NYCmetsfan
Banned
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...76b6ac-442a-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html
Its really long so I only posted the most WTF things I could find. Read the entire thing on the Washington Posts site. Its absurd.
The white house didn't have cameras on its entire perimeter till 2012
Its really long so I only posted the most WTF things I could find. Read the entire thing on the Washington Posts site. Its absurd.
The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, in the dark of a November night, in a closed lane of Constitution Avenue. He pointed his long, semiautomatic rifle out of the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger.
A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first familys formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and more pinged off the roof, sending bits of wood and concrete to the ground. At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House, flying some 700 yards across the South Lawn.
President Obama and his wife were out of town on that evening of Nov. 11, 2011, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obamas mother, Marian Robinson, were inside, while older daughter Malia was expected back any moment from an outing with friends.
Secret Service officers initially rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun box. Snipers on the roof, standing just 20 feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. With little camera surveillance on the White House perimeter, it was up to the Secret Service officers on duty to figure out what was going on.
Then came an order that surprised some of the officers. No shots have been fired. . . . Stand down, a supervisor called over his radio. He said the noise was the backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.
That command was the first of a string of security lapses, never previously reported, as the Secret Service failed to identify and properly investigate a serious attack on the White House. While the shooting and eventual arrest of the gunman, Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez, received attention at the time, neither the bungled internal response nor the potential danger to the Obama daughters has been publicly known. This is the first full account of the Secret Services confusion and the missed clues in the incident and the anger the president and first lady expressed as a result.
By the end of that Friday night, the agency had confirmed a shooting had occurred but wrongly insisted the gunfire was never aimed at the White House. Instead, Secret Service supervisors theorized, gang members in separate cars got in a gunfight near the White Houses front lawn an unlikely scenario in a relatively quiet, touristy part of the nations capital.
It took the Secret Service five days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence, a discovery that came about only because a housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor.
Just this month, a man carrying a knife was able to jump the White House fence and sprint into the front door. The agency was also embarrassed by a 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, that revealed what some called a wheels-up, rings-off culture in which some agents treated presidential trips as an opportunity to party.
The actions of the Secret Service in the minutes, hours and days that followed the 2011 shooting were particularly problematic. Officers who were on the scene who thought gunfire had probably hit the house that night were largely ignored, and some were afraid to dispute their bosses conclusions. Nobody conducted more than a cursory inspection of the White House for evidence or damage. Key witnesses were not interviewed until after bullets were found.
Moreover, the suspect was able to park his car on a public street, take several shots and then speed off without being detected. It was sheer luck that the shooter was identified, the result of Ortega, a troubled and jobless 21-year-old, wrecking his car seven blocks away and leaving his gun inside.
The response infuriated the president and the first lady, according to people with direct knowledge of their reaction. Michelle Obama has spoken publicly about fearing for her familys safety since her husband became the nations first black president.
Her concerns are well founded President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Services threat assessment.
It was obviously very frightening that someone who didnt really plan it that well was able to shoot and hit the White House and people here did not know it until several days later, said William Daley, who was White House chief of staff at the time.
Daley said he recalls the late discovery of the bullets shaking up the Obamas and their staffs. The Secret Service could not have prevented the shooting, Daley said, but it should have determined more quickly what happened.
The handling of this was not good, he said.
By the time Ortega shot at the White House, President Obama and the first lady were in San Diego on their way to Hawaii for the Veterans Day weekend.
With the first couple gone, the Secret Service staff at the White House slipped into what some termed a casual Friday mode.
By 8:30 p.m., most of the Secret Service agents and officers on duty were coming to the tail end of a quiet shift.
An undercover agent in charge of monitoring the White House perimeter for suspicious activity, McClellan Plihcik, had left with a more junior officer to fill up his service car at a gas station about a mile away.
On the White Houses southern border, a few construction workers were milling about. D.C. Water trucks, arriving on Constitution Avenue to clean sewer lines, had just parked in the lane closed off by red cones on the White House side of the street.
It was near that spot that Ortega pulled over his black 1998 Honda Accord.
Ortega had left his Idaho home about three weeks earlier, during a time his friends said he had been acting increasingly paranoid. He kept launching into tirades about the U.S. government trying to control its citizens, saying President Obama had to be stopped.
He had arrived in Washington on Nov. 9. He had 180 rounds of ammunition and a Romanian-made Cugir semiautomatic rifle, similar to an AK-47, that he had purchased at an Idaho gun shop.
Now, in striking distance of the presidents home, Ortega raised his weapon.
A woman in a taxi stopped at a nearby stoplight immediately took to Twitter to describe the actions of this crazy guy.
Driver in front of my cab, STOPPED and fired 5 gun shots at the White House, she wrote, adding, It took the police a while to respond.
Another witness a visiting neuroscientist who was riding by in an airport shuttle van later told investigators he had seen a man shooting out of a car toward the White House.
William Johnson noticed a curious clue as he crouched in the crisp autumn air leaves had been blown away in a line-like pattern, perhaps by air from a firearm muzzle. It created a path of exposed grass pointing from Constitution Avenue north toward the White House.
Then another call came over the radio from a supervising sergeant the one ordering agents to stand down.
The call led to some confusion and surprise, especially for officers who felt sure they had heard shots. Nevertheless, many complied, holstering their guns and turning back to their posts.
