Secret service ‘cutting corners,’ endangering Obama: author

By Raw Story
Thursday, November 26th, 2009 -- 4:58 pm
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CrashedWH Secret service cutting corners, endangering Obama: authorA socialite couple that gate-crashed a White House state dinner Tuesday night were able to do so because the Secret Service has been "cutting corners," and in the process endagering the life of the president, says an investigative reporter.

Ronald Kessler, author of The President's Secret Service, told CBS News Thursday morning that "the Secret Service has been cutting corners to a shocking degree ever since Homeland Security took it over in 2003."

Kessler said that "there absolutely could have been an assassination" at the state dinner Tuesday evening, when President Barack Obama hosted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"The Secret Service really needs a complete management shakeup," Kessler said. "The agents themselves are very brave and dedicated -- they'll take a bullet for the president. But the management has been dangerously cutting corners. They need a new director from the outside."

Kessler noted that "threats against President Obama are up as much as 400 percent compared to when Bush was in office. So this is just a disgrace."

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The Secret Service's cutting of corners "ranges from letting people into events without magnetometer screening, to not even doing regular firearms re-qualifications, cutting the size of counter-assault teams ... and bowing to pressure by the White House or campaign staff to let people in regardless of whether they've been screened," he said.

CBS' Maggie Rodriguez noted that the Secret Service says that Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the gate-crashing couple, did go through a metal detector. But Kessler argued that "they could have brought in other lethal weapons, such as anthrax, for example," because the Secret Service did not run a background check on them as it should have.

Kessler is a known investigative reporter, in recent years working for some conservative news sources. During the 2008 campaign, Kessler incorrectly reported that Obama attended a sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in which "the minister blamed the 'white arrogance' of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering." It later turned out that Obama was in Miami when Wright gave his sermon.

The following video was broadcast on CBS' The Early Show, November 16, 2009.

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Story comments are below...

  • regretfulrepub
    In the past I would have believed that no secret service agent would put his or her politics above the safety of the President; that they were too dedicated and loyal to their country...I also used to believe a President would always be loyal to the Constitution and never break the laws of the land..but all of that childish innocense has been doused with cold hard reality by the likes of Richard 'Watergate' Nixon, The Iran Contra Team of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and his high ass, George W. 'WMDs NOT' Bush.
    Our President, his wife and his daughters are in extreme danger as is, by proxy, our entire democracy.
  • Unless the democracy is long gone and only an empty shell.
  • oktoss
    Two possible reasons W Bush's life wasn't threatened all that much:
    1) He was such an embarrassment that most people tried to ignore him.
    2) Had anything happened to W, Cheney would have been his replacement.
    Oh yeah - and -
    3) W was 100% white.
  • DFW
    While almost all Secret Service agents take their jobs 100% seriously, there are certainly still people "higher up" in the Service whose "conservative (NOT, but definitely right wing)" views are that Barack Obama has no business being the choice of the American electorate, and it would therefore be no tragedy if a "tragedy" were to befall him. A purge of these "patriots (also NOT)" is in order in the Service, and sooner rather than later..
  • We've been in this "cage-free" police state all our lives. If everybody finds this out it's still possible to change it, but that may not always be true.
  • Swan
    So why is a republican putting the word out and to whom? I find it hard to believe that these comments made by this man from the Republican right, was meant to protect our President.
  • I can't find where it says he's a Republican . . .
  • redacted
    His party affiliation is implied by his pushing of the false Obama/Wright story.
  • moonbeams62
    I don't know anything about this reporter, Kessler, but I do know I did not find it amusing in any way that the security of the White Hosue was breached. I think these people should be severely punished and made an example of. This is no joke. The situation that exists out in the world today, is exactly as it was five or six years ago. Osama Bin Laden is still at large. The Taliban and Mullah Omar control most of Afghanistan, We are at war in Iraq, there are Al Qaeda terrorists all over the place and extremists training at special camps in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and in countries in Africa. etc etc. etc. Add to that the increased thread from the Extreme Right in this country, our very own domestic terrorists, and you have powder keg. So if anything, security measures should be heightened. Clearly they aren't if someone can get into a White House party! All I want to say is this: George Bush was an extremely unpopular President. Cheney was an even more unpopular Vice President. They embraced some extremely controversial policies. If we managed to keep them alive for eight years, we damned well better beable to keep President Obama and his family safe from harm. Period.
  • Weird aside: The woman is wearing her sari backwards. The wrap is always supposed to go over the left shoulder, not the right. (Spent 3 years in India until this past spring...and I always found wearing saris a challenge.)
  • Is that anything like reversing a svastika (another subcontinental adornment)?
  • More likely just an expression of cluelessness as to culture... I just found it strange how I picked that detail out immediately.
  • thepoliticalcat
    Let me assure you that you don't have the first clue what you are talking about. How the sari is worn depends on what part of the country you come from. The sari even differs in length and width, and decoration, depending on your caste, state, and even village grouping.

