horton Show have hosted interviews. 

Although the FBI report has now been sent to the New York Times, Washington Post, all members of Congress and United Nations members, no top-tier establishment news coverage, Congressional or UN investigations have been made public.  On Friday, National Public Radio syndicated host Diane Rehm immediately disconnected IRmep Research Director Grant F. Smith when he asked her reporter roundtable to assess the implications of the Netanyahu espionage ring.  An audio clip of the brief exchange is available at:http://www.IRmep.org/NPR.mp3

PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1jilE)

THE REPUBLICANS CROSS THE RUBICON

Paul Craig Roberts

Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?

During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.

In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.

Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.

Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.

What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.

The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?

The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brownshirts demonstrated their power.

The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.

One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.

One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.

Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.

But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections, and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.

In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.

Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.

In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.

He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”

Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.

But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.

The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.

It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.

It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.

The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.

Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”

Politicians Lie–and Reporters Can't Report That

FAIR

Peter Hart

There's an interesting Politico story (8/22/12) about Andrea Seabrook, who until recently was a Capitol Hill reporter for NPR. She's moved on to a new independent reporting project, but it's what she said about her previous gig that's most revealing:

"I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you're doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say," Seabrook told Politico. "And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real…. I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters…. To me, as a reporter, everything is spin."

She says her new Web-based project will try to "decipher Washington's Byzantine language and procedure, sweeping away what doesn't matter so listeners can focus on what does."

Seabrook seems pretty clear that the problem isn't the media: "I think the problem is the Congress itself. And we're all in the same positions, scrambling to figure out how the hell to cover these assholes."

So if a reporter is covering politicians who are lying to her every single day, what is preventing that reporter from saying as much? Why just repeat the lies?

The crystal clear implication here is that, for whatever reason, an NPR journalist doesn't feel comfortable challenging lies and spin.  It's a pretty important admission, and one thatNPR listeners–and management–should think about.

Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects

9/11 Blogger

Kevin Ryan

The Wall Street Journal recently commented on the upcoming military trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM).  The article claimed that KSM and four other terrorists were somehow making a mockery of the U.S. justice system by trying to “use the open military trial to promote jihad and discredit American institutions, including the military system of justice.”[1]  Unsuspecting readers might think that an “open military trial” would actually be less reflective of American institutions than the (actually open) civil trial requested for KSM by many of the 9/11 victims’ families.  But the more important question is – are the right terrorists being brought to trial?

That question is not welcome in polite conversation.

For example, last August I was invited to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to discuss the lasting phenomenon of 9/11 skepticism.  The show’s regular host was replaced by a woman who had clearly made up her mind about the subject.  Ironically, throughout the show she made snide comments about “conspiracy theorists” when referring to the millions of people who don’t believe the official conspiracy theory.  Her other guests, from the Hearst Corporation and Canada’s National Post, joined her in using some variation of this phrase every thirty seconds during the hour long show.  As the sole representative of 9/11 skeptics, I was allowed five minutes to speak until it was clear the conversation was not going as intended.[2]

People listening to this verbal turkey shoot must have wondered what happened to NPR.  Had the “P” suddenly been changed to Propaganda?  Possibly, but what is more important to notice is that, when organizations become effective, they are often co-opted by powerful interests that have hidden agendas.  As reported by Robert Parry, the co-opting of National Public Radio by right-wing corporatists is a great example.[3]  Another example of a phenomenon that has long been co-opted by powerful interests for effecting political change is terrorism.

At a minimum, 9/11 skeptics are willing to consider the possibility that the crimes of 9/11 were not just blowback but were what could be called managed blowback, or the co-opting of terrorism.  Support for this reasoning has been strengthened by the knowledge that al Qaeda was an ally of the U.S. in the recent war on Libya and is apparently working on the same side as the U.S. in Syria as well.[4,5]  None of that is surprising given that al Qaeda was born of the CIA-funded Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.

Adding to the suspicion that U.S. authorities are behind terrorist acts are the reports that the FBI has planned such terrorism and has engaged in entrapment of the accused “terrorists” in the years since 9/11.[6]  It appears that the CIA has been caught in the same kind of trickery recently.[7]

When applied to the 9/11 attacks, the concept of managed blowback means that there must have been others involved in allowing or encouraging 9/11 to happen for purposes other than simple retribution or symbolic gesture.  Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission never entertained any such notions.

“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame.  Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.”[8]

Yet here we are preparing to assign individual blame to KSM and a few others.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed

The 183 water-boarding sessions inflicted on KSM undoubtedly caused mental stress on a level that could not possibly lead to gaining useful information.  Instead, his torture was almost certainly meant to eliminate any information he otherwise might have been able to communicate.  We’ll never know because the tape recordings of those torture sessions, upon which the 9/11 Commission Report was indirectly based, were destroyed.[9]

Perhaps that is better than the treatment we gave to the other leading 9/11 suspect.  Last year we murdered Osama bin Laden without a trial and dumped his body at sea before bothering to get any information out of him about the organization he led.  It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder how many lives might have been saved by the capture and interrogation of that alleged terrorist ringleader.

Some might say that, because the 9/11 Commission pointed to OBL and KSM as being the masterminds behind the attacks, its findings provide adequate legal basis for executing OBL and torturing KSM.  After all, we all know who the enemy is, right?

“We learned about an enemy… [whose] purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal right for women. ”[10]

Unfortunately, there is significant evidence that the official conspiracy for 9/11 is not based on fact.  For one thing, the accused men were not the religious zealots that the official myth made them out to be.  KSM himself was reported by the Los Angeles Times to have spent years engaging in behavior that was far from that of a devout Muslim.  “He met associates in karaoke bars and giant go-go clubs filled with mirrors, flashing lights and bikini-clad dancers. He held meetings at four-star hotels. He took scuba-diving lessons at a coastal resort.”  No one suspected him “of being dangerous to anything but his bank account.”[11]

What kind of information could this man have that required 183 water-boarding sessions to eliminate?  How could the 9/11 Commission have possibly mistaken him for a religious fanatic?  Maybe we’ll find out in the coming year as the “open military trial” proceeds.

In the meantime, however, it is clear that other suspects should be considered.  My own research has revealed a few “white guys in ties” who, if properly investigated, will lead to the people most responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Unlike the officially accused, these guys do not just happen to live on the resource-rich lands that Western corporations and governments so desperately need to control in order to maintain their economies.  Many alternative suspects do have strong links to governments and corporations, however, and were in position to actually accomplish one or more aspects of the attacks.

Would such an alternative group of suspects form a conspiracy that better explains the evidence?  That and other questions will be considered in a forthcoming book called Another Nineteen.  Prior to publication, related research will be made available at the websiteAnother19.com, while the government simultaneously prepares to conduct the trial of KSM and his alleged colleagues.

The attacks of 9/11 were most definitely a conspiracy and discovering the correct explanation will require a theory.  Unfortunately, attempts by official story supporters to use ridicule to prevent consideration of alternative accounts have been successful.  Theatrical media accounts and FBI and CIA-arranged terrorist events have similarly propped up the myth of 21^st century terrorism and our on-again-off-again enemy called al Qaeda.  But there is a lot more to the story.  Some of us are dedicated to revealing more of the truth and if snide labels make people feel more comfortable and ready to look at legitimate suspects, I’ll take the ridicule.

NPR gets radio host fired for occupying

David Swanson
WarIsACrime.org

Lisa Simeone

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who hosted a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been participating in a nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., organized by October2011.org.  That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR.
This frantic email was sent to all NPR staff:

From:NPR Communications

Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 6:12 PM

Subject: From Dana Rehm: Communications Alert

To:       All Staff

Fr:        Dana Davis Rehm

Re:      Communications Alert

We recently learned of World of Opera host Lisa Simeone’s participation in an Occupy DC group. World of Opera is produced by WDAV, a music and arts station based in Davidson, North Carolina. The program is distributed by NPR. Lisa is not an employee of WDAV or NPR; she is a freelancer with the station.

We're in conversations with WDAV about how they intend to handle this. We of course take this issue very seriously.

As a reminder, all public comment (including social media) on this matter is being managed by NPR Communications.

All media requests should be routed through NPR Communications at 202.513.2300 or mediarelations@npr.org. We will keep you updated as needed. Thanks.

Also see NPR's blog post about this here.

About three and a half hours after the above email was sent, Simeone had been fired by a show called Soundprint as punishment for having been "unethical."  Here is her bio on that show's website.  And here she is on NPR's.

Hackers to FBI: 'We are not scared anymore'

MSNBC

Hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec, which had 16 of their alleged members arrested this week in the U.S. by the FBI, don't usually respond to statements written or made about them. But when the FBI's deputy assistant director gave an interview to NPR saying those arrests send "a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable," the hacking collective erupted, with a statement of its own:

We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can possibly to do make us stop.

In the NPR interview that aired Wednesday, Steven Chabinsky, of the FBI said that even if "hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."

Feds arrested 14 of the 16 Tuesday on charges tied to last December's attacks on PayPal as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks' donation account. Another two were arrested on charges related to intrusion and theft from computer systems at InfraGard, which has an IT contract with the federal government, and from AT&T.

The FBI's arrests took place in several states, including Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

Arrests, too, were made by the UK's Metropolitan Police Service and the Dutch National Police Agency in connection with the alleged cyber crimes.

In the U.S., Anonymous and LulzSec have taken credit for recent hacks and sharing of information from sites affiliated with the FBI, as well as from Arizona law enforcement, and the private groups they groups deem to be corrupt.

Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee

NPR 
Dina Temple-Raston

In the first of two stories on counterterrorism training, NPR reports on one training session that turned a state employee into a suspect. 

The man at the center of this story is a 59-year-old Jordanian-American named Omar al-Omari. He looks very much like the college professor that he is — all tweed jacket, button-down shirt, thick round glasses, drinking coffee. We met at a coffee shop near downtown Columbus, Ohio, where he laid out a series of events that ended with him being accused of having links to terrorism.

"Actually I was out of town, out of state, attending a conference and on my way back to Columbus," Omari said, "and I received a call from one of the attendees of this conference in which I was told my name was used repeatedly during the training. Apparently I was labeled as a suspect. They personalized the attacks. There was a promise to dig into my background and basically as an Arab-Muslim American — they thought I'm a suspect."

Omari was singled out at a three-day seminar for local police and law enforcement in the Columbus area last April. The class was part of a larger nationwide initiative to help local law enforcement not just understand terrorism, but perhaps find ways to stop it. The Obama administration has set aside millions of dollars to fund these training programs and, not surprisingly, that money has helped create an industry in which self-styled terrorism experts contract themselves out to local police departments as terrorism tutors.

There is no certification process to vet the experts. They simply present their resumes and, often through word of mouth, they get hired. The trainers tend to be former government officials. Sometimes they have had key roles in the federal government fighting terrorism. Just as often, they have not. There's growing evidence that many of these training sessions are providing officers at the grassroots with a biased view of Muslims in America. That is what appears to have happened to Omari.

The training at the Columbus Division of Police took place over three days in mid-April 2010. The course was titled "Understanding the True Nature of the Threat to America." Broad outlines of the curriculum are posted on the trainers' website. The course includes a discussion about the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States; Islamic law as it relates to jihad; and the trainers say they will provide "specific examples of Muslim Brotherhood/Islamic Movement activity in the locale in which the presentation is given." It was in that context that Omari became a target.

One of the trainers in Ohio that day was a man named John Guandolo. He's a former FBI agent and former Marine. According to people in the training class that day and Guandolo himself, a photograph of Omari with members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a local Muslim advocacy group, was put up on the screen. According to the people who were there, Guandolo and the other visiting trainers didn't say outright that Omari was a terrorist, but they suggested that he had links to bad people — people who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and even al-Qaida.

"I stand by what I said that day about Omari," Guandolo told me, though he declined to say so on tape. "The facts are on my side."

Now to understand why the accusations against Omari were so surprising, it is important to know that at the time he ran a key Muslim outreach program for the state of Ohio. What he was doing for the state's Department of Public Safety was considered so effective, counterterrorism officials in Washington sent him overseas to talk about it.

Omari is from Jordan. He's been living in the U.S. for 30 years and he's an American citizen. Even so, for people in the counterterrorism class in Columbus that day, it seemed entirely possible that he could be a terrorist. And that reaction in the room surprised a lot of people – most notably Deputy Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Columbus Division of Police. Blackwell is now in charge of the CPD's homeland security unit.

NPR Spreads Holder-Propaganda

Remember that NPR is "balanced"?

Only if "balanced" means reading from Eric Holder's script.

"Current and former federal officials say their hands are tied because of weak U.S. gun laws. Possessing a gun isn't a crime, unlike, say, possessing cocaine. And, in order to bring a prosecution, the government must demonstrate a straw purchaser had bad intentions." --Drivel of NPR

No, they have to demonstrate he was a straw purchaser. He was buying a gun for someone else...

"Intent" is NOT relevant.

Sure, there's more!!

"Issa and ATF whistleblowers who protested to no avail

with their supervisors in Arizona say the number of Fast and Furious guns still unaccounted for could top 1,000. But authorities are telling Congress the numbers could be far lower. Documents obtained by NPR and provided to lawmakers suggest that 568 weapons tied to Fast and Furious have been located: 372 in the U.S. and 196 more in Mexico." --Holder/NPR bullshit machine
I'd expected NPR at least to do simple math. The number of guns allowed to walk has been reported as 1,700 or 2,500. Subtract 568 from those and you get 1,132 to 1,932

Math is hard.