The criminal Eric Holder had tried to delay his Friday Guantanamo Bay military tribunal by saying he was emotionally incompetent to stand trial. His unlawful arrest, coupled with the psychological duress and “emotional abuse” endured at the hands of his jailers, had rendered him incapable of adequately defending himself against specious charges, he explained to Vice Adm. Darse E. Crandall at the start of Friday morning’s proceedings.
The admiral disagreed and reminded him that JAG had given him time to secure outside counsel. Holder had replied he hadn’t sought representation for two reasons: the charges were farcical and that he trusted only his own renowned legal acumen to defend his case.
“Detainee Holder, if you’re of sound enough mind to speak about legal defenses, you’re able to stand trial. Your morality is impaired, but your thinking is not,” Vice Adm. Crandall said as a pair of MPs ensured Holder took a seat at the defense table.
“I don’t lose cases,” Holder said.
“Neither do I,” said Admiral Crandall.
In an opening statement, the admiral said Holder should’ve been imprisoned in 2012 for using his authority as attorney general to cover up the thousands of guns that went missing during the ATF’s notorious five-year-long “Fast & Furious” gun-walking scandal, an operation by which Obama’s Department of Injustice “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.” But no cartel kings were caught, and the ATF lost track of the guns. The coverup surrounding “Fast & Furious,” also called “Project Gunrunner,” began unraveling after the murder of border patrol agent Brian Terry, whose homicide was linked to the serial number of a ‘missing’ AK-47-type rifle. After his death, ATF whistleblowers exposed the depth of the operation, implicating Holder, U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Dennis K. Burke, and acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, among others. Whistleblower testimony had sparked a congressional probe, but Obama invoked Executive Privilege suppressing incriminating documents, and in September 2012, his inspector general cleared Holder of any wrongdoing, saying there was no evidence Holder knew about “Fast & Furious” before it had become a matter of public record.
“He got an undeserved break. Only 712 of 5,000 firearms ever found,” the admiral said to the panel of officers JAG had picked to hear the case.
“That is a misrepresentation of the truth,” Holder chimed in. “It was 2,000, and that’s all on record.”
“That’s what the perpetrator wants you to believe,” the admiral told the panel. “He and his master, Barack Hussein Obama, adroitly made sure documents they wanted secret never reached the National Archives. But they missed a few things.”
Holder objected to the admiral’s use of the word ‘master,’ saying it evoked connotations of slavery.
“The race card doesn’t work here, detainee Holder,” Adm. Crandall said.
He showed the panel paperwork containing serial numbers of the 712 recovered weapons, the 1,288 ‘officially’ unrecovered guns, and an additional 3,000 firearms never mentioned in official findings. A Navy criminal investigator, the admiral said, had lifted Holder’s fingerprints from a few of the pages. His assistant entered the courtroom carrying a FN Herstal 5.7 pistol in a sealed evidence bag, which she placed on a table.
That pistol, the admiral explained, was in 2009 recovered from Nidal Hasan, the U.S. Army major and psychiatrist who fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 others during the Ft. Hood massacre in September that year. Hasan, an avowed Muslim, had shouted “Allahu Akbar” all through his rampage. Hasan was found guilty of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder on August 23, 2013, and was sentenced to death on August 28, 2013. As of this writing, he is still on death row at Ft. Leavenworth.
“According to the ATF’s own literature, the FN Herstal is a favorite weapon of straw buyers. The serial number on this sidearm matches the serial number of a page with the defendant’s fingerprints,” the admiral told the panel. “The defendant approved an illegal firearm sting program, claims to have lost the weapons, hides the existence of 3,000 more firearms. One kills a border patrol agent. Another magically finds its way into the hands of a mass shooter, a radical Muslim terrorist, on a U.S. military installation. The shooter is caught and punished, but no investigation was made about the pistol’s origin, which, we know, was purchased by someone other than Hasan at a now shut-down firearms dealer in New Mexico. The evidence shows that at least some of the weapons weren’t lost; they were placed into hands, hands like Nidal Hasan’s.”
Holder held his tongue no longer. He called the admiral’s “theory” a “twisting, speculative mess” that didn’t hold water. For all he knew, JAG had manufactured the serial numbers and twisted the mass shooting to fit an agenda. “This is a mockery of justice,” he said.
The admiral put the tribunal on recess until Monday morning, without giving an explanation.