Throwing shoes is hardly a well-known insult in the US. If some Arab threw shoes at me I'd assume he was the village idiot - Arabs usually throw dynamite.

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For you guys to call it a secret service 'failure' I'm curious what you'd suggest them to have done differently?


Security is all about the perimeter. Usually that's the podium, and it's surrounded by bullet-proof glass, etc. It looks to me as though this time it was the walls of the room, i.e., once checked & cleared the reporters were allowed inside the perimeter.

al-Qaeda has successfully done assassinations in the past with agents posing a reporters at press conferences so I question the wisdom of letting this group inside the perimeter. On the other hand, really bad Secret-Service screwups are often the result of the president overriding their plans.

Planning to turn the guy's brain into pink mist is useless - suicides don't care. The goal has to be to prevent or stop the *first* attack. Whether or not the guy is even captured isn't the protective detail's problem: the *only* thing is stopping the attack, starting with the *first* attempt.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock