Curtailment of civil liberities..torture..cold-blooded passive-aggressive murder of non-combatants..

...when I see how Obama turned away from accountability for the Bush/Cheney gang early on, why would I have any confidence this isn't more of the same?

Your quote above expresses my feelings regarding any president who lets former presidents or vice-presidents off the hook for criminal and impeachable offenses.

They are not doing it to "move on". The only way to move on would be to prosecute those criminals and see to it as best we can that their like will never take power in our country again.

They are not doing it to spare the country. The country would be educated and could finally breathe again if those who betrayed us were punished for their crimes.

Presidents who let a former criminal president and vice president go scott free is doing so in the expectation that they will be accorded the same shelter for themselves and officials close to them.

Or why Issa has not allowed to testify before the committee people who presumably have information to offer?

It was not.  Holders DoJ took this to another level.

The question Issa is asking is what did Holder and Obama know and when did they know it.

Nixon was taken down for lying about a burglary.  We are talking about people dying because our federal government gave bad guys guns.  

I can only imagine if Bush was still in charge and his DoJ had done this how many threads would be on TL about it.

Shouldn't matter that Holder and Obama are in the cross hairs.  This was government law enforcement run amuck and it resulted in innocent people dying.  It should be investigated and Holder and Obama should not be allowed to cover it up.

BTAL: "The most important being that [Operation Wide Receiver] was conducted in coordination and cooperation with the Mexican govt to limit the chance of guns disappearing when they crossed the border."

At the time "Operation Wide Receiver" was launched in 2006, licensed Tucson arms dealer Mike Detty -- who had been hired by the ATF as a confidential informant for this effort -- was given assurances by ATF that "Mexican officials would be conducting surveillance or interdictions when guns got to the other side of the border."

However, that clearly doesn't appear to be the case, because of the approximately 450 weapons sold by Mr. Detty in 2006 and 2007 as part of OWR, the overwhelming majority were subsequently lost as they were moved across the border into Mexico.

So much for "ccordination and cooperation with the Mexican government," huh?

Further, I'd offer that Congressman Issa's staff has also been deliberately conflating the events of "Wide Receiver" and "Fast and Furious" for partisan political purposes. From the Washington Post (October 6, 2011):

"But Wide Receiver, conducted in the Bush administration, has not received a lot of attention. According to Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler, some of the e-mails used in the attempt to discredit Holder were referring to the Tucson case, Wide Receiver. More specifically, Schmaler said that when the e-mails mention "guns walking," they are referring to the 2006-07 Tucson case, Operation Wide Receiver. Schmaler said neither of the officials knew about guns walking in the Fast and Furious case." (Emphasis is mine.)

Look, this entire gunwalking scheme concocted by ATF was a half-assed boondoggle from the outset. I'm not going to deny that the Obama administration bears the current responsibility for it because "Operation Fast and Furious" obviously happened on their watch. It's important to take sufficient steps on an administrative level so that such wildeyed nonsense isn't allowed to occur again.

But those who insist that "Operation Fast and Furious" didn't have its genesis in "Operation Wide Receiver" are being almost completely disingenuous, and are clearly less interested in getting to the bottom of the ATF scandal and resolving the problem, than in scoring partisan political points in an election year at the Obama administration's expense.

Special agents have been deployed to Monterrey to support the work of the attachés in the ATF Mexico Office and assist Mexican authorities in their fight against firearms related violence. Three additional ATF intelligence research specialists and one investigative analyst are planned for the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) to support Project Gunrunner, along with one intelligence research specialist in each of the four field divisions on the southwest border (Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles).

One of the talking points relates to the Bush admin program (WR) and F&F.  There was significant differences in the two programs.  The most important being that WR was conducted in coordination and cooperation with the Mexican govt to limit the chance of guns disappearing when they crossed the border.

Where is the evidence that WR was run with the coordination and cooperation of the Mexican government?  Just today, Chuck Grassley contrasted it with a third operation and said it was not:

Grassley also said the Hernandez operation is fundamentally different from Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious because it involved cooperation with the Mexican government.

