The Secret Service’s Open-Door Policy ~ or maybe "it's" just a friendly "reminder" to the prez ..."they" can get u (or yer family) at any .....time ??? so just "remember" ...stay on ...script , huh
September 22, 2014 by
James Huang
The Secret Service looks like it has an open-door policy at the White House after two security scares in as many days.
The first is by far the most interesting, and
the most embarrassing for the Secret Service.
It involves an Army veteran who vaulted over the fence and prompted an
evacuation of the White House. A second man was charged the next day
after he pulled up to a non-public entrance in his car and
refused to leave.
In the first case, federal prosecutors said Omar Gonzalez, 42, jumped the White House fence and
raced into the front door before he was apprehended. He was carrying a small pocket knife and, apparently
a message for the president about global warming. Later, authorities said they found two hatchets, a machete and 800 rounds of ammunition in his car.
Gonzalez’s relatives say he
suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder
from his tours of duty in Iraq. That fits nicely with the “lone nut”
category of White House crashers that’s often brought up by the
authorities to explain such incidents. The Secret Service has already
launched an investigation into itself as the result of breach, a process that’s produced
the Secret Service’s self-described squeaky-clean image.
Here’s a fascinating tidbit from the Gonzalez arraignment: he was
stopped outside the White House in August while carrying a hatchet
in his waistband. He was just let go. That’s despite the fact he was
arrested in July in Virginia after leading police on a chase. Guess what
was found in his car then? Among other things, a sawed-off shotgun and a
map of Washington
with the White House circled.
How is it Gonzalez got anywhere near the White House at all after those two incidents? That’s a story we’d love to hear.
For some insight and context with which to analyze the latest
White House gate-crashing, we are republishing Russ Baker’s story
from 2011 about some of the strange threats against President Obama:
The Salahis with Obama
ARTICLE SUMMARY
Small, bad things seem to (almost) happen to Obama; they get little
sustained attention from reporters or the public. But there’s something
odd about them, and they’re worrisome for the White House. Of course,
the corporate media will dismiss it as nothing at all. Yet there’s a
disturbing military/security thread running through it all—and as we
approach the 50
th anniversary of JFK’s demise, we’d be smart to err on the side of caution.
***
By Russ Baker
Here’s a crazy story that has gotten little attention in the United
States: During Barack Obama’s recent visit to Canberra, the Australian
capital, a reporter happened upon a classified booklet containing
security information about the presidential trip.
The highly sensitive booklet was…lying in a gutter.
What in the world can that be about?
We’ll come back to that in a bit, but first, let’s consider how a
political leader such as Obama would react to such an incident, which
was reported in an Australian newspaper.
In all probability, he would assume it was the result of spectacular
carelessness. These cases surface from time to time, as when a scientist
leaves top secret papers in the back seat of a taxi cab. But, knowing
the complex machinations of the political and spook worlds, it would be
understandable if, for a brief second,
Obama might at least contemplate
the possibility that such a “blunder” could be deliberate.
And he would realize that if it were deliberate, someone would either be trying to cause him harm, or to send a message of some sort.
***
A host of ill-fated leaders—from the early 20
th century
Mexican President Venustiano Carranza to Indian Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—learned too late that their own
security forces were fully capable of betraying their masters. Indeed,
history is replete with examples of treachery.
When it comes to the safety of US presidents, the line between
reckless accidents and deliberate acts is not so clear. In the case of
John F. Kennedy, the stunning inadequacy of Secret Service protective
measures on November 22, 1963 have been the subject of broad speculation
and debate for half a century.
Apparently, this was not the result of a one-day lapse. In his book,
The Echo From Dealey Plaza, former
Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden reveals not only the reckless
behavior of his fellow agents charged with protecting Kennedy—but also
their personal animosity toward the president and the policies he
implemented.
LONE NUTS GALORE
When it comes to Obama, he’s got other reasons to feel nervous.
