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2011: Gunman hit the White House 7 times, the Secret Service didn't know for 5 days.

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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 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 family’s 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 Obama’s 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 Service’s 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 House’s front lawn — an unlikely scenario in a relatively quiet, touristy part of the nation’s 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 family’s safety since her husband became the nation’s 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 Service’s threat assessment.

“It was obviously very frightening that someone who didn’t 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 House’s 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 president’s 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 president’s 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 family’s 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 Service’s 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 California’s 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 Ortega’s 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 Ortega’s 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
 
It's a house surrounded by a wide open lawn. Are we all supposed to pretend it's an impenetrable fortress?

Edit: And the Secret Service is a guard that almost never has to actually do anything but stand there and look intimidating, I'm not surprised they're no good in a pinch.
 

Amagon

Member
I have a feeling here we might be seeing a real assassination attempt on the President the way things are heading into lately.
 
It's a house surrounded by a wide open lawn. Are we all supposed to pretend it's an impenetrable fortress?

Edit: And the Secret Service is a guard that almost never has to actually do anything but stand there and look intimidating, I'm not surprised they're no good in a pinch.

No, but having cameras is a basic thing.

And basic investigations of the grounds would be good.
 
No, but having cameras is a basic thing.

And basic investigations of the grounds would be good.

Well of course, but what I think is funny is that people are shocked by the white house not being fully surveilled. From all the pomp of it you just assume it's locked down tight when really it's a rather soft target.
 

DC R1D3R

Banned
White-House-Down.jpg

soon!
 

Nickle

Cool Facts: Game of War has been a hit since July 2013
It's kind of crazy that we've gone almost 50 years without one of our presidents being assassinated. It couldn't be too hard for at least one person to buy a sniper rifle and shoot at the president while he is in public.
 

noquarter

Member
Really surprised by this. Everytime I've tried to just find a spot to take a picture for family I'm front of the white house we can't park near it. Able to get seven shots fired and not be noticed, must have been scopping the area out for awhile.

How the fuck can you not know someone is shooting a fucking automatic gun at you.
Where did it say it was an automatic? Saw it was a semiautomatic, but those are very common.
 

Dr.Acula

Banned
Reminds me of how people were shocked fighter jets weren't scrambled within minutes of the 9/11 attacks.

Security is largely theatrical. I've been in corporate and government offices and people just come and go and you assume they have business there. Security exists but only at check points and they can't see everything all the time. If you hop a fence or take a pot-shot they won't notice immediately.
 
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.”

When did the police start caring about someone shooting at a black man in America?
 

Corgi

Banned
Everybody was. It was 2 weeks until thanksgiving.

presidents get 2-3 weeks off for thanksgiving?

Wait that can't be right, thanksgiving is usually a good time for politics stuff, like visiting military bases and what not.


Wait do presidents even get paid vacations?
 

Valhelm

contribute something
To be honest, this sort of bloodless incident is probably good. It means the Secret Service will know what flaws are in their system, and how they need to ramp up security.
 

MIMIC

Banned
The daughters were in the house at the time?? @_@

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.

Sounds like a scene from 24. Just enough lackadaisical security to get shit started.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
Headline doesn't seem quite accurate: It sounds more like the supervisor on duty fucked up the initial situational assessment, but the situation was treated appropriately by the agents. They accounted for some, but not all, of the bullets during their first response - they found the rest 4 (not five) days later - on Tuesday, which is also the day they tracked the shooter to a hotel and arrested him there.


http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45335315/...suspect-was-obsessed-obama-date/#.VCrhdSco5Hg



http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/16/justice/dc-white-house-bullet/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...guilty-in-2011-white-house-shooting-case.html

It also looks like the Secret Service was busy with APEC at the time, so their best agents/supervisors may not have been staffed at the white house at the time.

http://www.secretservice.gov/USSS_FY12AR.pdf
 
Where is the NSA in all this? Isn't detecting these kinds of threats their only purpose? With the massive amount of data collection they are doing I would think they would have been able to connect dots prior to this ever happening.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
Where is the NSA in all this? Isn't detecting these kinds of threats their only purpose? With the massive amount of data collection they are doing I would think they would have been able to connect dots prior to this ever happening.

No - security detail for the president, his family, and the white house in general is the Secret Service's responsibility.

The NSA is tasked with global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation, and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including intelligence from sources within US territory. It is authorized to accomplish its mission through clandestine means, including through subversion, bugging, and sabotage. It's a spy agency. One that specializes not in human information, but the tools human use and the very communication of information itself.
 
Where is the NSA in all this? Isn't detecting these kinds of threats their only purpose? With the massive amount of data collection they are doing I would think they would have been able to connect dots prior to this ever happening.
There really wouldn't be a trail for them to follow.

If a guy just gets up one day and decided to fire off some rounds at the Whie House, how would anyone know until he did it?
 

Nikodemos

Member
At any rate, catching a random nutbag who doesn't tell anyone about his plan to shoot up the White House is a lot harder than it appears.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Slice.
 

kehs

Banned
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...l?Post+generic=?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost

They also lied about how far the recent intruder got and he was only stopped by an off-duty agent.

No necessarily. The press release says he was apprehended after entering through the front entrance.

It seems to be an assumption on everyone's part that he was brought down just at the doors.

Gonzalez failed to comply with responding Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers’ verbal commands, and was physically apprehended after entering the White House North Portico doors.

http://www.secretservice.gov/press/Secret-Service-Statement-Regarding-Fence Jumpe.pdf
 
Congressman Mica using this to advertise a local company, lol
http://thinkprogress.org/home/2014/...and-pointy-plants-to-protect-the-white-house/


No necessarily. The press release says he was apprehended after entering through the front entrance.

It seems to be an assumption on everyone's part that he was brought down just at the doors.



http://www.secretservice.gov/press/Secret-Service-Statement-Regarding-Fence Jumpe.pdf

He made it to the east room

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...6-120a8a855cca_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPN_p

The secret service downplayed it

w-secretservice768-v2.jpg
 

Kettch

Member
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.

"You tell her."
"No, you tell her."
"Oh fuck, we're so dead."

One part that stood out to me was the window glass shattering. Does the white house not have bulletproof windows, or does that not matter to a gun of this type? I don't know much about them, but I would think the white house of all places would have that.
 

kehs

Banned
Congressman Mica using this to advertise a local company, lol
http://thinkprogress.org/home/2014/...and-pointy-plants-to-protect-the-white-house/

He made it to the east room

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...6-120a8a855cca_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPN_p

The secret service downplayed it

w-secretservice768-v2.jpg

I know he made it farther, but I don't see any official word saying he was brought down at the door.

The only thing is from WP themselves

Secret Service officials had earlier said he was quickly detained at the main entry
.
 

kehs

Banned
I actually I did find another more direct quote:

He made it through the unlocked doors and was tackled immediately, said Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/u...n-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
After barrelling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters. He then ran into the 80-foot-long East Room, an ornate space often used for receptions or presidential addresses.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dr...t-service-lied-about-white-house-fence-jumper

This can happen in the span of 5 to 10 seconds. The was an agent at the door (which chased him through the corridor) and then another agent came from the other direction. (This is from today's tesimony).

Did they not release all the details in the first press release? Absolutely, doesn't equate to lying.
 
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