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Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
Showing posts with label US Secret Service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US Secret Service. Show all posts
There's a reason that there are invitations and Secret Service checks on those who attend events with a President. Rogers' admissions show a reckless disregard for the President's security.
Desiree Rogers claimed in an interview with the trade magazine BizBash at the Creative Coalition's annual meeting in June that she had added extra tables and benches at every event to accommodate uninvited guests.
"Lots of people just come anyways," she said. "They won't take no for an answer. Finally, I just said, 'All right, come on in. It's no use kicking you out.' "
But an administration official yesterday insisted that Rogers "was clearly making a tongue-in-cheek comment about White House staff, already cleared to be on the complex," not about the general public.
What else is the White House going to say? They don't want to admit that Rogers screwed up, so they'd rather make a joke of it?
The Secret Service has already acknowledged that they made mistakes in allowing Tareq and Michaele Salahi to enter the State Dinner hosted at the White House by President Obama in honor of the Indian Prime Minister.
Unlike at past state dinners, Rogers assigned no White House aides to vet guests before they went through security. Just as unusual, she was named as an invited guest rather than a staffer.
"I never sat down at a state dinner because I was always too busy taking care of what needed to be taken care of," Maria Downs, social secretary during President Gerald Ford's administration, told The Post.
"You are there all through the dinner, mingling with the guests, taking care of their needs, but you weren't a guest."
Rogers declined the committee's invitation "based on separation of powers," said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs.
The move prompted immediate condemnation from Congress.
"It's a terrible decision by the White House. They are obviously stonewalling. You have to conclude there is something to hide," said Rep. Peter King (R-LI), the committee member who asked Rogers to testify.
Also declining the Committee's invitation are the Salahis. A statement issued last night by their publicist said, "Having providing all relevant information to Representatives King and [Chairman Bennie] Thompson [D-Miss], there is nothing further that they can do to assist Congress in its inquiry . . . They therefore respectfully decline to testify."
The statement adds that before the Salahis were admitted to the dinner, they presented their passports to "three different Secret Service Agents at various White House checkpoints."
Thompson later threatened to subpoena the pair.
Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan is expected to appear.
Rogers broke protocol, especially for a freshman social secretary, when she seated herself as a guest at the dinner. Gibbs refused to say if she had invited herself or was a guest of the Obamas.
This whole mess reeks of incompetence and cronyism. And at the heart of the matter isn't just garden variety scandal, but one that affects the very security around the President of the United States. This is the kind of security breach that could have led to assassination attempts or other criminal acts. That the gate crashers were merely reality-show fame-whores is small consolation.
In fact, it is a reminder of the problems facing the White House Protocol Office, which provided Obama-centric items to various dignitaries, including the Queen of England.
That Gibbs and the White House claimed executive privilege to avoid testifying before Congress on a security issue affecting the White House and the President itself is also surprising; even they must know how bad things would look especially once Congress started looking deeper into the mess.
The Sahalis claim no wrongdoing and that they broke no laws and aren't likely to willingly testify before Congress either.
UPDATE:
The Washington Post is reporting that the agents at the state dinner have been placed on administrative leave.
Under a new and expanding program for offsetting emissions, United Nations administrators calculated that the meeting would generate the equivalent of 461 tons of carbon dioxide, with air travel being the single largest component. They offset those emissions by directing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agricultural leftovers like rice husks and sunflower stalks are turned into electricity for the local grid.
The offsets are intended to cancel out the carbon dioxide emissions created by airline travel or driving by financing green projects that will eliminate as much CO2 as the polluting activities create.
Since most of India’s power is currently produced by burning fossils fuels, like coal, producing energy instead at the Andhra Pradesh biomass plant reduces India’s overall carbon emissions.
The United Nations first tried its hand at large-scale offsets two years ago, shortly after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who called Tuesday’s conference, took office and declared that climate issues would be a central theme of his tenure.
“The secretary general started talking about greening the U.N. and that we needed to lead by example,” said Dan Shepard, a United Nations spokesman in New York.