American tradition has it that lone nuts are always lurking, ready to go
to great lengths to make a name for themselves. While Obama was away in
Australia, bullets struck the White House near the residential
quarters. A man was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate
the president. He was, of course, characterized as yet another lone nut.
But not so obviously disturbed that people had previously noticed. As
the
New York Times reported:
People here say that the only thing that could have
motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize
the severity of it until it was too late.
The defendant, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, is described by
The Times as having started acting very, very strange only recently:
The family reported Mr. Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight
days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead, it
was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still
has not.
Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving
increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday
party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to
detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with
American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed
violent.
A bit later,
The Times quotes an expert on Ortega’s new ailment:
Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to
have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia,
said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder
of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.
Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.
“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call
‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is
someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a
special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall.
We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and
they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being
treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan
in 1981.
Hinckley, it should be noted, was the son of close friends of Vice
President George H.W. Bush, who would have become president if Reagan
had died. When one considers that Bush and Reagan had just been rivals
for the Republican nomination the previous year, the Hinckley-Bush
connection was just too weird to even contemplate. So, the media by and
large did not mention it, and certainly did not explore it.
Another person who suddenly became mentally ill was a fellow named
George de Mohrenschildt. I devote a chapter to him in my book,
Family of Secrets.
Like Hinckley, he was a longtime friend of the Bush family. De
Mohrenschildt had, coincidentally, been a close friend of the former
marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, another “deranged loner.” In 1976, de
Mohrenschildt had written a letter to then CIA director George Bush,
saying that he believed that some unknown parties, possibly FBI, were
following him and tapping his phone, perhaps because of some things he
was trying to write about Oswald. Bush wrote back that he had nothing to
worry about. Shortly thereafter, de Mohrenschildt was forcibly treated
for a period in a psychiatric institution—and within a year, he was
dead, from what police said was a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the
head.
Coincidentally, 1976 was in the period in which Congress was holding
hearings on terrifying covert CIA experiments, including using LSD on
unsuspecting citizens as part of tests on mind control—the so-called
MKULTRA program. (For more on mind control experiments on unwitting and
unwilling subjects, see our
article on MKULTRA.)
It would be revealed that the CIA had effectively partnered with various hospitals in the research.
Now back to Dr. Torrey, the psychiatrist who told
The Times that the recent White House shooter was likely schizophrenic. The following is from a Wikipedia entry on him:
He has been criticized by a range of people, including
federal researchers and others for some of his attacks on
de-institutionalization and his support for forced medication as a
method of treatment. He has also been described as having a
black-and-white view of mental illness and as being iconoclastic, dogmatic, single-minded and a renegade.
It’s worth taking a look at St Elizabeth’s where Dr. Torrey once
worked, and where Hinckley is being treated. It came under criticism in
an
investigation by the Justice Department for a wide variety of practices.
St Elizabeth’s is especially interesting for its strong connections
to the military, intelligence agencies, and historical association with
mind control experiments. Its director in the 1940s, Winfred Overholser,
headed a “Truth Drug Committee” and oversaw extensive
testing of mind-altering substances
in association with the intelligence services. One goal was to see if
false personalities could be imposed on victims to make them susceptible
to commands. Such cooperation between St. Elizabeths and the government
continued over the years. Currently, the Department of Homeland
Security is converting much of St Elizabeth’s “campus”— which is only
now partially used by the hospital—as its
new headquarters. (For more on St. Elizabeths and its role in mind control and “personality profiling,” see the book
Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks.)
It is therefore interesting to note that the person the
New York Times quoted
identifying the White House shooter as a lone nut, Dr. Torrey, was
himself associated for nine years with a hospital historically involved
with experiments on the ability to make people do things they might not
otherwise do. Dr. Torrey is
an advocate of involuntary treatment and
critics have
contended for years that he exaggerates the threat that mentally unstable people represent for the rest of us.
