as you can read in this powerful and troubling Washington Post story.
Consider:
The McConnell adviser, who described his role on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns after the attack, reached out to former top officials at the Justice Department.
Speaking in a whisper, he told one the situation was dire: If backup did not arrive soon, people could die.
And consider this, from the narrative of the day:
A seeming fortress from a distance, the Capitol contains more than 400 separate doors, entryways and ground-level windows. And police lines on all sides of the building were collapsing.
Where there could have been help, but it had not been requested:
In fact, a small quick-reaction force at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland had been assembled by the Defense Department to assist if needed — but it did not immediately respond because of a lack of a prior planning with Capitol police over how it might be deployed, Pentagon officials said.
Please keep reading. The article is long, and I am going to push fair use in what I offer.
Read this:
Outside on the west side of the building, a handful of Capitol police officers had been backed into a corner, under the scaffolding holding up the inaugural stage. One was pulled down a set of stairs and then beaten and kicked while he tried to cover his head, according to footage of the incident.
Atop the stairs, another had his helmet ripped off as he tried to hold up the last remaining metal barrier before the crowd could flood into the building. A person in the mob sprayed something at an officer. Another lifted a hammer above his head as if preparing to throw it, and then instead began striking at the barrier, where officers were holding it with their hands.
I have seen pictures of the officer referred to in the first of the preceding paragraphs, on the gounrd surrounded by violent insurrectionists.
And this, very important — read it all:
At that moment, one floor below, rioters had crashed through windows and climbed into the Capitol and clashed with police, including a lone Black Capitol police officer who tried to prevent them from ascending toward the Senate chamber.
A video captured by Igor Bobic, a congressional reporter for HuffPost on the scene, shows the officer trying to hold back a few dozen rioters who push him back and up the steps leading almost directly to the chamber.
For almost a minute, the officer held them back — at the exact moment that, inside the Senate, police were frantically racing around the chamber trying to lock down more than a dozen doors leading to the chamber floor and the galleries above.
“Second floor!” the officer yelled into his radio, alerting other officers and command that the mob had reached the precipice of the Senate.
Had the rioters turned right, they would have been a few feet away from the main entrance into the chamber. On the other side of that door, had they made their way into the Senate, were at least a half-dozen armed officers, including one with a semiautomatic weapon in the middle of the floor scanning each entrance for intruders.
Instead, the group — all White men — followed the Black officer in the other direction and met a group of police in a back corridor outside the Senate.
At 2:16 p.m., Bobic tweeted a photo of a half-dozen police confronting the protesters.
Absent the courage and quick thinking of that officer, who is in the picture accompanying this post, there would have been a blood bath. At a minimum multiple insurrectionists would have been shot and possibly killed. But given how many there were, and the real possibility that some of them were also armed, they might well have overwhelmed the few law enforcement personnel in the chamber, and then?
Similarly, the three officers who stood in front of the door to the Speaker’s Lobby wer able to delay it being broken into long enough until additional officers with semi-automatic or automatic long gons arrived. Yes, one person was shot and killed trying to crawl through a broken window, but a mass rush in - where there anough officers to stop them? We know that had that entrance been breached the Congressmen who were still within the chamber would have been trapped.
We barely averted a mass casualty situation. We were lucky that there were not mass assassinations of elected members of the House and Senate, and a possible partial decapitation of the Presidential line of succession.
There can be no forgiveness without serious accountability.
Anyone not willing to demand full accountability has forfeited any claim to legitimacy of their office holding. They should be shamed, and wherever possible legal action taken against any and all up to and including the current occupant of the Oval Office.
IF we do not act forcefully, this WILL be repeated.
And the results will then be catastrophic.