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All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the GAO's investigation into the Federal Protective Service. ABC anchor Charles Gibson quoted the mission statement of the $1bn/yr "highly trained and multi-disciplined police force" that is tasked with enforcing security at 9,000 buildings on 2,300 different federal facilities nationwide. "We are talking about 13,000 guards," noted NBC's Kelly O'Donnell. "They are not federal employees but contractors hired by the government."
Anyway all three correspondents--NBC's O'Donnell, CBS' Bob Orr and ABC's Pierre Thomas--picked up on the anecdotes of incompetence: one medicated guard was found sleeping at his post; another shot his own image in a bathroom mirror while practicing with his gun; a third X-rayed a sleeping infant when he passed the baby carrier through the bomb detector.
The headline grabbing ruse pulled off by the GAO was to smuggle a bombmaking kit--"a bag full of bomb components, liquid explosives and a detonator," as ABC's Thomas put it--through the screening systems in ten separate buildings and then to assemble it undetected in building bathrooms. CBS' Orr reported that the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security itself were successfully infiltrated.
Then CBS' Orr went overboard. He mentioned both the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the attacks of 9/11 as types of threat that this lax security might fail to prevent. Neither involved a bomb assembled and detonated inside a building; both came from the outside. Neither Timothy McVeigh nor Mohamed Atta had to worry whether building security guards were up to snuff.
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