Security failures, or Sedition Successes?
Much public outage over the January 6 insurrection is focused on why our Capital wasn't better protected in anticipation of potential violence, when Trump extremists from across the nation converged on Washington DC with intentions that were barely (if even that) concealed. It has been widely called a "security failure", which implies that "mistakes were made", and no doubt some were. The alternate explanation though is that plans were instead well executed, plans that may have ensured that the defenses for Capital Hill were functionally crippled through the deliberate withholding of adequate security resources.
For now most attention seems focused on why our security forces were not better prepared, a question that obviously must be answered. For me what stands out even sharper though is why was the ransacking of Congress, and the targeting our national leaders for possible assassination, allowed to go on for three hours after it was evident that the security of Congress was severely compromised, before either National Guard or standard military troops arrived to restore order?
The Mayor of Washington DC lacked the authority to deploy the National Guard on her own orders, because the District of Columbia is not an independent state. DC is the Capital of our nation, not the county seat of some sparsely inhabited not all of that strategic region thousands of miles away from the American seat of government. Thousands of reinforcements could have arrived at Congress within twenty minutes of any crisis erupting there. They didn't.
One can argue at length, with plenty of hard evidence, that our security officials should have seen what was coming on January 6th weeks in advance and prepared accordingly. No doubt some will try to make excuses for such a massive, and consequential, "security failure". Some always do, but it didn't require any foresight, to perceive what actually occurred once an insurrectionist mob reached the steps of the Capital. You didn't need to personally receive frantic phone calls from Congressmen and Congresswomen barricaded inside their offices to know what was going on. You just had to turn on a TV.
Where was Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller while all this was going down, he who was very recently appointed personally by Donald J Trump, leapfrogged into that position over several officials better prepared and higher up in the Defense Department chain of command? He was "out of contact" for two hours while repeated appeals were made to him to authorize the use of the National Guard to quell an insurrection. No one should kid themselves. The United States Secretary of Defense in NEVER "out of contact." He is ALWAYS available to respond to any real threat to National Security literally within seconds. There are secure means for communication available inside of every "undisclosed secure bunker." The American Secretary of Defense does never gets to "turn off his cell phone. So what was he doing when he should have been deploying the National Guard?
I hear a lot of talk about "Security Failures." I need to hear a lot more talk about the "Coup successes."
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