The operation involved tracking purchases by suspected straw buyers and observing whether guns recovered at crime scenes tracked back to these purchases.
According to Wikipedia, the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to
illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them." I don't know much about the case, but the claim that said buyers were illegal is fairly significant.
For this sort of thing, I'm more inclined to trust RationalWiki.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious
Here's their citation:
http://fortune.com/2012/06/27/the-truth-about-the-fast-and-furious-scandal/
Note that Fortune magazine is hardly "Liberal Media".
Here are the problems with the Right of Center narrative on "Fast and Furious"
1.) It was a program started by the ATF years before Holder even started as AG, and was always a regional initiative rather than a national one.
2.) The notional plan was to use a system where they tracked people whom they had probable cause to believe legal purchases would then be illegally resold.
3.) Although the ATF had probable cause to believe everyone on their list was reselling to criminals, another department in DoJ, the US Attorney's Office (ie., the guys who file charges and prosecute as opposed to the people who investigate the crimes (dun dun)) refused to indict some of them.
4.) One of the guns bought by one of the indicted suspects was used to kill a US Border Patrol agent.
5.) One of agents of the ATF team alleges that the reason 4.) happened was not 3.), but a deliberate decision by ATF investigators to wait until crimes were committed with the guns before purchasing, which GOP congressmen have chosen to believe in the face of evidence to the contrary.
OK, realize that point 2.) turns this into a guaranteed political win with conservatives.
If everything goes right, the ATF is exceeding its authority and trampling on the rights of gun owners by prosecuting people who purchased guns legally.
If something goes to hell, as it did, they scream about letting guns pass into the hands criminals (and worse, non-Whites), and savage the ATF for not acting.
Compare the analogous scenario where someone purchases alcohol on behalf of a minor, and that minor kills someone while driving drunk. The emotions will be less charged but the legal principles are the same. Civil Libertarians will argue against prosecution of the purchasers unless a very stringent standard of probable cause is met, while anti-DUI activists will be outraged if a death could have been prevented by prosecutorial action.
Of course in this case, the people upset with the two separate government outrages tend not to be the same people.
So if you are concerned about the civil liberties issue of tracking gun purchases, as some of the libertarian minded folks on this forum are, you really have no leg to stand on in condemning the ATF for inaction leading to the shooting. If you are outraged about the preventable death of the Border Patrol agent, then you want to be angry at the gun lobby for putting the pressure on to not prosecute straw purchasers. (That would in this case mean condemning the NRA, so that will never happen.)
In general though this is just another fake scandal. There may be reasons to condemn Holder for his other policies, but Fast and Furious is pretty much a load of nonsense.
