Video from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast July 8th
John Byrne | RawStory.com
A Government Accountability Office investigator smuggled live bomb components into a federal building in just 27 seconds, then assembled a bomb in a restroom and ventured throughout the building without being detected, a leaked tape revealed Wednesday.
In addition, congressional investigators were able to penetrate every single federal building they probed without any difficulty — 10 in all.
A shocked Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) went off on the news in an article Wednesday by ABC News.
“It’s stunning. It’s shocking,” Lieberman quipped. “It just says that basically some people have forgotten the lessons of 9/11.”
A division of the Homeland Security Department is supposed to protect some 9,000 federal buildings across the United States. Fifteen thousand of their employees are private contractors, the network said.
The Federal Protective Service, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for securing more than 9,000 federal buildings and, among other employees, utilizes 15,000 contract security guards.
“The GAO has been investigating the service since 2007 for a wide range of reported problems, and says it found serious vulnerabilities during visits to the 10 buildings,” the network noted. “ABC News obtained videos and images from the GAO investigation. Investigators are slated to publish their latest findings in a report later this summer, but Lieberman’s staff said he found the information compiled so troubling that he scheduled a hearing for today.”
“Just think about it. In this case, in this GAO test, ten different federal buildings in different cities in the country were all compromised,” Lieberman is quoted as saying in the report. “If a terrorist group just did that in two or three federal buildings, it would not only really hurt some people; it would create a real crisis of confidence here in the United States about our homeland security.”
Homeland Security released a tepid statement to the network’s reporters, saying the department “is committed to providing government facilities and employees with a first class security force. The Federal Protective Service (FPS) is charged with that critical mission and DHS takes the concerns raised in the forthcoming GAO report very seriously.”