BTW - The second link from vicndabx says nothing about coordinating/cooperation of Wide Receiver.

Unfortunately, unless Rove appeared in person in either the U.S. Capitol building or nearby congressional offices, the House Sgt.-at-Arms had no legal authority to arrest him. The power to enforce a congressional subpoena outside the U.S. Capitol complex rests solely with the U.S. Attorney's office for the District of Columbia.

how long has this investigation been going on? You get all the witnesses on the stand, ask them questions under oath, collect all the documents, whatever defense there is makes its case, then the court reaches a verdict.

But guess what?  Issa not only has no interest in looking into the ATF field office's behavior over the years, he's actively barred testimony on the subject, whether from witnesses he's called himself whom he out loud forbade to answer questions on the subject, or witnesses he refuses to call when they've been proposed by the Dems. on the committee.

Darrell Issa is a collossal hack who has no interest in finding out the truth, only in sliming Holder and the Obama administration as thoroughly as he can manage.

Either the name of the one who authorized this should be known, or those responsible for unauthorized gun transfers to the cartels should be charged and arrested.

The "leftists" on this site have been quite clear in their disapproval of Fast & Furious, and would like to get to the bottom of the whole ugly mess, but are not willing to take either side's talking points as a substitute for facts and information.  Is Holder covering something up? I don't know - but I can assure you that regardless of what team Holder plays for, you won't find much defense for him here if he is.

And that's where you are wrong about what the "leftists" here are all about.

How is it that you don't get that yet?

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this affair is what Issa once suggested his investigation will uncover. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Issa claimed that the Obama administration "made a crisis" when they continued the Bush-era gunrunning operations because they wanted to "us[e] this crisis to somehow take away or limit people's Second Amendment rights." This accusation originates from a former militiaman who supports violent resistance to imagined government attempts to seize his guns. And it amounts to an accusation that a series of botched gun stings that begun during the Bush Administration were actually part of a secret Obama plot to release guns to Mexican drug lords, so that those guns could then be used to kill federal agents, which would then cause a national uprising in support of gun control.

Link

And I don't - believe Darrell Issa, that is.

Link

Either Issa's elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or he's pandering to the evil-kenyan-gonna-take-muh-guns crowd.

The Justice Department has retracted a second statement made to the Senate Judiciary Committee. During a hearing last week, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that his predecessor, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, had been briefed about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver. Now, the Department is retracting that statement and claiming Holder "inadvertently" made that claim to the Committee.

Or is your argument predicated on the idea that if the Mexican drug dealers hadn't bought guns in AZ, they'd have attacked Agent Terry with mean words and harsh glances?

Team Romney and the SuperPacs are all ready spitting out the commercials for this one.

That quote followed up by a grainy video of Holder soon to follow.

Instead of working with the Mexican government they went around them hoping that a more covert operation would better lead them to the source of the gun running.

As with all good government programs what looked good on paper didn't work out and our government lost thousands of weapons that ended up in the cartels hands and eventually killed a boarder agent breaking the story.

DoJ, namely Holder lied when confronted about it and here we are.  

They've lied from the get go on multiple occasions and now Issa and the House (obviously originally out to smear Holder and now Obama have knowingly or unknowingly stumbled on a real scandal) have had enough.

If you put your partisanship aside it's pretty simple.   Someone at DoJ messed up big time.   That is not in doubt.

The questions are...

1. Who initially authorized the program?
   
2. Did Holder authorize it and if not when did he find out it went bad?
   
3. Same for Obama.
   
4. Why has DoJ repeatedly lied about it?

All snark aside, you do raise an entirely valid and really good point. Why DOESN'T Darrell Issa raise those other issues with due regard to AG Holder?

Well, I would counter that the GOP doesn't really seem all that interested in holding Holder and Obama accountable for stuff with which they're almost entirely in agreement.

But hey -- when you're talking about the Mexican border, the ATF and the secretive gunrunning of automatic weapons? "Yah-HOOOOooooo ...!!! We hit the friggin' Trifecta!"