Help me out here. Which of these incidents is more alarming?
1.) A knife-wielding madman -- sadly, a veteran of the Iraq War -- jumps over the fence at the White House, runs all the way across the lawn, enters the residence through the unlocked, unguarded front entrance, overpowers a guard inside and gets within feet of the presidential living quarters before he is finally apprehended by an off-duty guard who just happened to have been there. Imagine the outcome of that same scenario, but with a well-armed, well-trained team of assailants instead of a lone nutcase, because you can bet that enemies of this nation are imagining it today too.
2.) An Obama-obsesssed gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle and 180 rounds of ammunition drives from Idaho to Washington, parks near the White House and fires nine shots, at least seven shots of which strike the residence. However, Secret Service personnel are reassured that the multiple gunshots are really just backfires from a passing car, and are told to stand down.
The fact that the White House had been targeted wasn't even discovered until four days later, when someone noticed spent bullets and damage to the building. The assailant was also found only by accident. He had wrecked his car seven blocks away and then fled on foot, leaving his rifle and nine shell casings inside. It took several days to apprehend him. (Somehow, eyewitness accounts of a young white male fleeing the scene had morphed into a police call telling officers to arrest two black males fleeing the scene.)
3.) During a visit to the Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta, President Obama boards an elevator with his Secret Service detail and a private security contractor hired by the CDC. Even though all personnel at the scene of a presidential visit are supposed to be screened for criminal records, the contractor on the elevator has three convictions for assault and battery. Unknown to Secret Service agents at the time, he also carried a gun. (And yes, how the CDC hired a private security officer with multiple assault convictions and then deemed him worthy of being able to carry a loaded weapon is an issue in its own right).
Personally, I find security breach #1 the most mind-boggling, but that doesn't lessen the gravity of incidents #2 or #3. Any one of the three could have gone horribly bad in any number of ways, and together they form a scathing indictment of the professionalism, competence and culture of the Secret Service, an agency that until recent years had an almost pristine reputation.
I have no doubt that many individual members of that agency are still committed, focused and well-trained professionals. But based on what we're learning, I suspect that things have been going awry within that bureaucracy for quite a while now. Based on what we know so far, each of these breaches can be traced not to some previously undiscovered weakness in the system, but to the agency's failure to follow its own well-established procedures. Small, supposedly elite bureaucracies insulated from outside oversight have a tendency to start believing too much in their own awesomeness, and that seems to be what has happened here.
If so, that's good news in a way. It means that the solution does not appear to require a redoubling of the already suffocating security envelope around the president. (Consider the enormous traffic jams that accompanied Obama's visit to Atlanta, supposedly made necessary by security, and then imagine an armed felon with a history of violence standing in the same elevator with him, and the uselessness of "going bigger" becomes pretty apparent.) Instead, the issues seem to be institutional in nature, including poor judgment and a lack of discipline and leadership in the agency's upper echelons.
Fix it. Fix it now.
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