2/24/21
Steven Sund, the disgraced former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Department, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo from his own intelligence unit that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself. The memo didn't really say much more than was already obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was authoritative, detailed and, of course, prescient. Sund waved it off. He didn't bother to share it with the rank and file. He didn't equip his frontline officers with tear gas, or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, or riot gear. Instead, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks, and get the shit beaten out of them. One officer died, and many others were injured. He let the Capitol fall to a mob. But in his first public comments on Tuesday, Sund had the breathtaking gall to blame the breach of the Capitol not on his own poor decision-making, but on a "clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies." And the pathetic, credulous, ill-informed senators to whom he was testifying lapped it up. The closest any senator came to asking about that was Sen. Patrick Leahy who noted that Sund had acknowledged knowing that white supremacist groups and other extremist groups were expected on Jan. 6 and might become violent.
The point is that something else was clearly going on in Sund's head to reduce his sense of alarm. And if you think about it for just an instant, you know exactly what it was. As newly-elected Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. — a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests — put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: "Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn't have made it up those steps. … We would have been shot, we would have been tear-gassed." But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once. Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren't even near the Capitol. Nobody asked why Sund didn't give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two former sergeants at arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the "other". A day after the ransacking of the Capitol, retired Lt. General Russel Honoré told a TV station what a lot of people were thinking: "We knew they were coming; everybody knew they were coming," he said. "I've just never seen so much incompetence, so they're either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit".
www.salon.com
