Ball thoroughly dropped
Pro Publica notes that it was all out there in plain sight.
For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen. They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.
“We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. They called their Wednesday demonstration the Wild Protest, a name taken from a tweet by Trump that encouraged his supporters to take their grievances to the streets of Washington. “Will be wild,” the president tweeted.
Oh did he; let’s see.
“Be there, will be wild!” Four people dead wild enough?
Thousands of people heeded that call.
For reasons that remained unclear Wednesday night, the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared to contain the forces massed against them.
On Wednesday afternoon, a thin line of U.S. Capitol Police, with only a few riot shields between them and a knot of angry protesters, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on the steps of the West Front. They struggled with a flimsy set of barricades as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way toward the Capitol entrance. Videos showed officers stepping aside, and sometimes taking selfies, as if to usher Trump’s supporters into the building they were supposed to guard.
Taking selfies??!
A former Capitol policeman well-versed in his agency’s procedures was mystified by the scene he watched unfold on live television. Larry Schaefer, a 34-year Capitol Police veteran who retired in December 2019, said his former colleagues were experienced in dealing with aggressive crowds.
“It’s not a spur-of-the-moment demonstration that just popped up,” Schaefer said. “We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons — why would you not prepare yourself as we have done in the past?”
Pro Publica asked the Capitol Police that question but got no reply.
The easily overpowered police force guarding the Capitol on Wednesday posed a stark contrast to the tactics deployed by local police during this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Then, the city felt besieged by law enforcement.
…
The contrast shook Washington’s attorney general, Karl Racine, who seemed to be almost in disbelief on CNN Wednesday evening.
“There was zero intelligence that the Black Lives Matter protesters were going to ‘storm the capitol,’” he remembered, after ticking down the many police forces present in June. “Juxtapose that with what we saw today, with hate groups, militia and other groups that have no respect for the rule of law go into the capitol. … That dichotomy is shocking.”
BLM protesters were not going to storm anything, so call out the military. Trump-loving white supremacists were openly planning to storm the Capitol, so call out no one at all, just treat it like any other day.
David Carter, director of the Intelligence Program at Michigan State University, said that sometimes, the best intelligence in the world doesn’t translate into adequate preparedness. Perhaps the security officials responsible for protecting the Capitol simply could not envision that a crowd of Americans would charge through a police line and shatter the glass windows that stood as the only physical barrier to entering the building.
“I go back to the 9/11 commission report,” Carter said. “It was a failure of imagination. They didn’t imagine something like this. Would you imagine people were going to break into the Capitol and go into the chambers? That failure of imagination sometimes makes us drop the ball.”
But we’ve had the Malheur takeover, we’ve had Charlottesville – this didn’t even require imagination, just remembering would have been good enough.
It may not quite seem like it at the moment, but the the United States really dodged a bullet yesterday.
It seems like the rioters were not really that organized, that even though the presense of at least one rioter with zip-ties suggests there was some thought by at least some of these thugs to take prisoners or hostages, there doesn’t seem to have been any plan beyond taking selfies. It was a mob, not an organized cadre of people ready to take over anything other than an office or two. They brought flags and banners, but no organization or coherent strategy once they’d entered the Capitol.
It’s a good thing that Trump is evil and stupid, lacking the commitment and forsight to do anything beyond stirring shit up. It’s a good thing that Trump is a lazy, incompetent coward, willing to let others do the dirty work for him, yet unable to mount a truly cooordinated and ruthless coup to retain power, perhaps overestimating his actual appeal and popularity, maybe believing that people would rise up spontaneously for him. I know there’s two weeks of this asshole left, if he’s not removed from office in the meantime, but things could have been much, much worse. They still could get bad, but I think Trump’s overplayed his hand. With any luck, there’s not any more chance of anything dire happening, no way of preventing Biden from taking office on the 20th. Maybe I’m being naively optimistic, but I think the worst may be over. I hope it is. Unfortunately, we have to rely on luck more than we should be having to be. The next would-be dictator may be smarter and better prepared.
Sitting thousands of miles away and paying cursory attention to Trump post election, I would have briefed the security forces to take special care, cancel leave etc. It’s incredible that they weren’t prepared for something like this.
I’d be wary of attacks on the open-air inauguration site. Even if the mobs don’t come, the safety sweeps have got to be thorough, and the site protected competently.
The best intelligence in the world won’t stop anything if the law enforcement are the insiders on the job. It actually would help terrorist efforts. That’s what we witnessed.
Yeah, the key on law enforcement seems to be they answer to the president (at least the federal ones do). And it’s tricky on the 20th. With Trump as president until Biden is sworn in, it seems that Trump could do a lot of damage to police protection.
He better be careful, though. If the mob manages to kill Biden, our next president will be…(choke, gasp)…a woman. And a woman of color, at that. (Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have the woman sworn in as president, but I wouldn’t want it to happen that way.)
My feelings exactly. I have much greater hopes of Kamala Harris than I have of Joe Biden.