More on Secret Service security lapse at Obama rally
Posted by: Christopher in PoliticiansDrudge is leading with the Secret Service / Obama story I commented on yesterday. Other news outlets have picked it up as well.
Let me make sure I have this straight, k? The TSA won’t allow people to carry bottled water, pool cues, or snow globes (huh?) through an airport security checkpoint. But yet, the Secret Service orders police to not screen people for weapons at an event held by the presumptive Democratic nominee for president?
All together now.
Wtf?
How can this possibly happen in this day and age in America? The government has spent the last 6 years telling us that terrorists are going get us unless we surrender our civil liberties for greater security. And by and large, we have stood by passively and watched as they took them from us, one by one. But when it comes to protecting a very high profile member of the opposition party, they are suddenly lax and carefree with security?
This evokes memories of the Bhutto assassination. How could it not? She was a popular member of the opposition party, who was assassinated because of lax security due to meddling by the ruling party.
Consider this story, which details how police abandoned their posts and did not screen everyone for weapons and implicates the ISI, Pakastan’s version of the Secret Service.
Perhaps more shockingly, an attendee at the rally where Bhutto was killed says police charged with protecting her “abandoned their posts,” leaving just a handful of Bhutto’s own bodyguards protecting her.
“Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts,” wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. “As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: ‘Willing to die for Benazir.’”
While some intelligence officials, especially within the US, were quick to finger al Qaeda militants as responsible for Bhutto’s death, it remains unclear precisely who was responsible and some speculation has centered on Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, its military or even forces loyal to the current president Pervez Musharraf.
Sound familiar?

