The Washington Navy Yard Shooting Is a Good Example of the Federal Government’s often Deadly Incompetence — a Comment regarding What Has become a Lunatic Nation

18 September 2013

If the organization you work for had done this — would you be impressed?

The following essay concerns the Navy Yard shooting deaths of 12 innocent people on 16 September 2013.

It makes the point that broad arguments about gun control and mental illness are primarily irrelevant in the Navy Yard case.

Instead, the take-away message is that the Federal Government is incompetent because we go out of our way to make it so.

Background — the initially reported facts of the Aaron Alexis case

What happened in the Navy Yard shooting is that a psychotic person — with a history of demented behavior with firearms, both before and after his Navy Reserve service from 2007 to 2011 — was granted employment and security clearance there. Twelve people paid for this error with their lives.

McClatchy reporters noted that:

Still unclear . . . was where the problems occurred that allowed the alleged shooter, 34-year-old former Navy reservist Aaron Alexis, to slip through a supposedly thorough examination of his conduct, some of which was easily found by simple Internet searches.

Alexis’ employer at the Navy Yard, a federal subcontractor based in Fort Lauderdale, Fl., called The Experts, said the Defense Department had confirmed his “Secret” security clearance twice in the last year, even though he’d been arrested three times between 2004 and 2010, twice for suspicious gun firings.

“The latest background check and security clearance information were in late June of 2013 and revealed no issues other than one minor traffic violation,” The Experts said in a statement.

[P]olice records show that[:]

Alexis was arrested in 2004 after he shot out the tires of a car near his Seattle home;

arrested in 2008 on disorderly conduct charges in DeKalb County outside Atlanta;

and arrested in 2010 in Fort Worth, Texas, after his gun was fired into his ceiling and through a neighbor’s floor.

He wasn’t prosecuted in any incident.

David Wood, writing in the Huffington Post, uncovered the answer to McClatchy’s implied question about how Mr. Alexis got into the Navy in the first place:

Alleged Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was able to enlist in the Navy in 2007, despite an earlier shooting incident in which he claimed to have "blacked out" -- a record which normally might have disqualified him for military service.

But at the time, the Navy and the other military services were struggling to reach their wartime recruiting goals, and were granting thousands of waivers to potential recruits with criminal backgrounds.

In 2007, the year that the Navy accepted Alexis into its ranks, the military services together enlisted 909 recruits with felony convictions, including burglary, grand larceny, aggravated assault, child molestation, narcotics possession and arson, according to Defense Department data provided to Congress.

However, what is not yet explained is how the Navy dropped the ball in prohibiting Mr. Alexis access to the Navy Yard — after Newport Police (Rhode Island) informed them that Mr. Alexis was apparently psychotic:

According to a Newport Police report obtained by WBZ-TV, Aaron Alexis was in town in August and called them claiming voices were harassing him in his hotel room at the Marriott.

On the evening of August 6th, Alexis checked into a room at the Residence Inn in Middletown. He’d apparently gone there on business, according to what he would later tell authorities, but he quickly checked out, later telling police that he had had a fight with a man at the airport on his way to R.I. from Virginia. Alexis said that man had “sent three people to follow him and keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations into his body.”

Alexis switched to a hotel located right on the Newport Naval Base, but he said that the voices were still reaching him through the walls and the floor.

Finally he checked into the Newport Marriott on America’s Cup Avenue, but he couldn’t take it any longer. He called Newport Police to come to his room, where he told them “the individuals are using ‘some sort of microwave machine’ to send vibrations through the ceiling, penetrating his body so he cannot fall asleep.”

Police learned Alexis was a contractor with connections to the Navy, so they contacted the Naval Station Police and faxed them their report. Naval authorities said they would follow up.

“So, Pete, what is the most pertinent issue? — If Mr. Alexis hadn’t been able to get a gun, he couldn’t have shot all those people”

Most pertinent is not that Mr. Alexis got hold of a gun with which to murder people — but that he had access to a bunch of innocent people, which a reasonable and competent organization would have denied him.

The Navy Yard shooting is a good example of what happens when a combination of governmental negligence and deliberately skewed laws and regulations come together to kill American citizens.

Think about our obtuse way of reacting to these mass shooting incidents

On the one hand, we have the gun lobby rightly pointing out that responsible gun owners aren’t shooting people. On the other, their opponents correctly deplore America’s irresponsible love affair with all things violent.

In between, very few people recognize that our political culture makes controlling anything that limits profitability a dead end cause, no matter what cultural sector it is in.

How unregulated profit-seeking indirectly created the cultural conditions that permitted the Navy Yard shootings

Do you ever wonder why so much of what used to be military sector or government duties are contracted out?

Answer — private profit, also known as the Plutocrat Suck Factor. Why have the military or government do something that they could do at a reasonable cost, when private corporations can come in and essentially suck the tax payers’ treasury dry?

And by diffusing administrative accountability more diffusely — between military, intelligence, and private contractors — it is even easier to do this public trough-feeding out of sight. (The nation’s Fat Cats roll with delight in their comfortable burrows.)

In the case of Aaron Alexis, commentators are wondering how this troubled man made it into the Navy and stayed associated with it, despite a history of aberrant and violent behavior. Critics’ focus is currently on the mechanics of background checks — rather than on the rottenness of the entire Military Industrial Complex system.

Notice that Mr. Alexis made it into the Navy Reserve during a period when criminal records were ignored. Was 2007 an era, when the United States was under meaningful attack by any rational standard? No.

The waiver of criminal records at the time was merely intended to keep the Military Industrial Complex “foddered” for yet another spate of unnecessary, but profit-making wars.

In regard to Mr. Alexis’ security clearance and Navy Yard access, no sane society would permit a private contractor to do the checks that are necessary to the nation’s security. And no reasonable military organization would trust a non-military organization to inculcate the virtues of squad loyalty and sacrifice that go with the uniform or anything directly associated with it.

Yet, increasingly, we Americans have tolerated greedy pantywaist corporations and their often “wannabe” rabble from the civilian outside in performing functions that are critical to the safety and mission of our military and intelligence services.

In this regard, were I one of the Navy Yard victims’ families, I would be furious that the Congress and the U.S. Navy permitted my loved one to be assassinated by a lunatic, who had ostensibly been cleared by a grossly negligent screening and supervisory system.

If we cannot even get background clearances and security monitoring correct — in an essentially closed chain of command environment — what makes us think that yet more laws affecting the general public are going to work?

I’m not a gun nut. But in my view, the Navy Yard shootings make the gun lobby’s case.

If the Feds can’t even do comparatively simple things right, why should we trust them to do anything complex or nuanced?

The Navy Yard horror also makes the case against granting the Feds more surveillance power

These Government “guys” can’t even do what we want them to — even with regard to people who have voluntarily submitted themselves to privacy intrusions.

Why should we trust Big Daddy’s discretion with an even more enormous mass of unwarrantedly intrusive information? I don’t. And neither should you.

The moral? — Our political culture is just as ill as Mr. Alexis reportedly was

But most of us don’t recognize that.

We continue to argue about irrelevancies — the equivalent of “hearing voices” — without recognizing that the basic evil that propagates most of our tragedies comes from our love affair with the combination of militarized violence and easy money.

The irony here is that Gun Lobby, whom I often detest, is probably right about the menace that Big Government poses. Paradoxically, the lobby and its conservative minded ilk actively contribute to the institutional and cultural mechanics that make American governance unworkable.

Cultural insanity.

PeteFree.com

The Washington Navy Yard Shooting Is a Good Example of the Federal Government’s often Deadly Incompetence — a Comment regarding What Has become a Lunatic Nation