    Contrary to your assertions, India is not one homogenous country where everybody wears identical garb. Marathi women, especially those who ride, still wear their saris with the pallu end tucked between the legs, while respectable Bengali Brahmin women often wear the pallu over both shoulders rather like a shawl.
  • I've seen the dozens of different ways saris can be worn, *let me assure you*.

    That woman was wearing a regular south Indian wrap style -- only backwards.
  • kayttt2000
    Could the Rothschild,CIA,,and all the Criminal element be more obvious...?

    After the above are arrested, we will have to reinstate the United States Secret Services authority..They still have the authority,,but will have to reconfirm it,,more clearly define it,,to prevent future schmucks from playing games...

    The criminal schmucks are VERY aware of the power the United States Secret Service has under said conditions,,,The conditions have been met many times over...

    So there working damn hard to discredit the United States Secret Service...

    The bad boys know better than to f*ck with the US Secret Service...
    When I was under the Rothschild/CIA MK Ultra Program,,,they implied they were the US Secret Service(a very serious crime) and they stored,,'Don't f*ck with the US Secret Service in my memory..
    They stored in my memory all the power the United States Secret Service has,,let's hope they use it....

    How dare they,,the men and woman in the Secret Service give there blood and guts to protect these schmucks...

    The American people respect and love there Secret Service,,,so the games the criminals are playing won't work,,,

    Shet* runs down hill and the guy at the top of the US Secret Service is a good guy..
  • Ques.: What would the Secret Service do, ideally, with a president at a well-publicized event immediately following three major terrorist attacks using aircraft, especially when that event was only a couple miles from an airport?

    I mean, if they didn't know in advance what the prearranged targets were for the day?

    Ans. They'd be buttoned up and gone in under two minutes.

    The fact that he continued to read My Pet Baphomet for another eight minutes tells you they knew.
  • Satan
    Lions and Tigers and Bears!
  • When I saw, for the fourth time today, Thanksgiving Day, the day when people go to Google News several times, being home from work — I mean, an ideal day for visibility — when I saw, for the fourth time today, that picture, essentially the one at the head of this article, and the soulless smiles on the faces of the two defiers of the Public State, the state that says "laws matter" (as opposed to the Deep State), I knew that they plan to kill him. This is a billboard. It is now official. Then I see this article at RAW which only confirms it.

    Let me quote for you from JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass (p.103):
    Abraham Bolden [first ever black presidential Secret Service agent] saw increasing evidence of the president's isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they'd get out of the way. The agents' drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president; Bolden refused to drink or play cards with them. The other agents made remarks about "n_____" in his presence.

    And from Col. L. Fletcher Prouty's speech Anatomy of Assassination, speaking about the assassination of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (March 25, 1975):
    "What is it then that keeps these people alive? In every country, the king would not live, if there was not an elite guard. And who trains the elite guard? The Vinnell Corporation.

    It seems to me that there's a point to the subject which appeared just a little while ago in the     New York Times and the Washington Post and a great number of other papers, to the effect that there had been a contract issued with the Vinnell Corporation — and I don't have any idea what their corporate connections are — and the Defense Department of the United States, and the fact that the Vinnell Corporation had signed this contract for the purpose of training first of all the National Guard of Saudi Arabia, and the King's Elite Guard.

    I wonder which king they had in mind. Because when you control the elite guard of a country..., when you train that guard, when you arm that guard, when you teach them to jump from an airplane at Fort Benning..., that guard knows how to keep a man alive — as long as that guard agrees."
  • Doug
    I think that this whole incident just goes to show that Ann Coulter lookalikes get to go anywhere.
  • Doug
    I think that this whole incident just goes to show that Ann Coulter lookalikes get to go anywhere.
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