US government buildings security deeply flawed

Investigators testing security at key US government buildings were able to sneak bomb-making materials at 10 sites over the past year, the investigative arm of the US Congress reported Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said the officials, carrying liquid explosives and low-yield detonators, "passed undetected" through security checkpoints, then assembled the bombs and "walked freely" around the buildings with the devices in a briefcase.
The GAO did not specifically identify the facilities, citing security concerns and lasting fears about terrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks. But the agency said eight of them were government owned while two were leased, and that they included the offices of a US Senator and House member, as well as the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security.
On its official Internet site, the GAO also provided a video of one of its investigators walking through a security checkpoint with bomb-making materials. The Senate Homeland Security Committee was due to take up the GAO's findings at a hearing Wednesday on the failings of the Federal Protective Service tasked with guarding such facilities.
More than one million US government employees work in 9,000 facilities around the country protected by the Federal Protective Service, including 350,000 in and around Washington. "It is simply unacceptable that federal employees working within buildings under FPS' protection, and the visitors who pass through them, are so utterly exposed to potential attack by terrorists and other enemies," said Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, who chairs the committee.
Republican Senator Susan Collins, the panel's ranking member, called the security lapses "stunning and unacceptable." "In post-9/11 America, I cannot fathom how security breaches of this magnitude were allowed to occur," she said in a statement.
The GAO listed other lapses, including a night-time post inspection that found a guard asleep at his post after taking the prescription painkiller Percocet. In another instance, a guard failed to recognise or did not properly x-ray a box containing handguns at the loading dock at a facility, according to the GAO report.