Bomb Threats Disrupt White House Briefing, TSA Hearing On Screener Failures
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Secret Service agents evacuated a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday due to a bomb threat.
It was the second time in 24 hours that business in Washington was disrupted by security concerns.
Several floors of the Dirksen Senate Office Building were cleared after Capitol Police received a call reporting a suspicious package during hearings about trouble at the Transportation Security Administration, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported.
A Capitol Hill hearing on the problems of TSA screeners was stopped for 90 minutes, the room cleared. Capitol Police got a phone call reporting a suspicious package in the room and taking no chances evacuated several floors of the building.
"The reported failure for detecting prohibited items at checkpoints are more than troubling, they are unacceptable," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.
The suspicious package report came as senators expressed frustration about a recent internal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security that found security failures at dozens of airports. Agents with fake bombs and weapons got past TSA screeners in 67 out of 70 tests, Kramer reported.
"TSA cannot afford to miss a single genuine threat without potentially catastrophic consequences, yet a terrorist only needs to get it right once," Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth said.
Roth refused to publicly discuss the specific findings due to security concerns, but senators also raised concerns about a second troubling report from the inspector general -- that the agency needs to do a better job in vetting its agents after testing showed that the agency failed to identify 73 airport workers in sensitive jobs who had links to terrorism.
"We found in December 2011 that TSA and airports were conducting background checks based on limited criminal history information, specifically TSA's level of access to FBI criminal history records was excluding many state records," said Jennifer Grover of the Government Accountability Office.
As the senators pointed out, the TSA has serious security responsibilities, screening 25,000 domestic flights and 2,500 international flights each day. That also includes 1.1 million checked bags and 3 million carry-ons every day that agents must check for bombs and weapons, Kramer reported.