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Eric Holder Military Tribunal, Day 1
By Michael Baxter -July 16, 20233159005
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 âemotional abuseâ 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 morningâs proceedings.
The admiral disagreed and reminded him that JAG had given him time to secure outside counsel. Holder had replied he hadnât sought representation for two reasons: the charges were farcical and that he trusted only his own renowned legal acumen to defend his case.
âDetainee Holder, if youâre of sound enough mind to speak about legal defenses, youâre able to stand trial. Your morality is impaired, but your thinking is not,â Vice Adm. Crandall said as a pair of MPs ensured Holder took a seat at the defense table.
âI donât lose cases,â Holder said.
âNeither do I,â said Admiral Crandall.
In an opening statement, the admiral said Holder shouldâve been imprisoned in 2012 for using his authority as attorney general to cover up the thousands of guns that went missing during the ATFâs notorious five-year-long âFast & Furiousâ gun-walking scandal, an operation by which Obamaâs Department of Injustice âpurposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them.â But no cartel kings were caught, and the ATF lost track of the guns. The coverup surrounding âFast & Furious,â also called âProject Gunrunner,â began unraveling after the murder of border patrol agent Brian Terry, whose homicide was linked to the serial number of a âmissingâ 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 âFast & Furiousâ before it had become a matter of public record.
âHe got an undeserved break. Only 712 of 5,000 firearms ever found,â the admiral said to the panel of officers JAG had picked to hear the case.
âThat is a misrepresentation of the truth,â Holder chimed in. âIt was 2,000, and thatâs all on record.â
âThatâs what the perpetrator wants you to believe,â the admiral told the panel. âHe and his master, Barack Hussein Obama, adroitly made sure documents they wanted secret never reached the National Archives. But they missed a few things.â
Holder objected to the admiralâs use of the word âmaster,â saying it evoked connotations of slavery.
âThe race card doesnât work here, detainee Holder,â Adm. Crandall said.
He showed the panel paperwork containing serial numbers of the 712 recovered weapons, the 1,288 âofficiallyâ unrecovered guns, and an additional 3,000 firearms never mentioned in official findings. A Navy criminal investigator, the admiral said, had lifted Holderâs 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 âAllahu Akbarâ 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.
âAccording to the ATFâs 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 defendantâs fingerprints,â the admiral told the panel. âThe 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 pistolâs 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 werenât lost; they were placed into hands, hands like Nidal Hasanâs.â