Obama Threat Level Assessment is… what again?
We are getting conflicting reports with this news item.
“The threats (to Obama) right now and inappropriate interest that we are seeing is the same level as it has been for the previous two Presidents at this point,” the Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan said in response to a question at a Congressional hearing.
“They are not,” Sullivan said when Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton asked him if the threats to Obama were higher or not, during a hearing by House Committee on Homeland Security on the security breach in the White House last week.Norton termed “as very comforting news,” when Sullivan dismissed published reports that the level of death threat against Obama was four time higher than that of his predecessors.
“I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 per cent. I’m not sure where that number (came from). It’s not [a] 400 per cent [increase],” Sullivan reiterated when Norton said that the Secret Service needed additional agents to protect the first African-American president.
Compare that with, published just today by this Cannuck publication, but it’s pulled from the New York Times, which published it a day or two ago.:
Kody Brittingham, a 20-year-old lance corporal, wrote that he had taken an oath to “protect against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.” In a signed “letter of intent,” tucked away in his barracks at Camp Lejeune, N.C., he identified a “domestic enemy” he planned to eliminate last winter: U.S. President Barack Obama.
The details of this threat, which were revealed at his arraignment hearing in North Carolina, have not previously been reported. Brittingham pleaded guilty in August and awaits sentencing on charges of threatening to kill the president and attempted armed robbery.
It is one of the cases in a spike of threats against Obama before his inauguration in January and in the early months of his presidency, raising deep fears inside the Secret Service and at the White House.
The threats have levelled off in recent months, officials said, and Obama now receives about the same as his two most recent predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But several officials said they took no solace that the volume of reports had receded, because it was the nature of the threats that concern them and because the factors behind the increase remain – Obama’s race prime among them.
So. Which is it? Were the threats up 400 percent, and have since levelled back to Clinton – Bush levels, or was that number plucked from thin air and we’re proceeding at Clinton – Bush levels? Or is this a preogative of the Secret Service, none of the public’s business, and we should really entertain ourselves with the antics of the oddly threatening suggestions that came with the Party Crasher story?