Earlier efforts at offsetting emissions, Mr. Shepard said, were less systematic, and over time, they have become more sophisticated and rigorous. The United Nations hopes eventually to apply the offset system to all meetings, “as well as individual travel,” he said.
But back to the key claim - that the UN is actually reducing emissions. The UN isn't reducing its own emissions or even offsetting its emissions, but hoping that some other emitter reduces its emissions going forward. It's shifting the burden around.
Even the plant that the UN touts isn't reducing emissions. It's a new emitter of CO2, but at lesser amounts than a comparable coal-fired plant. That means that CO2 levels will continue rising, but at a fractionally lower level, and the UN can claim it did something to combat CO2 levels without doing anything substantive to reduce its own emissions.
The CO2 from the UN confab has already made it into the atmosphere, and unless carbon sequestration technologies can be made workable (and not cause earthquakes as some pilot programs have found), the only way to curtail emissions is to actually reduce them - not to pay off someone else or plant trees to offset emissions.
That means using less energy - more teleconferencing and fewer vehicles or using more hybrid vehicles to get diplomats around town. It means using more efficient aircraft to ferry diplomats to the UN meeting. But don't expect that to happen overnight or anytime soon as diplomats or the President of the United States rely on those SUVs because they provide a measure of security from a wide range of threats that a smaller car can't.
Racism may be playing a role in the spread, but the FBI and Secret Service are admittedly at a disadvantage since they really don't have a handle on the scope of the threat:
Word of the feds' new push to get a grip on fringe extremists - who faded into the background after the 9/11 attacks - came as a new watchdog report warned militias are making a racist "comeback" thanks to Obama's election.
"The face of the federal government today is black, and that has injected a whole new element into the militia movement," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence project, which issued the report.
The center's report said a rash of domestic terrorism cases recently, plus skyrocketing firearms and ammunition sales and an explosion of heated rhetoric by disgruntled militia types, is cause for worry.
Some hate groups also are opposing Obama's health care reform efforts as a form of Socialism, a top federal agent said.
After Obama's election, many counterterror officials snickered at the idea of a militia comeback from the 1990s. Some still insist the threat is overblown - and local.
But when Obama was sworn in, the FBI's Intelligence Directorate and Domestic Terrorism Section - which probes homegrown malcontents - asked joint-terrorism task forces nationwide to sniff around for hints of possible violent activity.
They are not spying on protected speech, officials emphasized.
"We don't know if there's an increased threat," a law enforcement source said.
"There's legitimate concern," said an agent inside the Justice Department who laughed off the threat months ago. "You're seeing more paranoia by the militias."
Author Ronald Kessler reports in his new book, "Inside the President's Secret Service," that threats against Obama are up 400% over threats to George W. Bush.
Government insiders told The News that threats are now decreasing. They noted that only one would-be assassin - Sara Jane Moore, who targeted President Ford in 1975 - was ever in the Secret Service's threat database beforehand.
The SPLC is the one issuing the call for increased vigilance.
I think it is warranted since the already overheated language and venom directed at the Administration has been ratcheted up in recent weeks in the course of the health care debate. Civility in the public discourse has broken down, and tone deaf politicians don't help matters, nor do statements by the Administration claiming that this must be rushed through swiftly, which would necessarily limit debate on changes that would affect the nation in profound ways.
None of this excuses the threats and increased chatter among militia groups.
The increase in death threats against the President is something that must be taken seriously by the FBI and Secret Service.
It is possible that these groups and those who were most threatened by President Obama taking office are coming to grips that he is indeed in office for the duration. That could explain the reduction in the number of threats against Obama in the recent period. Or, it could mean that they've now decided to lay low to avoid bringing more attention to themselves.
The thug who decided to throw his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad is now asking the Iraqi President for a pardon. I refuse to call this man a journalist because of his actions.
In a letter delivered to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the journalist described his behavior as "an ugly act" and asked to be pardoned, spokesman Yassin Majid told The Associated Press.