The fact that Dr. Torrey’s own privately funded institute is in
Arlington, near the Pentagon, brings to mind another fellow who seemed
fine and then became increasingly deranged in recent years: Jared Lee
Loughner, the young man who opened fire at a political event in Tucson
earlier this year, killing several, including a federal judge, and badly
wounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Loughner, like Ortega, is
described as having listened to “conspiracy” type radio shows. Loughner
had apparently tried to enlist in the military but been rejected. We
never did see any releases of military files on the exact nature of his
interactions with the Army that resulted in his rejection—or whether
those grounds would have drawn interest of the authorities. Such
disclosure is of course crucial in public assessment of the particulars
behind such seemingly demented people involved in politically
destabilizing events.
UNINVITED GUESTS
The military angle brings to mind yet another event that shook up
Obama and gave him a reason to worry about his safety and the quality of
the protection he’s given.
In a well-known incident in 2009, shortly after he took office, a
couple managed to get into a White House state dinner without an
invitation, and got so close to Obama they were able to get their
picture taken with him. Michaele and Tareq Salahi were characterized as
essentially harmless publicity hounds, but Obama took the breach
seriously.
As the
Washington Post reported at the time:
On the eve of the president’s major speech on Afghanistan
policy, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Monday was
inundated by reporters’ questions about the Salahis and the security
breach at the state dinner.
“Look, the reason there’s an investigation is the president and the
White House has asked for that to happen,” Gibbs told reporters…. “So I
think, suffice to say, the president is rightly concerned about what
happened last week.”
So were others.
Here’s ABC News’s website, at the time:
“What concerns me the most is that someone was able to
walk in off the street to a White House event, without the proper
credentials, without the proper vetting, and get next to the president,”
said Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee.
The Secret Service, red-faced, later apologized for sloppy procedures that enabled the couple to pass through two checkpoints.
Curiously, there were again military connections—
two of
them. For one thing, the Salahis had been encouraged via e-mails to
believe they might gain access to the White House by Michele S. Jones,
special assistant to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates—and Pentagon
liaison to the White House.
As
reported by the
Washington Post:
The e-mails apparently do not contradict that version of
events, but are described as having given the Salahis the confidence to
get dressed up, mingle with some of the most powerful Washington players
and post snapshots of their presence at the party on their Facebook page.
The e-mail exchange is said to include assurances from Jones that she
was trying to score an official invitation, complete with seats at the
dinner, for the couple. By the time they arrived in line, the couple
believed that Jones had succeeded in getting them approved only for the
cocktail reception and a handshake with the president, sources said.
Jones presumably had pull with the White House. A high-ranking
African-American military backer of Obama, she’d delivered a speech on
his behalf at the 2008 Democratic convention. How she came to be hired
as Gates’s special assistant is not clear. It’s an intriguing issue—as
is the very fact that Obama had asked Gates, who served as George W.
Bush’s defense secretary, to stay on as his. Gates had a long track
record as a Bush family retainer, serving as CIA director under George
HW Bush and then as chief of the elder Bush’s presidential library in
College Station, Texas; he also served on corporate boards with Bush
connections.
Why did Gates’s assistant even know the Salahis? She declined to say. As the
Post reported:
…Asked how she knows the Salahis and why she would have
tried to get them into the White House, she said: “I am not going to say
anything at this point at all. In fact, I am going to terminate the
call right now because I am not sure what in the world is going on
here.”
As for the Salahis, they too have clammed up. Appearing before the
Committee on Homeland Security, Tareq Salahi read a statement: “We
reiterate that, on advice of counsel, we respectfully invoke our right
to remain silent and will decline to answer any questions surrounding
the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Yet another curious military element must be mentioned, for it surely
crossed Obama’s mind when he learned that the security breach had been
enabled via the Pentagon. At the time of the state dinner, Obama had
been embroiled in a vicious secret battle with the military over
Afghanistan policy. I wrote about the battle, which was characterized in
part by leaks to the Pentagon’s favorite journalist Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post,
here and
here and
here.
Obama was in the process of a review of Afghan policy that the military
feared would result in a withdrawal from that country. (Eventually,
Obama’s hand would be forced, and not only would he not remove troops—he
would actually approve a substantial increase in the boots on the
ground.)
