The United States Secret Service (USSS) is “in crisis”–a crisis that threatens President Barack Obama and his successors as President of the United States.
That’s the verdict of a review of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Since April, 2012, the agency has faced scandal–and scrutiny by the press and Committee. That was when reports first surfaced of agents buying the favors of prostitutes in Columbia.
Even more embarrassing for the USSS were a series of security breaches that potentially exposed President Barack Obama to danger.
As a result, during the last three years, three directors have headed the Secret Service. Numerous agents–including senior officials–have been disciplined, transferred or fired.
For decades, the Secret Service was seen by the press, public and other law enforcement agencies as an elite agency. And the Presidential Protection Detail (PPD) was seen as the most elite part of the agency.
No longer.
Secret Service agents guarding President Obama
Among the findings of the 438-page report:
- The agency is understaffed and overworked.
- Its staffing crisis started in 2011 owing to government-wide budget cuts demanded by Republicans.
- The Secret Service has fewer employees today than it did in 2014, despite recommendations from an independent panel that staffing be increased.
- There have been a number of undisclosed security breaches–such as in October, 2014, when an unauthorized woman gained access to a Congressional Hispanic Caucus event that Obama attended.
- In February, two people gained access to the outer security perimeter of the White House.
- There have been 143 security breaches–or attempted breaches–during the last 10 years at facilities protected by the agency.
“This report reveals that the Secret Service is in crisis,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, (R-Utah) publicly stated. “Morale is down, attrition is up, misconduct continues and security breaches persist.
“Strong leadership from the top is required to fix the systematic mismanagement within the agency, and to restore it to its former prestige.”
But the truth is that many of the problems now plaguing the U.S. Secret Service were on display long before the House issued its report.
On September 11, 2001, Secret Service agents literally grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney and hauled him from the White House to a secure facility beneath the Executive Mansion.
As for everyone else who worked in the White House, agents simply threw open the White House doors and ordered: “Run!”
“Women, take off your shoes!” agents shouted–so they could run faster. Frightened Presidential aides were told to remove their White House badges–just in case snipers were lurking nearby.
That was it.
With the World Trade Center and Pentagon in flames, and the White House seemingly next in line as a target, this was the sum total of protection offered White House staffers by the agency considered the elite in Federal law enforcement.
White House staffers fleeing on 9/11
Not knowing what to do, some aides walked home in a daze.
(President George W. Bush was not in the White House at the time. He was reading The Pet Goat to a group of children at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida.)
Three days later, on September 14, Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff, addressed White House staffers in Room 450 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing.
Card said he understood that “this is not what any of you signed up for when you joined the White House staff.” And he offered them the chance to resign without anyone–himself or the President–thinking any less of them.
When no one offered to leave, Card let a Secret Service agent offer security advice:
- Vary your routines to and from work.
- Watch out for any cars that might be following you.
- Go to different restaurants for lunch.
At least one member of the audience, Bradford Berenson, an associate White House counsel, knew he wouldn’t be taking that advice.
Like most of the others at the meeting, his name was listed in the local phone book. A terrorist wanting to kill him need only lurk outside Berenson’s home and open fire when he appeared.
And that was it, as far as the Secret Service was concerned.
No offers of even temporary escorts by Secret Service agents. No offers to install “panic buttons” in their homes in case of emergency.
In essence: “We’re really glad you’ve decided to serve your country. But don’t expect us to protect you. You’re on your own.”
Fast forward 13 years later.
On the night of September 19, 2014, an Iraq war veteran, Omar Gonzales, jumped the White House fence, ran more than 70 yards across the north lawn, and sprinted just past the north portico White House doors.
Gonzalez appeared unarmed as he ran across the lawn–possibly one reason why Secret Service agents didn’t shoot him or release their service dogs to detain him. But he had a small folding knife with a three-and-one-half-inch serrated blade when he was apprehended.
According to a criminal complaint, when he was arrested he told Secret Service agents he was “concerned that the atmosphere was collapsing” and needed to contact the President “so he could get word out to the people.”
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SOLDIERING IN AFGHANISTAN: THEN AND NOW
In History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on December 25, 2015 at 3:26 pmIn “Excalibur,” director John Boorman’s brilliant 1981 telling of the King Arthur legends, Merlin warns Arthur’s knights–and us: “For it is the doom of men that they forget.”
Not so Steven Pressfield, who repeatedly holds up the past as a mirror to our present. Case in point: His 2006 novel, The Afghan Campaign.
By 2006, Americans had been fighting in Afghanistan for five years. And today, almost ten years into the same war, there remains no clear end in sight–to our victory or withdrawal.
Pressfield’s novel, although set 2,000 years into the past, has much to teach us about what are soldiers are facing today in that same alien, unforgiving land.
Matthias, a young Greek seeking glory and opportunity, joins the army of Alexander the Great. But the Persian Empire has fallen, and the days of conventional, set-piece battles–where you can easily tell friend from foe–are over.
Alexander next plans to conquer India, but first he must pacify its gateway–Afghanistan. Here that the Macedonians meet a new–and deadly–kind of enemy.
“Here the foe does not meet us in pitched battle,” warns Alexander. “Even when we defeat him, he will no accept our dominion. He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering.”
Alexander the Great
Matthias learns this early. In his first raid on an Afghan village, he’s ordered to execute a helpless prisoner. When he hesitates, he’s brutalized until he strikes out with his sword–and botches the job.
But, soon, exposed to an unending series of atrocities–committed by himself and his comrades, as well as the enemy–he finds himself transformed.
And he hates it. He agonizes over the gap between the ideals he embraced when he became a soldier–and the brutalities that have drained him of everything but a grim determination to survive at any cost.
Pressfield, a former Marine himself, repeatedly contrasts how civilians see war as a kind of “glorious” child’s-play with how soldiers actually experience it.
Steven Pressfield
He creates an extraordinary exchange between Costas, an ancient-world version of a CNN war correspondent, and Lucas, a soldier whose morality is outraged at how Costas and his ilk routinely prettify the indescribable.
And we know the truth of this exchange immediately. For we know there are doubtless brutalities inflicted by our troops on the enemy–and atrocities inflicted by the enemy upon them–that never make the headlines, let alone the TV cameras.
We also know that, decades from now, thousands of our former soldiers will carry horrific memories to their graves. These memories will remain sealed from public view, allowing their fellow but unblooded Americans to sleep peacefully, unaware of the terrible price that others have paid on their behalf.
Like the Macedonians (who call themselves “Macks”), our own soldiers find themselves serving in an all-but-forgotten land among a populace whose values could not be more alien from our own if they came from Mars.
Instincitvely, they turn to one another–not only for physical security but to preserve their last vestiges of humanity. As the war-weary veteran, Lucas, advises:
“Never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself. They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die.”
Put conversely: One lives, we all live.
Pressfield has reached into the past to reveal fundamental truths about the present that most of us could probably not accept if contained in a modern-day memoir.
These truths take on an immediate poignancy owing to our own current war in Afghanistan. But they will remain just as relevant decades from now, when our now-young soldiers are old and retired.
This book has been described as a sequel to Pressfield’s The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, which appeared in 2004. But it isn’t.
Virtues showcased the brilliant and luminous (if increasingly dark and explosive) personality of Alexander the Great, whose Bush-like, good-vs.-evil rhetoric inspired men to hurl themselves into countless battles on his behalf.
But Afghan thrusts us directly into the flesh-and-blood realities created by that rhetoric: The horrors of men traumatized by an often unseen but always menacing enemy, and the horrors they must inflict in return if they are to survive in a hostile and alien world.
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