Majid confirmed to Fox News that Muntadhar al-Zeidi has asked the Iraqi president for a pardon, and expressed "regret and sorrow" for his behavior.
"It is too late to now to regret the big and ugly act that I perpetrated," al-Zeidi wrote, according to Majid.
Majid told the AP that al-Zeidi went on in the letter to recall an interview he conducted with the prime minister in 2005 when al-Maliki invited him into his home, saying: "Come in, it is your home too."
"So I ask for your pardon," al-Zeidi wrote, Majid said.
Majid told Fox al-Maliki, who tried to shelter Bush from the incoming shoes with his arm, is inclined to let Iraqi law run its course.
al Malaki is right to let the justice system run its course - and al Zeidi should feel the weight of the law come down on him. He actively engaged in a premeditated assault on the President of the United States. That's not some heroic act, although anti-American leftists and Bush haters will certainly do their part to make him out to be a hero and/or now play the role of victim.
It was completely unprofessional, and I really doubt he would have ever attempted to do such a thing if Saddam Hussein were in power.
Saddam routinely murdered people for much less, and Saddam never tolerated any dissent. This man's ability to express himself was granted by the US and its overthrow of Saddam's regime. The irony of that fact is lost on all too many people.
In fact, when someone displeased Saddam, he would often not only kill that person's family, but he'd kill all their relatives, his thugs would rape the women in front of the men, and then feed the hapless victims into plastic shredders feet first. Saddam's regime was barbaric by all standards, and engaged in multiple confirmed acts of genocide, including the use of chemical weapons. He was a menace and the world is a better place without him in power.
Al-Zeidi simply couldn't see that through the haze of his Che Guevara and Sadr coated worldview. His heroes are thugs of the Left.
Meanwhile, President Bush handled the situation with aplomb and managed to maintain his composure despite the clear breach of his personal security. This isn't the first time his Secret Service detail hasn't had shining moments either. A 2005 incident in Tbilisi, Georgia involved someone who managed to toss a live hand grenade into the crowd near President Bush.
The device did not go off and no one was hurt. However, the grenade was live and the FBI said today it could have caused considerable harm to Bush and the tens of thousands of people who had gathered May 10 to hear him speak in Freedom Square, a main plaza in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
"We consider this act to be a threat against the health and welfare of both the president of the United States and the president of Georgia as well as the multitude of Georgian people that had turned out at this event," said Bryan Paarmann, FBI attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi.
The Soviet-era RGD-5 grenade, which was wrapped in a red handkerchief, fell just 61 feet from where the president was speaking, sources told ABC News.
The grenade's pin had been pulled, but it malfunctioned and did not go off. It was snatched up and removed by a Georgian security officer. Georgian authorities did not tell the Secret Service about the incident until after the president had left the country.
Are we supposed to derive some kind of outrage over the fact that President Elect Barack Obama's official limousine is going to be a gas guzzler as compared with the eco-leftist claptrap we've heard him talk about out on the campaign trail?
Nope.
There are two completely different things at play here. One is the security of the President of the United States. The limo used by the US Secret Service is designed with one thing in mind - to make it as secure as possible against a wide range of threats against the President. That means making it durable and resistant to mines, bombs, and snipers.
It means that the vehicle is going to weigh a lot and must be designed to absorb lots of damage and continue running and the mileage isn't a concern. Perhaps at some point down the road the Secret Service will commission the construction of a hybrid vehicle for the Presidential motorcade, but it surely isn't a top priority.
Still, a hybrid limo for the President could provide certain additional benefits beyond the green talk. Hybrids can have lots of low-end torque, which is useful to get out of sticky situations in a hurry. When combined with a conventional engine, you can have lots of top end speed. That's a combination that should be favorable to the Secret Service. Perhaps, they are not satisfied that the hybrids today can take the kind of damage that they must be expected to absorb and continue running. After all, the hybrids have to carry battery packs that go in locations that may be required for armor, and until the batteries are miniaturized, this will remain a problem.