As the
Post reported in October, 2009:
The Obama administration’s plan to conduct a strategic review of the war in December
has touched off maneuvering between U.S. military leaders seeking
support for extending the American troop buildup and skeptics looking
for arguments to wind down the nation’s role.
What was at stake in Afghanistan? Besides the publicly argued issues
about the Taliban’s brutality and tolerance of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan has
become a crucial profit center for military contracting industries in
the United States. As interesting, however, is the revelation that
Afghanistan harbors nearly a
trillion dollars in untapped mineral deposits. The
New York Times reported that estimate in a 2010
article claiming the Pentagon had
just discovered this information.
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan,
far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally
alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to
senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron,
copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so
big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry
that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most
important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could
become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the
manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
[Snip]
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander
of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday.
“There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is
hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of
Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely
on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the
United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross
domestic product is only about $12 billion….
[Snip]
..American officials…recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.
Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could
lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the
country….
[Snip]
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will
try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth…
The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country,
including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with
Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the
American-led war against the Taliban insurgency…..
So let’s review what happened here. Just as the president was under
severe pressure not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan
,
an aide to Gates [perhaps inadvertently] creates a security scare for
Obama. This all may be coincidental, and probably is, but the facts
stand. Obviously, if Obama was “rightly concerned” and personally asked
for an investigation that means he thought there was more going on than
just a screw-up on an invitation.
It’s important to note that it was only
after Obama folded
to the military pressure, in other words, after the die was cast in
Afghanistan, that the military leaked a story about the tremendous
mineral wealth lying underneath that country. Suddenly, although public
support for keeping American troops in Afghanistan was declining, there
was a new “realistic” reason to retain a U.S. presence. ,. Again, all
this was perhaps only coincidental, but leaks are carefully calculated
for intended purposes—and as students of the so-called “Deep State”
know, not even the participants in a leak may fully understand deeper
intents behind acts in which they are asked to participate.
Creepily, the Salahis’ uninvited entry into the White House was not
their first effort to get close to Obama. Four weeks before crashing the
state dinner, they crashed a
Congressional Black Caucus event
at which Obama appeared. Surely not lost on Obama was the poetic touch
that Tareq Salahi, a Palestinian, entered the event through the kitchen,
as the lone nut Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan also did prior to purportedly
shooting Robert Kennedy. (Sirhan’s guilt, like that of Lee Harvey
Oswald, is the subject of intense ongoing controversy—and his attorneys
have recently presented a federal court with
reports from experts contending that Sirhan was programmed by hypnosis to create diversionary gunfire to mask the actual killer.)
The Salahis, it must be emphasized, are not just some goofy types.
They were long on people’s radar as folks who would go for any
cozying gambit
–and a couple with powerful friends. One was the person who played some
kind of role in encouraging the idea that they might hope to attend a
White House gathering: Michele S. Jones.
It’s hard to figure out why Defense Secretary Gates gave Jones the
job of special assistant and Pentagon liaison to the White House.What we
do know is that Gates was perhaps the military-industrial-oil complex’s
chief person keeping an eye on Obama. Gates had been CIA director under
George HW Bush and later was in charge of the elder Bush’s library and
papers, before becoming Defense Secretary to both George W. Bush
and Democrat
Obama. That Gates’s special assistant had some kind of hand in
introducing this security risk to the president deserves scrutiny.
Jones, who was public in her support of Obama’s candidacy (and even
made a speech for him at the 2008 convention), is African American, as
is the Salahis’ lawyer, Paul W. Gardner II. Gardner has donated several
times to Hillary Clinton—but, notably, not to Obama. Jones was a
Facebook friend of Gardner’s, though it is not clear how she knew him,
or exactly how or why he served as a link to her.
A few months before the scandal, Jones was guest of honor at a DC
event the Salahis hosted called America’s Polo Cup. In her remarks to
the crowd, she declared, somewhat obscurely, “This game is a true
reflection of the relationship we have around the world.”
