There’s a large number of news articles about a guy who jumped the white house fence and made it inside.
Do the pundits and Congress expect the secret service to have opened fire on the man in a hail of bullets before he got halfway across the lawn?
Or did they expect them to close and lock the outer doors he got past?
I expect they plan to blame it on President Obama.
He wasn’t an intruder. He was just an undocumented visitor.
Well, I think it’s fair to think that he should have been intercepted at the door at the very least.
My understanding is that, since the president (nor his family, VP, etc) were in the White House at the time, the level of response goes down proportionally (no hail of bullets) since the primary function of the Secret Service in that regard is to protect the President, not the White House. But that hardly excuses letting someone run in over the threshold.
Since we’re in IMHO, I think the guy should have lost his life on the front porch, the second he touched the door handle.
I think the general idea is that he should have been intercepted by the Secret Service somewhere out in the middle of the White House lawn, long before he reached the building itself.
According to this story in the Washington Post
The surveillance team that’s supposed to watch the perimeter didn’t see the intruder jump the fence.
There was supposed to be a guard dog set loose if the human guards couldn’t reach the intruder. The dog was available, but not used.
The alarms which were supposed to alert everyone had been silenced because false alarms had disturbed the White House staff.
The front door was left unlocked, nor was there a guard at the door.
I’d say that’s enough questions to start with.
I don’t think this should be a political thread. The Secret Service clearly screwed up badly and they are generally good about admitting their mistakes quickly but they didn’t in this case. The head of the SS did not admit just how far the lone assailant got inside the White House until days after the incident. That is a serious breach of trust on its own. She needs to be fired ASAP for it and probably will be.
As to what should have happened, the security protocol is well established:
Once someone breaches the fence, SS agents on watch should immediately notice and move in to make a physical takedown and arrest.
If the person starts to run, the attack dog handlers need to release the attack dogs that are always on duty specifically for that purpose to take the person down. That never happened in this case for no good reason at all.
If those measures fail and the person makes it close to the entrance to the White House, it it up to the agents’ discretion but shoot to kill would be appropriate for most circumstances including this one.
Once the person is inside the White House, he is a clear threat and it is a clear shoot to kill scenario unless some other option is almost guaranteed to work or bystanders or hostages are at risk.
This was one guy with a knife but the Secret Service didn’t know that at the time. They just blew their jobs so badly it is inexcusable. It could have been a group of ISIS militants coming en force while the President was present.
The person that caught him was an off duty agent that just happened to be there and in the assailant’s path. The on-duty agents seemed powerless against a lone crazy civilian. Presidential assassination attempts come in all the time, we just don’t hear about most of them. It could be a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald or it could be a famous person like John Wilkes Booth (basically the George Clooney of his time) or even another Squeaky Fromme type (Gerald Ford’s attempted assassin). They have to be ready and on top of all those scenarios and be prepared to act on any of them in the blink of an eye. That is their primary job and they failed miserably in this case. There is no good defense for it.
Well speaking on behalf of all pundits everywhere I think the expectation of the Secret Service is to stop intruders from entering the White House.
But the people on duty did manage to stop him from carving his initials in the mantle. It’s not like they let an armed person get next to the President.
You forgot the oops link.
This may sound bad but I think shooting the intruder (but not killing him) would have been good, not so much for the threat he posed, as to set an example to anyone with similar ideas.
I’m not sure people with ‘similar ideas’ are able to consider the issue rationally. My default assumption is that someone who acts like this has a serious untreated mental illness, so they may not put two and two together or they may think it’s worth risking death. But the Secret Service is supposed to have had a bunch of ways to stop this guy before he got off the lawn - from agents on foot to the dog to snipers - and then there were the alarms in the White House. And today I think they admitted they can’t remotely lock the front door to the White House, and it came out that this guy was stopped by an agent who was off-duty and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. So it’s just happenstance that the guy didn’t get even further into the White House.
He should not have made it off the lawn at most.
And he got far enough that he could have encountered any of the Obamas inside the WH if they had been home.
