The unswept roof
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Two viewer questions about event security drew from John Kiriakou a pair of observations about basic protective practice, made without reference to any theory of the killing itself.

The drone question

A viewer asked why security for outdoor events does not use drones for surveillance. Kiriakou's reaction was immediate agreement that it was a good question, and Ted Rall called it a good one too.

The assessment that followed was brief and unanimous. It is cheap. It is easy. "There's no reason not to," Kiriakou said.

Rall qualified the point by wondering how much security there really was at the event, noting that the subject was not being protected like a president and that he did not blame anyone for that. Kiriakou's answer began by conceding the qualification and then setting it aside: "But still, Ted."

The building

His substantive objection concerned a specific structure. The building from which the shooter was reportedly firing, Kiriakou said, "closed down for renovation in April and was supposed to be locked up tight."

From that he drew the question he clearly regarded as unanswerable: "Did it not occur to anybody in the campus police department to just, you know, sweep the building, walk up to the roof, just make sure nobody's up there?"

The complaint is about a routine, not about a conspiracy. A closed building on the perimeter of an event is a known category of risk, and clearing it is a task requiring one officer and a staircase.

The precedent

Rall supplied the reason the failure ought to have been foreseeable, pointing out that a gunman on a roof had figured in a very recent and very prominent case at Butler, Pennsylvania, and that by now this should be standard operating procedure. Kiriakou did not dispute it, and the conversation moved to the physical evidence recovered at the scene.

Note on scope

Kiriakou's remarks here are confined to protective practice. Elsewhere in the same broadcast he explicitly refused a conspiratorial reading of the killing, cutting off a man at lunch who wanted to attribute the shot to a foreign intelligence service, and he treated the marksmanship involved as unremarkable rather than professional.

See also

- The 9/11 truth honorarium
- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
