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Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach
HughPickens.com writes On Friday evening, a man jumped the White House fence, sprinted across the North Lawn toward the residence, and was eventually tackled by agents, but not before he managed to actually enter the building. Now CBS reports that the security breach at the White House is prompting a new round of criticism for the Secret Service, with lawmakers and outside voices saying the incident highlights glaring deficiencies in the agency's protection of the president and the first family. "Because of corner-cutting and an ingrained cultural attitude by management of 'we make do with less,' the Secret Service is not protecting the White House with adequate agents and uniformed officers and is not keeping up to date with the latest devices for detecting intruders and weapons of mass destruction," says Ronald Kessler. "The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance." But the Secret Service must also consider the consequences of overreaction says White House correspondent Major Garrett. "If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?" But Kessler says Julia Pierson, the first woman to head the Secret Service, has some explaining to do. "If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
id say things went well. he was stopped fairly quickly, no one was hurt. not sure why all the hate on it? its a fine line between protection and being a fortress, i dont think we want the white house on military lock down do we?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So, they don't guard it as strictly when the POTUS and family aren't home? I'm pretty OK with that.
If you want to defend the president 24x7 against absolutely any threat that includes non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, then you'll need to forget about putting the white house in the middle of a city, and never have the president step outside of an armored and sealed environment. If you want to protect against a threat that includes nuclear weapons, now you need maybe a 10 mile buffer zone between anywhere the president goes and the rest of civilization.
On the other hand, half of the other national leaders can bike to work if they want to. Granted, terrorists aren't gunning for the leader of Norway the way they would be for the US president.
In the end, security is a balance. Sure, we could have sentries that shoot anything that moves and a minefield in the white house lawn, but as was pointed out that results in lots of dead crazy people on the news. There is no question that the style of secret service the US has is going to lead to a few dead presidents each century, which is basically what the trend has been. I just don't see a way to fix things without making other things much worse. The problem is that there are a lot of nutjobs who think that killing one person will somehow solve the world's problems, and that the last election was just a one-time delusion that could never happen again.
This is just puffery because it is trendy to beat up on every government agency now, and the SS in particular after the Columbia prostitute scandal.
They have everything they need to protect the president but they are smart and respond to each threat based on the *actual* threat it poses. The snipers that hang out on the White House roof could have dropped the man before he made it ten feet, but had they done so everyone would be screaming about how they killed an unarmed man when the president and his family weren't even on the grounds.
From the summary: "risk having cell phone video"
Sounds like the decision making is largely driven by 1) Will we get caught doing X on video? and 2) What will the press say?
I'd just recommend that when you compare, it's done intelligently and fairly. I mean, there's a huge difference between the insanely distorted America depicted in clever headlines and media soundbites and the many and varied communities across the United States. The US is not CNN, it is not the E Channel, it is not Hollywood. Really. I've lived and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia across the decades. I've found there to be at least as much variation in good and bad neighborhoods, rich and poor, genteel and tough, both Europe and Asia. There are streets, stradas, rues, calles, etc., on either continent that I avoid at night or alone.
Presidents are politicians. They must keep in contact with the voters to get re-elected, and the accessibility of the current president has been welcome. It helps defuse concerns about his level of education separating him from ordinary citizens, or forgetting what it's like to be black.
Assessing the strange "what if he'd been carrying a weapon of mass destruction" concerns:
1) The simplest pony yield atom bombs have to weigh at least 40 pounds for the nuclear material alone, based on rough guidelines for U-235 critical mass published in various magazines during my career. Jumping the fence and sprinting across the White House lawn, carrying something that heavy is difficult and _will_ give the Secret Service personnel more time. Such a device would be more effective _outside_ the White House during a semi-public event where the President is outdoors, such as an inauguration.
2) Chemical attacks have similar problems. An aerosol or chemical poison would have to basically flood the air of the White House, which has quite good climate control inside. That means getting past the ventilation system, which would be a _very_ good place to put the sensors and stop the air flow if there were such an attack.
3) Bacteriological weapons would, again, have to get from the attacker's entry to the President. Such a biological agent would be more effectively spread by leaking it during a White House tour, not by a run across the White House lawn.
The Secret Service reacted well, with measured restraint. Better staffed guard posts might be useful, but they are _expensive_. If you estimate the presence of 20 more patrolling guards, 24x7, at roughly $100,000/guard/shift covered, that's roughly $6,000,000/year. Which federal budget shall we strip for that funding?
"If you have a jumper and he is unarmed and has no bags or backpacks or briefcase, do you unleash a dog and risk having cell phone video shot from Pennsylvania Avenue of an unarmed, mentally ill person being bitten or menaced by an attack dog?"
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance.
On what is arguably the most heavily guarded building on the planet some idiot thinks a little lock on the front door is going to keep the bad guys out? Exactly what would be the point of this little door lock? What would it protect against?
Talk about someone with no clue when it comes to security.
Anything to paint the President in a bad light.
No need. Obama is a "hands on" president, he takes care of that himself.
Republicans are fucking scumbags.
And yet they are still a major improvement on Democrats!
GP here, although I've got no proof of that. You clearly did not read what I wrote. I am saying that it is perfectly safe pretty much everywhere in the US, but we've managed to convince ourselves that it is getting worse every year.
For what it's worth, I am from Centennial, Colorado and my neighborhood was solid middle class 40 years ago and remains so today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was a Friday evening. The President had left for Camp David earlier, and his main protective detail went with him. Most staffers had gone home. The guy got just inside the outer doors, where there is a security checkpoint, before he was tackled.
The Secret Service made the right choice not shooting the intruder dead on the lawn. They certainly had the capability to kill him. They would have been heavily criticized, with pictures of the dead body on national TV.
On September 12, a man wearing a Pokemon hat and carrying a stuffed animal jumped the White House fence. He was tackled and arrested. Should he have been killed?
Here in the US, there is really very little relevance to whether or not anything DOES happen to the president. We have a rather robust chain of command going down how many elected positions? I'd personally rather lose 20 presidents than spend a dollar more on presidential security. It's not like loss of a president would lose us that much face with the global community, except perhaps in those regimes where their 'elected leader' is slightly less elected and slightly more concerned with staying in power and not being dead.
I mean hell we are replacing the guy every 4-8 years, likely with another corporate shill, so does it really matter that much to us if something happens to our figurehead? I mean hell, most Dems/Reps wouldn't mind it as long as it was the OTHER party's guy, right? All those bad decisions allegedly made by him can be stopped! Well, until the next automaton replaces him as part of the emergency chain of command, and you finally come to the realization it is puppets all the way down.