The White House has made it official: President Barack Obama has chosen the man he wants to run the agency responsible for protecting him.
It’s Joseph Clancy, the former special agent who Obama asked in October, 2014, to temporarily run the troubled Secret Service.
Clancy is the former head of the service’s presidential protective division. He was quickly appointed on an interim basis in a hurry after then-Director Julia Pierson was forced to resign on October 1 after a series of highly embarrassing security breaches.
Joseph Clancy
On October 10, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a four-member panel to conduct an independent review of the Secret Service. Its results were presented in December.
Among the panel’s recommendations: The next Secret Service director should be an outsider:
“The next director will have to make difficult choices, identifying clear priorities for the organization and holding management accountable for any failure to achieve those priorities.
“Only a director from outside the (Secret) Service, removed from organizational traditions and personal relationships, will be able to do the honest top-to-bottom reassessment this will require.”
Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was “disappointing” that Obama decided not to follow the panel’s recommendations.
If Clancy is serious about reforming the agency, he has a lot of work to do.
Consider:
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.
A Secret Service agent posted outside the White House on September 11, 2001
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–which may be 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.
And he could have been wearing a suicide vest under his shirt.
At least one Secret Service agent was on his cellphone at the time of the intrusion and thus missed the alarm.
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.”
Even more disturbing: At the time of his arrest, Gonzalez had a machete, two hachets and 800 rounds of ammunition in his car.
In late August, Gonzalez had been stopped while walking along the White House fence. He was carrying a hatchet and allowed police to search his car, where they found camping gear and two dogs. He was not arrested then.
Then, less than 24 hours after Gonzalez’s arrest, a second man was apprehended after he drove up to a White House gate and refused to leave. This triggered a search of his vehicle by bomb technicians in full gear. Other agents shut down nearby streets. No bombs were found.
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ISLAMICS VS. THE WEST – HE PREDICTED IT: PART TWO (END)
In History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on August 19, 2014 at 9:10 amDuring the 1930s, Winston Churchill, a seemingly failed politican, repeatedly warned his British countrymen against the growing menace of Nazi Germany.
The leaders of Britain, France and the United States–the three great victors of World War 1–hoped that if they simply ignored the increasingly aggressive behavior of Adolf Hitler, they could somehow escape catastrophe.
Winston Churchill
When, in the early 1930s, Hitler began re-building a powerful German army (Whermacht) in open defiance of the Versallies Treaty that had ended World War 1, Churchill gave warning–and was ignored.
When Hitler ordered his army to occupy his native Austria in 1938, Churchill warned that the Nazis would not be content with the conquest of one nation. And was ignored.
In 1938, Hitler demanded that Czechoslavakia cede the Sudetenland, its northern, southwest and western regions, which were inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans.
Adolf Hitler
When British Prime Minister Nveille Chamberlain surrendered to Hitler’s demands at the infamous “Munich conference,” his fellow Britons were ecstatic. He returned to England as a hero.
Churchill knew better: “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.”
In March, 1939, the German army occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Hitler next turned his attention to Poland–which he invaded on September 1, unintentionally triggering World War II.
In time, historians and statesmen would regard Munich as an object lesson in the futility—and danger—in appeasing evil and aggression.
It is a lesson that current world leaders have forgotten as Islamic fundamentalists increasingly flex their military and economic muscles–and demand that Western nations bow to their demands.
Winston Churchill’s warnings fell on deaf ears until other world leaders–most notably Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin–were forced by events to take action.
So did the warnings of Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington.
In 1993, he published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” In this, he argued that the post-Cold War would be marked by civilizational conflict. Among his assertions:
Huntington’s critique of Islamic civilizations ignited a firestorm of controversey–especially his statement: “Islam has bloody borders.”
In 1996, Huntington expanded his thesis into a book–also called The Clash of Civilizations. Once again, he minced no words:
“Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”
Huntington cited British scholar Barry Buzan as giving several reasons for an inevitable war between the West and Islam:
Much of the fury Muslims were directing toward the West, wrote Huntington, was aimed at its embrace of secularism. Westerners were attacked not for being Christian but “for not adhering to any religion at all.”
Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a quasi-war developed between some Islamic nations and some Western ones. On the Islamic side: Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. On the Western side: The United States and Britain.
“In this quasi war,” wrote Huntington, “each side has capitalized on its own strengths and the other side’s weaknesses.” For example:
Writing at a time before the United States directed its full military power at conquering Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntington ominously noted:
“During the 15 years between 1980 and 1995…the United States engaged in 17 military operations in the Middle East, all of them directed against Muslims. No comparable pattern of U.S. military operations occurred against the people of any other civilization.”
The war that Huntington warned was coming and was, in fact, already in progress, has since erupted into full-scale conflict, with no end in sight.
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