But William Johnson knew shots were fired and got on his radio to say so. Flagship, he said, using the code name for the command center, shots fired.
Plihcik, the special agent who had been gassing up his patrol car, was among those arriving on the scene. A homeless man told him he had seen a young white male running from the vehicle after the crash and heading toward the Georgetown area.
Amid conflicting radio chatter, including a Secret Service dispatcher calling into 911 with contradictory descriptions of vehicles and suspects, police began looking for the wrong people: two black men supposedly fleeing down Rock Creek Parkway.
The man who had shot at the White House had disappeared on foot into the Washington night, with the Secret Service still trying to piece together what he had done.
Back in the White House, key people in charge of the safety of the presidents family were not initially aware that a shooting had occurred.
Because officers guarding the White House grounds communicate on a different radio frequency than the agents who protect the first family, the agent assigned to Sasha learned of the shooting a few minutes later from an officer posted nearby.
The White House usher on duty, whose job is tending to the first familys needs, got delayed word as well. She immediately began to worry about Malia, who was supposed to be arriving any minute. The usher told the staff to keep Sasha and her grandmother inside. Malia arrived with her detail at 9:40 p.m., and all doors were locked for the night.
The Secret Services watch commander on duty, Capt. David Simmons, had been listening to the confusing radio chatter since the first reports of possible shots.
When word came of the wrecked Honda, Simmons left the command center and drove to the scene at the foot of the Roosevelt Bridge.
It was up to Simmons to decide whether the events of that night appeared to be an attack on the White House. After consulting with investigators and calling his bosses at home to confer, he turned the case over to the U.S. Park Police, the agency with jurisdiction over the grounds near the White House.
In effect, the Secret Service had concluded there was no evidence linking the shooting to the White House.
At the time of the shooting, President Obama had been sitting courtside on the USS Carl Vinson warship in the Californias Coronado Bay, watching the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University basketball teams play on the flight deck. He was getting ready to be interviewed by ESPN at 9 p.m.
Forty-five minutes later, the president and Michelle Obama climbed aboard Air Force One, bound for Honolulu, unaware that a man had taken several shots at their living quarters.
The next day, things seemed to have settled down at the White House.
Officer Carrie Johnson, who had heard debris fall from the Truman Balcony the night before, listened during the roll call before her shift Saturday afternoon as supervisors explained that the gunshots were from people in two cars shooting at each other.
Johnson had told several senior officers Friday night that she thought the house had been hit. But on Saturday she did not challenge her superiors, for fear of being criticized, she later told investigators.
Though the Park Police was now in charge of the investigation, Secret Service agents continued to assist, using social media and other sources to locate witnesses, such as the tweeting taxi passenger, and people who knew Ortega.
Investigators did not issue a national lookout to notify law enforcement that Ortega was wanted. If they had, Ortega could have been arrested that Saturday in Arlington County, Va., where police responded to a call about a man behaving oddly in a local park. They questioned Ortega but had no idea he was a suspect in a shooting, and they let him go.
The Park Police did not obtain a warrant for Ortega on weapons charges until that Sunday. A Park Police spokeswoman, reached this Friday, declined to comment, saying the agency needed more time to review the episode.
Meanwhile, Secret Service agents, who had been learning from Ortegas friends and family that he was obsessed with President Obama, began canvassing the D.C. area to locate him.
The situation at the White House remained quiet until Tuesday morning. President Obama was continuing from Hawaii to Australia. But the first lady had returned to Washington on an overnight flight. She had gone upstairs to take a nap shortly after arriving home early that morning.
Flying back on her plane was Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan. At that time, his agents were learning that Ortega, still at large, appeared to be obsessed with the president. The episode had not yet risen to the level of a confirmed threat that the Secret Service would share with the first couple, according to people familiar with agency practice.
Reginald Dickson, an assistant White House usher, had come to work early to prepare the house for the first lady.
Around noon, a housekeeper asked Dickson to come to the Truman Balcony, where she showed him the broken window and a chunk of white concrete on the floor.
Dickson saw the bullet hole and cracks in the antique glass of a center window, with the intact bulletproof glass on the inside. Dickson spotted a dent in another window sill that turned out to be a bullet lodged in the wood.
Dickson called the Secret Service agent in charge of the complex.
Suddenly, Ortega was no longer just a man who had abandoned a car with a rifle inside. He was now a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president of the United States and he was about to become the target of a national manhunt.
Daley, the White House chief of staff, was alerted by aides about the discovery on the second floor of the residence.
The first lady was still napping, and Daley and his aides knew it was their job to tell her. They debated whether they should wake her up and give her the news.
They decided, according to people familiar with the discussions, to let her sleep. Instead, they concluded, they would brief the president and let him tell his wife.
A subsequent internal security review found that the incident illustrated serious gaps.
The Secret Service, for instance, could not use any of the dozens of ShotSpotter sensors installed across the city to help police pinpoint and trace gunshots. The closest sensor was more than a mile away, too far to track Ortegas shots.
Sullivan acknowledged in closed congressional briefings that the agency lacked basic camera surveillance that could have helped agents see the attack and swarm the gunman immediately.
Some of the technology issues have since been addressed, according to officials. The agency added a series of surveillance cameras in 2012, giving authorities a full view of the perimeter.
The white house didn't have cameras on its entire perimeter till 2012
