Tag: capitol
US Capitol Evacuation Over False Alarm Provokes Fear And Fury

US Capitol Evacuation Over False Alarm Provokes Fear And Fury

Washington (AFP) - The US Capitol was briefly evacuated Wednesday after authorities sounded a threat alarm over a harmless parachute stunt, prompting top lawmaker Nancy Pelosi to blast aviation officials for an "inexcusable" failure.

Police tasked with protecting the complex at the heart of US government in Washington issued an initial statement shortly after 6:30 PM ET saying they had ordered an evacuation as they were "tracking an aircraft that poses a probable threat."

They did not give further details. But it turned out the mini-crisis was triggered by a pre-planned flyover at nearby Nationals Stadium.

The news became a top headline within minutes in the United States, where the memories of September 11, 2001 attacks -- which saw Al-Qaeda fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington -- and the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol by protesters are still powerful.

US Capitol Police swiftly issued a second statement to say the order had been given "out of an abundance of caution," that there was now "no threat" to the complex and that buildings had reopened for use.

Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate, the chambers of Congress that are located in the Capitol, were in session at the time of the scare.

But the incident enranged Speaker of the House Pelosi, who fired off a withering statement soon after the evacuation order was lifted blasting the Federal Aviation Administration over the apparent misunderstanding.

The FAA's "apparent failure" to notify Capitol police of the planned flyover was "outrageous and inexcusable," Pelosi said.

"The unnecessary panic caused by this apparent negligence was particularly harmful" for those still facing trauma from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, she said, adding that Congress would review "what precisely went wrong today and who at the Federal Aviation Administration will be held accountable for this outrageous and frightening mistake."

There was no immediate explanation for the order, but Pelosi was clear it came after a parachute display that was part of a baseball pregame show for "Military Appreciation Night" at Nationals Stadium.

'Very Stressful 15 Minutes'

NBC's Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake tweeted that he had "Just watched some people parachute down over/near the US Capitol amid an evacuation order."

NBC, citing police, said they were part of a demonstration by the Golden Knights at the stadium. The Golden Knights are the US Army's official aerial parachute demonstration team.

"Seems they might not have told Capitol Police they'd be in the airspace. One officer here told me she saw the small plane appearing to circle before the parachuters jumped," Haake tweeted.

The stadium is roughly 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) from the Capitol. The Nationals were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks there Wednesday.

The US Capitol was the focal point of an actual violent attack just 15 months ago, when supporters of then-president Donald Trump stormed the building in an effort to stop certification of Joe Biden's presidential election victory.

Despite Wednesday's scare being a false alarm, lawmakers and visitors were shaken by the warning.

"We just went through a very stressful 15 minutes, but we are thankful that everyone is safe," Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) said on Twitter.

CNN's congressional correspondent Ryan Nobles said he was among those evacuated, and that "for a good 15 minutes it was pretty frantic."

"The alarms were loud and intense and Capitol Police were not messing around getting people out," he tweeted.

Two young Swiss tourists visiting Washington said they were walking towards the historic white domed Capitol to take a tour when police waved them away from the structure.

"They shut the security barriers behind us. They didn't tell us why and I thought it was better not to ask," one of the tourists, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

Biden, Trump to Offer Two Very Different Addresses on Jan 6 anniversary

Biden, Trump to Offer Two Very Different Addresses on Jan 6 anniversary

Washington (AFP) - A divided nation will experience an ominous split-screen moment Thursday when President Joe Biden uses the anniversary of the January 6 attack on Congress to warn of threats to US democracy and Donald Trump goes live with his conspiracy theories.

One year after a mob of Trump supporters marched on Congress to try and prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden's victory in the presidential election, political wounds remain far from healed.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will reportedly speak from inside the Capitol, the setting during the unrest of almost unbelievable scenes as Trump supporters fought past police to invade the heart of US democracy.

As a veteran politician who came out of retirement to take on what he saw as Trump's authoritarian presidency, Biden has often warned during his first year in the White House of an "existential" threat to political freedoms that until now most Americans took for granted.

His speech -- part of a series of events on what Biden's key ally, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, says will be a "difficult day" -- is set to take that warning to a new level.

But while Congress is holding a prayer vigil for what Biden has called "a dark moment," Trump will be giving a press conference from his luxury property in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

His message is likewise easy to predict. Despite losing by more than seven million votes to Biden, and despite losing multiple court challenges around the country, Trump continues to tout wild claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

And the accusations are only the most incendiary element of a broader attack against Biden on everything from immigration to Covid-19, all adding up to what looks very much like an as-yet undeclared bid to take back power in 2024.

It's a campaign that Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, calls "unprecedented in US history."

"No former president has attempted to do so much to discredit his successor and the democratic process," Tobias said.

What can Biden do?

However ludicrous the election conspiracy theory may be -- one federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled Trump's case "strained" and "speculative" -- it is seen as truth by millions of Americans.

Polls consistently show that around 70 percent of Republicans think Biden was elected illegitimately.

A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll puts this number at 58 percent. However, that same poll found that 40 percent of Republicans, compared to 23 percent of Democrats, believe violence against the government is justified sometimes.

