[Infowarrior] - Forget the gate; is the enemy at the front door?

[Richard Forno]

(The last paragraph really says it all.  --rick)

Forget the gate; is the enemy at the front door?
By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, December 2, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/01/AR2009120104264_pf.html
During a stroll outside the gates of the White House grounds the other  
night, I thought about the controversy surrounding Tareq and Michaele  
Salahi and started wondering about ways to sneak into a state dinner.  
So I took out my notebook and began jotting down the most visible  
obstacles to overcome. Streets around the White House are blocked with  
concrete pillars and steel shields; that meant I couldn't show up at  
the front door in a limo pretending to be President Obama's lost  
cousin from Kenya.

Guards dressed in SWAT-like outfits were stationed at gatehouses  
around the White House grounds. Leaping over the spear-tipped wrought  
iron fence and making a mad dash for the Rose Garden wouldn't work,  
either, unless I could outrun a bullet.

As I took notes, an unmarked van with tinted windows showed up and  
parked across the street from me, engine idling. Call it paranoia, but  
I began to sense the warmth of an infrared facial recognition scanner  
-- which made me worry that I could be mistaken for Saddam Hussein.  
Again.

It happened back in 2003, when the threat level was raised to "orange"  
by the Bush administration. Highway signs urged citizens to be alert  
for terrorist activities. For a column, I went to the Jefferson  
Memorial and asked people if they had seen anything suspicious. The  
next thing I knew, U.S. Park Police had detained me.

"We hear you've been asking curious questions," an officer said to me  
at the time. ""Why are you doing that?" I later learned that a tourist  
had called police to report that a man resembling Saddam was hanging  
around the cherry blossom trees, acting strangely.

This time, though, I was in front of the White House, not the Tidal  
Basin. Far more dangerous real estate.

Earlier this year, the president mentioned the consequences that even  
he might suffer if caught trying to break into his residence at 1600  
Pennsylvania Ave.

"Here, I'd be shot," Obama said.

The remark had been prompted by the arrest of his friend, Harvard  
professor Henry Louis Gates, whom a neighbor mistook for a burglar.  
Entering the White House using the Gates method was definitely out.

But if the president thought that he could get shot for trying to  
enter his own house, then it was possible that I could be considered  
fair game just for thinking about it.

So much for breaking-and-entering fantasies. It seems the only way to  
get in to a state dinner uninvited is to sashay on in right past the  
Secret Service.

After carefully approaching two police officers who were standing  
outside their patrol cars, not far from the idling van, I said in my  
friendliest tone, "You guys catching any heat over the party crashers?"

The officers smiled, as congenial as tour guides -- albeit with guns.  
"We're just waiting on the results of the investigation," one replied.  
The two had deftly positioned themselves slightly on each side of me.  
Courteous, but cautious.

We ended up talking about street closings. There was a time, for  
instance, when you could take your grandparents on a drive past the  
White House, showing them where the president lives without putting  
them through the agony of a long walk from some overpriced downtown  
parking garage.

No more.

"We closed this block of Pennsylvania Avenue after Oklahoma City," one  
of the officers said. Even in death, Timothy McVeigh was still  
dictating the terms of our freedom.

To the east was a closed-off stretch of Madison Street that used to  
run between the Treasury Department and the White House. You could  
walk through -- drive through, too, but only old folk seem to remember  
those days -- with the children waving to the president they imagined  
was standing in an East Wing window waving back at them.

No more. Al Qeada took that street away.

In winter, children used to slide down the snowy steps of the U.S.  
Supreme Court; in spring, you could picnic on the grounds of the U.S.  
Capitol. No more.

And now come the Salahis, reminding us -- if that investigation proves  
they sneaked into the White House -- how easy it is to breach it all  
and that safety measures for which we traded so much liberty amount to  
little more than an illusion.