A mentally ill person can make a good assassination attempt at least as well as perfectly sane one. See John Hinkley Jr, Squeaky Fromme, probably Lee Harvey Oswald for example plus lots of others that everyone forgets about or were never widely publicized. Making a charge at the White House is a clear threat to security of the President and the nation regardless of any supplemental facts and needs to be treated as such for the immediate security response. All it takes is for one to slip by and pull off the seemingly unlikely scenario before we have to watch another state funeral followed by Congressional Hearings and the and endless string of conspiracy theories.
It is really bad form for the SS to let everyone know that security can be that wide open. Someone else can use that knowledge to come up with a much more effective plan next time (and there is always a next time).
Frankly we are all rather disappointed that the robot cannons in the lawn did not take him out. There WILL be a review of that and whether the OS upgrade to Win3.11 WFW is responsible.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Yes, they can. I was responding to the idea that it would be a deterrent if this guy had been killed. I don’t think people who are out of touch with reality would be deterred that way.
Yes, this is very bad for any number of reasons. Since these problems are now public, I hope they actually get fixed.
To the title question: What should have happened was what had happened to over a dozen fence-jumpers over the last quarter century: a nonfatal takedown on the lawn before they could get across it. Example: The guy in the Pikachu hat on last 9/11, of all dates… they stopped and grabbed him right on the lawn.
Heck, a dude who opened fire from the sidewalk with a rifle during the Clinton years was initially disarmed by quick-thinking/acting close passerby, NOT killed where he stood in a hail of fire – which would have been a problem if there were other people so close. AFAICT the last intruder or would-be intruder to be shot (nonfatally) by the guard detail was back in the Reagan years and was taken down upon brandishing a weapon.
As has been mentioned, this last incident was a parade of major malfunctions: lack of realtime detection of breach; guards not being in a position to cover the whole of the perimeter immediately thereupon; the dogs not getting released; the unsecured front door (OK, *that *I can understand, in the sense of “hey, nobody is supposed to make it to this door who is not supposed to be here”); the understaffed front hall security (just one guard?); the report that the alarm box had been muted on request of the usher’s office (WTF??? Of course alarms will disrupt ongoing work/events, they are supposed to!!). Plenty of :smack:-type failure points. Thing is, it looks like there’s extreme reliance on any intrusion being stopped right at or right within the outer or middle perimeter, and a lack of defense-in-depth, which requires the first and second lines to be very tight and impregnable and this day they were not.
The Committee Chairman at the hearing on this latest incident said something to the effect of “you should not praise the agents for restraint, we don’t want restraint, we want overwhelming force”. Well I hope that he does not mean shoot-to-kill as first choice. The notion that the moment anyone trespasses on the WH lawn he is a dead man is going too far to opposite extremes. Such a person must be surrounded and confronted and made to taste the grass well before he makes it up the driveway, and if this means a labor-intensive and high-personal-risk guard detail then so be it. But I would not be at all surprised if the standard for WH security were that IF the First Family is NOT in the building, then they will NOT use lethal force unless the intruder gives them no choice and is an imminent threat (e.g. weapon is brandished)
One does wonder if the WH security may indeed be a bit heavily weighted in the back of their minds for many years now by what a shitstorm it would be to kill a mere civilian having a mental episode, with no terrorism evidence being found. I can’t help but imagine a lot of people loudly bitching and moaning up and down every venue that would hear them about jackbooted thuggery and a siege mentality and how come Clinton and both Bushes never had to have any fence-jumpers shot, etc. Thing is, of course, had this guy been stopped quickly and efficiently like Pikachu-man, that would have been the last most of us would have heard of it. What worked on the 11th failed on the 19th, badly.
Well maybe we should have the TSA guard the White House. The guns will still get through but the President will be safe from old people in wheel chairs and diapers. We have to start somewhere or other countries will start laughing at us.
A woman was killed after driving into a White House road barricade last year, and almost nobody seems to have a problem with it. In part I think that’s because the incident was initially treated as potential terrorism and nobody seems sure why it all happened- was she confused and panicked, or was she having a depressive or psychotic episode?