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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.
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.
I am sick of this. Every. Fucking. Thing. that happens is an excuse to pump money into the militarization of the US of A with the accompanying security theater. I've been in Europe for about 15 years. I am not going to talk about whether Europe is better or not, I've been around enough to know that it's apples to oranges. But I can compare between the America I grew up in and love and what I see today.
When Obama came to visit Brussels last year, myself and several thousand other people were locked in our offices for three hours because the only exit was on the street that his motorcade was scheduled to come down, only he was two hours late. When he passed, he rolled by in his motorcade with military escort; the last vehicle was an SUV with the back hatch open and a couple of dudes with machine guns in it. While I was having a smoke afterwords, one of the older ladies in the building told me about Clinton's visit in the 90's... she saw him out jogging in the foret de soignes park.
Every time I go home to visit my family, it makes me cry a little bit. Crime rates are their lowest since well before I was born, yet all I hear is about how important it is to take measures to keep myself safe. Last year I was jet lagged and went out for a walk at 2am for some air... a cop actually stopped me to ask me what I was doing! A middle aged man, clean-shaven and wearing light-colored clothes while walking on the sidewalk is now a cause for suspicion in suburbia. When I was growing up, I used to go out at that time on a weekly basis and actually do bad stuff. Never even saw a cop then.
It is time for us to wake up as a country. It is popular to say that 9/11 changed everything, but in fact it only changed us. We need to stop being so pussy-shit and do a little cost-benefit ratio analysis on the stupid security stuff we do. What is more likely to extend the average lifespan of your community's inhabitants, putting a dozen patrolmen on the streets or building a gym? I bet I know the answer to that one.
Oh, and the president is just a man. His family is just a family. He is an important man serving the country and deserves to be protected by said country, but if he bites the dust he'll be replaced and it ain't worth many millions of dollars on technical gadgetry when we could use that money to pay down the deficit.
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?
There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house.
Back when rather few people actually traveled any significant distance. Also back in those days the federal government mattered rather less than it does today. It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot has changed. Maybe the fact that every president since Johnson has been the target of known assassination attempts or plots. Four presidents have been assassinated (Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield) and two were wounded by would-be assassins (Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt). When you are the leader of a nation there are some crazy people out there who will kill you if they have the chance.
Losing your nation's leader is a BIG deal. It causes very serious problems no matter what country you are talking about.