Last week, we learned that the Department of Homeland Security can’t distribute electronic announcements of new watchdog reports because the inspector general’s office says it “lacks capacity to create a mass email list.”
As if that wasn’t enough cause for concern about the agency that helps keep us safe on U.S. soil, the private security guards protecting DHS headquarters are coming forward with some pretty serious complaints. Consider this stunning example:
For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff’s window without evacuating people nearby.
The scare, caused by white powder that proved to be harmless, “stands as one glaring example” of the agency’s security problems, said Derrick Daniels, one of the first guards to respond to the incident.
“I had never previously been given training … describing how to respond to a possible chemical attack,” Daniels told The Associated Press. “I wouldn’t feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer.”
As Garance Franke-Ruta put it, “[W]hen you get real anthrax in the mail, the most important thing to do is take it to the office of your agency head, infect him, and then pollute the entire area around his office while also killing as many innocent bystanders as possible and contaminating a city street.”
Keep in mind, the Department of Homeland Security has had some time to find its way here. Four years and billions of dollars later, the agency can’t even safeguard its own headquarters? Does anyone feel safer by this news?
These guards, who work for a private security firm called Wackenhut Services, are now trying to tell Congress that they’ve seen inadequate training, failed security tests, and slow or confused reactions to bomb and biological threats.
“If the allegations brought forward by the whistleblowers are correct, they represent both a security threat and a waste of taxpayer dollars,” Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote. “It would be ironic, to say the least, if DHS were unable to secure its own headquarters.”
On an unrelated matter, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said, “Forget the compassionate conservative we were promised in 2000. At this point, I would settle for a competent conservative.”
It’s a sentiment that applies to so many aspects of the administration’s inability to govern.