What exactly did Jones do to make the Salahis imagine they could get into the White House?
In relating their email exchanges on the day of the state dinner, ABC reported:
In the last email from Jones, sent at 8:46 a.m., Nov. 24, she said she still had not gotten them tickets.
“The arrival ceremony (was scheduled to be outdoors) was canceled due
to inclement weather,” Jones’ email said. “They are having a very small
one inside the WH, very limited space. I am still working on tickets
for tonight’s dinner. I will call or e-mail as soon as I get word one
way or another.”
So, was their gate-crashing a simple misunderstanding, easily
explained? As noted above, the Salahis, who might be able to clarify
matters, refused, “on advice of counsel, …to answer any questions
surrounding the circumstances around the events of November 24, 2009.”
Meanwhile, we can find no further mention of the grand jury
investigation that was once said to be underway. . As for Pentagon
official Jones,
a story asserted
that she had padded her resume prior to joining Gates’s staff by
claiming employment with a non-existent entity. That story got little
attention, though it raised a host of interesting questions.
A year after the Salahi incident, the Pentagon quietly
reassigned Jones, moving her from Gates’s office to a lower-ranked post.
***
It is against this murky, suggestive backdrop that we must consider
both the recent shooting into the White House—and the fact that someone
dumped confidential documents relating to Obama’s security into a
Canberra gutter.
As
reported by the Australian newspaper
The Age,
A CLASSIFIED booklet containing President Barack Obama’s
Australian schedule down to the minute, as well as details of his
security convoy and the mobile phone numbers of dozens of senior US and
Australian officials, was found by The Age on a Canberra street yesterday morning. The booklet, Overall Program and Orders of Arrangements, for Mr Obama’s visit, was found by this reporter in a gutter about 100 metres from the front entrance to Parliament.
***
I asked Bolden, the ex-presidential security man turned critic and
author, about these events and his former employer, the Secret Service.
He replied: “It shows a pattern that they haven’t changed much since
1961—there’s still laxity and carelessness. I see a pattern
of…disturbing negligence within the organization that needs to be looked
into. They have much more training now, a much larger organization now
than in 1961, so you would think they would become more professional. I
see them relying more on the armoring [of vehicles], but I don’t any
more sophistication in the protection or the attitude since the
assassination of President Kennedy.”
As noted earlier, ties between security services and either overt
participation or willful ignorance of mortal threats to politicians is
not unheard-of. A recent example is the 2007 assassination of former
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Even in modernized Western
democracies like Sweden and France, elements in the military or
intelligence services have been widely suspected of, at minimum,
covering up the true sponsorship of assassination plots.
In the United States, key institutions, in particular academia and
the media, rigorously maintain the position that it could not happen
here. A search of the Nexis-Lexis database of articles from principally
American media sources turns up more than 3000 articles that include the
term “assassination” and “conspiracy theory” (or some variation.)
Deaths of politicians, witnesses and whistleblowers in small airplane
crashes, suicides and other conflagrations are automatically toted up to
the “accident” category.
Few politicians, however, believe that. And as I documented extensively in my book
Family of Secrets, presidents
either play ball with the national security state or bad things happen
to them (see specifics on the downing, physically or otherwise, of
Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter, and warnings from Ike and Truman that the
security complex was badly out of control.)
At a minimum, American presidents’ very real awareness of their
fragile position and safety risks probably explain in part the lack of
bold, dramatic action against perceived power centers, be it the
military, the intelligence establishment, or the financial, industrial
and resource extraction interests that ultimately shape American policy.
This is scary stuff. The easy, and default position for the
establishment—from the media to academia—is to pooh-pooh such concerns
and to paint those who raise them as fantasists or worse. But then,
that’s why they call it the establishment. It has no incentive to dig
into these matters. And plenty of disincentives.
# #
The Echo from Dealey Plaza:
The true story of the first African American on the White House Secret
Service detail and his quest for justice after the assassination of JFK
Graphic:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2009/11/30/Style/Images/PHO-09Nov30-190627.jpg
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