Fighting what Trump, the master brander, popularizes as "the Steal," has become a political ideology in its own right, with nearly all Republican lawmakers either squirming to avoid criticizing what happened on January 6 -- or actively defending the attack.

Lara Brown, director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, said the combination of political grifters looking to get into Trump's good books and the masses of voters deluded into believing what they're told amounts to a considerable force.

"What is so frightful about where we are right now isn't just that these are elite attacks, but they are being fueled by a grass roots movement," she said.

"It wasn't just far-right win groups who had organized" on January 6, she said. "It was average, everyday Americans who had bought into this whole notion."

It's unclear what, if anything, Biden can do to change these dynamics.

Political scientist and Democratic pollster Rachel Bitecofer urged Biden to take on Trump more aggressively, rather than stick to pretending that the man Press Secretary Jen Psaki has referred to as "the former guy" no longer matters.

Biden "is not commemorating an event that ended. He is commemorating the event that is in process and threatens to get worse," she said.

"There's a real hesitancy to accept how virulent the right is in coming after democracy here."

Brown said, however, that Biden has little room for maneuver, because a direct attack on Trump risks looking like a "political witch hunt" -- exactly what the former president claims in his conspiracy theories.

Do The Capitol’s Sergeants-at-Arms Carry Guns?

Do The Capitol’s Sergeants-at-Arms Carry Guns?

By Hannah Hess, CQ Roll Call (MCT)

Members of the Canadian Parliament are praising as a hero House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, a former police superintendent, for his reported role in taking down the gunman who entered the building. Capitol Hill may be wondering if its own sergeants-at-arms usually pack heat.

“I didn’t carry it all the time,”former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance W. Gainer said on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Thursday morning. “I had it close at hand in a locked compartment.”

Gainer, who served as chief of the Capitol Police before his seven-year gig in the Senate, said he frequently relied on the uniformed officers of the department. “We have concentric circles of security around here and so they are the first line of defense, but as the chief law enforcement officer, I was armed when I needed to be or thought it was appropriate,” he said.

House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul D. Irving also is armed while on duty, he has said in previous conversations with CQ Roll Call about securing the chamber. Irving, a Secret Service alumnus, is responsible for maintaining order in the House side of the complex and implementing policies related to the safety and security of members.

It’s unclear if the same policy applies on the other side of the chamber, where the sergeant-at-arms plays both security and administrative roles. (The House elects a separate chief administrative officer.)

Unique among sergeants-at-arms in the post-9/11 era, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Drew Willison does not have a law enforcement background. As Gainer’s former deputy and chief operating officer for the SAA, Willison brought a city manager’s touch to the role when he took over in May. His deputy is Michael Stenger, who spent 35 years in the Secret Service and rose to No. 3 in the organization before joining SAA in 2011.

The office did not immediately respond to calls and emails asking whether Willison is armed.

In the July 1998 attack on the Capitol, officers were the first line of defense against a man firing a .38 caliber revolver. Detective John Gibson, who was stationed outside the office of then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX), managed to shoot armed intruder Russell Weston Jr.

Gibson later died from several gunshot wounds sustained during the incident. Officer Jacob Chestnut also was shot and killed that day. Authorities determined Weston suffered from severe delusions and wasunfit to stand trial. Weston, unlikely to ever be tried, wascommitted to a mental hospital.

In the immediate wake of Wednesday’s shooting in Ottawa, Capitol Police did not make any major modifications to security around the 276-acre complex. Department spokeswoman Lt. Kimberly Schneider indicated police were monitoring the event and remained at a”post-9/11 heightened level of awareness.”

U.S. Capital Votes To Allow Concealed Firearms

U.S. Capital Votes To Allow Concealed Firearms

Washington (AFP) — City council members voted unanimously but reluctantly Tuesday to allow residents and visitors alike to carry concealed weapons in the streets of the U.S. capital.

The measure replaces Washington’s longstanding ban on carrying firearms in public, which a federal judge in July declared unconstitutional.

“We really don’t want to move forward with allowing more guns in the District of Columbia,” said council member Muriel Bowser, a front-runner in the city’s mayoral election in November.

“But we all know we have to be compliant with what the courts say,” she said, quoted by The Washington Post newspaper.

Washington outlawed public ownership of firearms in the mid-1970s, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the ban violated Americans’ constitutional right “to keep and bear arms.”

Strict regulation remained in place, however, until July when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a prohibition on carrying guns in public also violated the U.S. Constitution.

Tough gun laws are credited in part with helping to bring down Washington’s once-notorious homicide rate, with just over 100 murders reported last year.

Tuesday’s vote came amid the aftershock of a major security breach Friday when a former U.S. army soldier, carrying a small folding knife, jumped over a fence and into the White House.

Prosecutors revealed Monday in court that the accused, Omar Gonzalez, had more than 800 rounds of ammunition in his car, and had previously been arrested in Virgina with a sawed-off shotgun, among other firearms.

Under the city’s new legislation, gun-owners would still have to apply for a permit to carry a firearm in public, and show police that they have good reason to do so.

It would also remain illegal to carry a gun inside schools, hospital, government buildings, public transit, sports venues, and anywhere within 1,000 feet (300 meters) of a dignitary under police protection.

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier

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