Is Obama Being Threatened by US Hawks with ‘Security Risks’?

TND Guest Contributor: Finian Cunningham | Are a rash of media disclosures showing how President Barack Obama’s personal security has been endangered aimed at intimidating him into toeing the Pentagon’s warpath on Syria and in Ukraine? On the face of it, the disclosures mainly published in the Washington Post have portrayed the presidential Secret Service as bungling and incompetent. Last week the director of Obama’s security detail Julia Pierson was forced to resign (that is, sacked) amid a hue and cry on Capitol and the White House over several blunders. House of Representatives speaker John Boehner said then: «The secret service is beset with a culture of complacency and incompetence». This week the Washington Post revealed more damaging information: that White House aides were also compromised in covering up the «hooker scandal» dating back to April 2012, when more than 20 of the presidential security team were sacked or punished for partying in a hotel ahead of a major political summit in Cartagena, Colombia. The latest twist on that scandal plus the recent disclosures of other breaches in President Obama’s personal security appear to be aimed at not merely exposing incompetence, but, more significantly, at undermining Obama’s confidence in the people who are assigned to protect his life, including his own White House aides. The previous security scandal to rock the White House emerged within hours of Pierson being sacked on October 1 when it was reported that a convicted armed man was allowed to enter an elevator alongside the president while he was on official business in Atlanta, Georgia, last month. That incident, on September 16, occurred when a private security contractor working at the building where Obama was visiting was able to mingle among the president’s Secret Service bodyguards. It was only after the agents noticed the man acting strangely, by persistently taking a cell phone video of Obama while riding the elevator, that they reportedly realised the security breach in their midst. It turned out that the man, who has not been named, was armed with a gun and had three previous convictions for assault. Obama reportedly found out about this security breach only «within minutes» of the story being published last week. That he was not informed about it by his own security people, but rather only learned of it in the newspapers must be very unsettling for the man who is supposed to be most heavily protected in the world. As the Washington Post reported: «Extensive screening is supposed to keep people with weapons or criminal histories out of arm’s reach of the president.



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