As if the Secret Service didn’t have enough problems

Good day all. This story popped up Friday, the traditional day for news to be released that the government wants buried. This story is about the drivers in the Presidential Motorcade. It seems that not all of them are highly trained members of the Secret Service.

In fact, it looks like a number of them just got their drivers licenses. These drivers are unpaid volunteers and haven’t spent one minute in a formal class on what to do if there is an issue. Here are some of the details from the, (And I’m in shock it was reported here), New York Times:

Shortly after President Obama landed here, (San Francisco), one fall day for fund-raisers, his motorcade pulled out of the airport and raced at 80 miles per hour down an empty freeway to his hotel in the city. At the front of the procession were bulletproof black sport utility vehicles and limousines driven by Secret Service agents who had spent hundreds of hours learning how to maneuver at high speeds. Bringing up the rear were police cars with their lights flashing and a Secret Service ambulance that follows the president wherever he travels.

That sounds about standard. I remember when the Great Ronald Reagan was wounded by that nutjob Hinkley back in the 80’s. The Secret Service driver blasted down the road to the nearest hospital pretty much as fast as the Presidential Limousine was physically able to go. I would assume that every single driver, even if they aren’t Secret Service, is a trained individual who is fully briefed on what to do in an emergency. Yeah, um…no.

And in between were several vans filled with White House staff members and journalists, being piloted by volunteers like Natalie Tyson, a 24-year-old Bay Area graduate student wearing fluorescent orange sunglasses.

“Wow,” she exclaimed as she hit the gas and the van lurched within a few feet of the one in front of it.Then she slammed on the brake. Then she hit the gas again. “Sorry about that,” she said.

She returned her hands to the textbook 2-and-10 positions on the steering wheel.

Volunteers with no special training are a link in the middle of the fastest, and highest-profile, chain of vehicles in the country. They are cheaper than the Secret Service personnel or local police officers who surround them on the road. And their cargo of lowly staff members and reporters is apparently less precious.

Oh great. Isn’t this just wonderful? These people are IN THE MIDDLE of the convoy? Well, I hope they’ve been carefully briefed on what to do if the motorcade comes under attack.

Volunteer drivers “are briefed by the Secret Service agent responsible for the motorcade prior to any movements” about what to do in case of an emergency, like an attack, a spokesman for the agency said.

Ahhh, that’s a relief. So these kids know that if something bad happens, like a wave of RPG’s flying in, they are to get out of the way of the professionals.

But Ms. Tyson said in a telephone interview several weeks after she drove in the motorcade that she had received little instruction from the Secret Service about what to do in the event of a high-speed emergency. She assumed that she should just follow the car in front of her no matter what happened.

Ms. Tyson said that her driving record was “pristine” and that she had “driven a pickup truck but not a van.”

I drive a pickup and I have driven a van. A van handles a lot differently from a pickup and a car handles a lot differently from the other two. The biggest difference is vans tend to be a bit top heavy and aren’t as stable as a pickup, never mind a car. You slam a van into a sharp evasive turn at 80MPH and you will roll it.

Some security experts said the practice was troubling. Not only could the volunteers cause an accident — and they have — but they are sandwiched between the president’s limousine and the Secret Service ambulance, so neophyte drivers could create complications and delays in an emergency.

No kidding.

Dan Emmett, a Secret Service agent from 1983 to 2004 and the author of “Within Arm’s Length: A Secret Service Agent’s Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President,” said he considered volunteer drivers like Ms. Tyson, who read her family therapy textbook between stops, a national security threat.

“You are face to face with a young person who is just completely full of themselves and enthralled,” Mr. Emmett said, recalling the years when he was part of the motorcade’s counterassault team that traveled in vehicles in front of the volunteers.

So why aren’t these vehicles driven by Secret Service drivers?

Privately, Secret Service officials said they did not use agents or uniformed personnel to drive the vans because it was not the agency’s responsibility to protect the White House staff members or journalists. White House officials said they were forced to use volunteers because staff members needed to be with the president at all times, and reporters demand that they travel with the president wherever he goes.

First, I can see some need to have a few staff members nearby, and while I understand that it isn’t the job of the Secret Service to protect them, I would think they would make sure that the drivers were competent and fully understood what needed to be done in an emergency. As to the reporters? Who cares about them? Obviously, Natalie Tyson is also wondering about that.

A photograph of her in the van was captioned, “Me, wondering why anyone would trust me with a 15-passenger van full of reporters.”

This one is simple. No one cares if you wreck the van and wipe the reporters out. Most people would consider that to be a public service, like stepping on cockroaches. Still, the professionals are worried about this practice.

“If the motorcade ever comes under fire, it’s going to be a problem,” he said. “There are so many non-law-enforcement vehicles that it’s going to be a goat rope. Everyone will be responding, police officers and the Secret Service, and it will be all these people running around in a panic like the last scene of the ‘Blues Brothers’ movie, when there’s the big police chase that ends in a wreck of 50 police cars.”

We’ve all seen video’s of the Presidential Motorcade traveling along. The SUV’s in front and behind the limo are armored, have overpowered engines and are loaded with weapons. If a group of terrorists should attack the convoy, and they know what they are doing, it’s going to be a nightmare. In the normal course of events, assuming that the first SUV’s are hit by rockets and destroyed, the remaining ones are going to put themselves between the limo and the attackers. Agents and police are going to open fire on the attackers and the driver of the limo is going to do whatever he, or she, needs to do to get the president out of there.

This will involve a lot of ramming of any vehicles that are in the way, both by the surviving Secret Service vehicles and the Presidential Limousine. The last thing they need will be a bunch of kids driving van loads of staffers and reporters getting in the way as they panic and try to escape the firefight. You can also count on the attackers targeting those vans with the intent of causing as much panic as possible.

If the White House is going to insist that these vans accompany the motorcade, then a few things need to be changed. First, put them at the end of the convoy. Place a few police cars in front and one or two behind them. Keep them at least one minute behind the motorcade. I would also look at getting a team of drivers, paid or volunteer, who have some training and experience and are fully briefed on what to do if something happens. Otherwise, some day, some one or some group is going to decide to go after the motorcade and even if they miss the President, (Whoever it is), they will cause a huge number of casualties, and possibly even manage to wreck or trap the Presidential limo in a fire zone. If the Limo drive can’t get clear because some 20 something twits have blocked the escapes routes trying to get away…well, let’s just hope that the New York Times article forces the Secret Service to review how motorcades are assembled and who is driving in them.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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