Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
No Intelligence Failure in Capitol Attack
The Senate held a joint committee hearing yesterday looking into the January 6 armed rebellion against the United States government. The finger pointing illuminated very little, but two things did become clear. First, the FBI did have intelligence that there was going to be massive trouble and alerted the Capitol Police the night of January 5. Second, the Capitol Police intelligence report on January 3 stated that "Congress itself" would be the target of the rebels. The smokescreen that there were intelligence failures is untrue.
Both acting D.C. police chief Robert J. Contee III and former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund claimed that there was no intelligence to suggest that the insurrectionists would be violent.
"I would certainly think that something as violent as an insurrection at the Capitol would warrant a phone call or something," Mr. Contee testified.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sund was echoing this nonsense, "If they were finding efforts that this was a coordinated attack, that had been coordinated among numerous states for some time in advance of this, that's the information that would have been extremely helpful to us. That type of information could have given us sufficient, advance warning to prep, plan for an attack such as what we saw."
The backside covering continued as former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving said in a written statement to the Senators, "The intelligence was not that there would be a coordinated assault on the Capitol, nor was that contemplated in any of the inter-agency discussions that I attended in the days before the attack."
Perhaps, they should have read the FBI warning out of the Norfolk, Virginia, office the night before the insurrection. "As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to 'unlawful lockdowns' to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.," the document says. "An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating 'Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal'."
The witnesses claim that they did not see the FBI warning. It was emailed around 7 pm the night before. Yes, there probably should have been a phone call to make sure the warning was read. By the same token, the massive protest was not a secret, and perhaps, emails should have been read after 5 pm quitting time.
Even if the FBI warning was merely a failure to understand the significance of the intelligence, the Capitol Police had their own intelligence people reporting on January 3 that there would be trouble in the Capitol. That report read in part, "Supporters of the current president [Donald J. Trump] see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election," according to the memo, portions of which were obtained by The Washington Post. "This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th."
In other words, the Capitol Police intelligence officers themselves expected violence three days before the excrement hit the air conditioning unit. Yet, the preparations were inadequate.
The next question, which must be answered at the next meeting, is why the National Guard took so long to deploy. That question, however, is secondary to how the authorities got the threat so very wrong from the beginning.
© Copyright 2021 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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