NAKED GUN 2 1/4 – SECRET SERVICE – THE SMELL OF INCOMPETENCE

Via WSJ

White House Down

The stunning failure of the Secret Service is a new government nadir.

On a July night in 1976 a Washington taxi driver named Chester Plummer became the first person killed on the White House grounds. Wielding a length of pipe, Plummer refused to surrender after scaling the fence and was shot in the chest by a Secret Service officer on the north lawn. “That’s what guns are for,” as an old Gerald Ford hand reminded us the other day.

Whatever resolution the agents of the Secret Service used to call upon to protect the lives of the President and his family has apparently long since departed this once-elite corps. This month’s astonishing breach of the White House, supposedly one of the world’s most secure complexes, has exposed a culture of incompetence and duplicity. Government failures are legion, but rarely are they so dangerous.

The core mission of the Secret Service is to prevent an attack on the chief executive’s person and that includes defending the White House. Yet this crude intrusion would be implausible in an airport thriller. The guy waltzed in the front door.

Two weeks ago Omar Gonzales eluded the Secret Service’s perimeter cameras and a plainclothes surveillance detail, hopped the fence, and crossed 70 yards to the mansion before a rapid response team was deployed. He then entered without tripping an alarm or encountering a deadbolt on either the outer storm door or the interior ornamental historic door. Mr. Gonzales overpowered a female guard in the foyer and roamed through the ground floor before being tackled, eventually, to the East Room floor.

Had Mr. Gonzales hung a left and ran up a flight of stairs, he might have penetrated President Obama’s private living quarters. He was armed with a serrated Spyderco knife though he could have easily been carrying a small arsenal or wearing a suicide vest. The only other lucky break the service (and the nation) caught was that Mr. Obama and his daughters had departed via helicopter only moments before.

Mr. Gonzales was not on the Secret Service radar though two months ago Virginia police found a sawed-off shotgun, 800 rounds of ammunition, a machete and a map with the White House circled in his car. Nor after he was found lurking with a hatchet along the south fence.

These details leaked over the weekend. The Secret Service originally blamed the inadequacy of the 49-year-old fence and added in a statement that Mr. Gonzalez “was physically apprehended after entering the White House North Portico doors.” This is technically true in the sense that the British Redcoats who captured the White House in 1814, ransacked the silver and set the building on fire also came in through doors.

Secret Service director Julia Pierson had no explanation for such dissembling at a House hearing on Tuesday, much less for the cascade of failures before and after the crisis. “It’s clear that our security plan was not properly executed,” she said, in what would be the understatement of the decade if there weren’t so many other instances in which this Administration has tried to justify its incompetence.

Ms. Pierson lamented “the difficulty in trying to operate a critical federal agency in times of fiscal constraint,” but the truth is that the Secret Service budget of $1.7 billion for 2014 has doubled in real terms since 1998. In the four decades since the Ford Presidency, the U.S. has invested billions of dollars (the totals are classified) in fortifying the White House and Old Executive Office Building, and Pennsylvania Avenue has been closed to traffic in front of the White House for half as long. Yet the Secret Service was no more prepared for this most unsophisticated of infiltrators than for the 16 other people who have come over the fence in the last five years.

The larger danger is that these embarrassments advertise security vulnerabilities in Vegas-strip neon. The more they happen, the more likely more dangerous individuals or organizations will try again, and a team with tactical training or advanced weapons could do great damage against an evidently hapless Naked Gun 2½ patrol.

On Monday the Administration expressed “full confidence” in Ms. Pierson, and perhaps even a threat to Mr. Obama’s personal safety is not enough to disabuse his excessive faith in government. Yet she got the job in March 2013 after her predecessor was canned when agents engaged the less-than-secret services of Cartagena hookers while doing advance work for a Presidential visit to Colombia.

The latest episode marks a new nadir in the decline of government, and the start of rebuilding professionalism is accountability. That should include firing Ms. Pierson and anyone else who lies to the public. The Secret Service also ought to respond to White House invaders with lethal force. The next Omar Gonzales or Chester Plummer may be a terrorist strapped to a bomb.