Q Takes the Capitol, a New American Journal graphic by artist Walter Simon, depicts this golden calf of the Shaman of Qanon in his bison horn headdress, flying a flag with the slogan, “Quo unus nostrum it, eo universi imus.” The saying is inspired by the coming of age at sea saga “White Squall” using a lame slogan from the Albatross ship’s bell, “Where we go one, we go all.”

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Why are we so afraid to simply state the truth for the American people to see? Why do we always have to tip toe around it and spin the facts to serve a political purpose?

Is it just a naïveté that a police and justice system is supposed to work in a non-partisan way, in a world where the partisan divide trump’s everything else?

A 127-page joint report released this week from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Rules and Administration Committee provides a great deal of detail of what is known from Congressional testimony about the Capitol insurrection on 1-6-2021 — without calling it an insurrection, a term many Republicans had joined Democrats in embracing immediately after the attack. The New York Times admits that in its breaking news deadline coverage of the report, for which it failed to provide a link so readers could see it for themselves.

The report does not deal with Trump’s false claims about the stolen election leading up to and including his insurrectionist address to his followers by the White House Elipse just before the riot took place, although it does simply include a full text copy of Trump’s disjointed statement in the end, which includes this paragraph where Trump asks the military and the Secret Service to stand down and let the rioters in.

“And I’d love to have if those tens of thousands of people would be allowed… The military, the secret service… And we want to thank you and the police law enforcement. Great. You’re doing a great job. But I’d love it if they could be allowed to come up here with us. Is that possible? Can you just let them come up, (and in) please?”

Would it be treated differently if he had simply said: “Please, military, Secretive Service, Capitol Police, will you just stand down and let my friends march into the Capitol and disrupt the vote to certify the election, and while they are there, hang the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, so we can have a coup and keep control of the government and turn America into a dictatorship?”

That’s basically what he was saying, in his typical indirect way of speaking in Trump tongues to appeal to his brainwashed base of loyal MAGA followers.

While the report is somewhat critical of the Capitol Police chief, the Sargents at Arms for the House and Senate, and Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense, it treats the police like heroes — some of whom deserved it — but says nothing of the six officers who were suspended and at least 35 others are under investigation for their complicity in helping Trump’s crowd past barriers and inside the Capitol on the East side, where some were escorted into the Senate chamber by a Capitol Police officer and out again with no threat of arrest, including the Qanon Shammon (see the New Yorker video).

It says nothing of the Republican members of Congress who helped plan the insurrection in advance at the Trump Hotel the night before the “Stop the Steal” rally and march up Capitol Hill, including Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville. It says nothing of Republican members of Congress who stood on the stage with Trump and helped incite the insurrection as a new Civil War, including Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, who is now running for Richard Shelby’s Senate seat.

The report was the product of more than three months of hearings and interviews and reviews of thousands of pages of documents, and it does present a damning portrait of the preparations and response by law enforcement at multiple levels, claiming the FBI failed to communicate effectively with local police about known advance threats of violence or take the threats seriously.

The implication is that none of the police agencies responsible for protecting the Capitol and members of Congress had enough advance knowledge to predict such a violent siege of the Capitol. Clearly — and it’s not in the report — what they all expected was a violent clash between groups like the Proud Boys and Antifa out in the streets, because that’s what they had faced since the summer. They did not expect one side crashing into the building unchallenged.

But if the intelligence community had not been under Trump’s control as the president and commander in chief and not in on the stand down order to let it happen, they might have monitored the social media chatter and figured out that Black Lives Matter and Antifa had told their people to stay away from the Capitol that day, knowing the left was going to be blamed by the police and Republicans for any violence. This had been demonstrated time and time again in protests in Washington over the past half a year. Police proved time and time again that they were on the side of Trump’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and against African American peaceful protesters and anti-Nazi activists.

In mid-December, apparently a fact lost to all of the national press and broadcast media covering this story, members of Antifa were beaten by D.C. Metro police on K-Street and jailed in a violent clash with the Proud Boys, while the white members of the Trump-supporting groups were allowed to walk away totally free of harassment or arrest by police. I know this because I actually have sources inside Antifa, who talked to me on the phone the week of Jan. 6 – from a campground in Florida. They were more than a thousand miles away, but are still being blamed by the right-wing Republican falsity meme machine for the violence and damage at the Capitol.

And not one reporter for The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS or CNN knows this? They may get most of the leaks and breaks, but not all of them. The problem is the MSM is still echoing each other, and not paying attention to anything else.

At least Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York, in praising the committees’ work on Tuesday, said he reserved the right to bring up the idea of an independent commission for another vote in the future, even though the effort has already been killed by Republicans in the Senate with the use of the filibuster to require a super majority vote of 60 members.

“Just as glaring was what the report didn’t consider — indeed, what it was not allowed to consider,” Schumer said. “The report did not investigate, report on, or hardly make any reference to the actual cause, the actual impetus for the attack on Jan. 6.”

The committee report did say that top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to “storm the Capitol,” infiltrate its tunnel system and “bring guns.”

An FBI memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for “war” at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials, except in a routine email message lost in a flood of other communications. The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of President Donald Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss.

“If they don’t show up, we enter the Capitol as the Third Continental Congress and certify the Trump Electors,” one post said.

“Bring guns. It’s now or never,” said another.

The first congressional report on the Capitol riot is the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the dozens of intelligence failures, miscommunications and security lapses that led to what the bipartisan team of senators that assembled it concluded was an “unprecedented attack” on American democracy and the most significant assault on the Capitol in more than 200 years, since the British invasion in the War of 1812.

“The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,” said Michigan Democrat Gary Peters, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “The attack was quite frankly planned in plain sight.”

“The failures are obvious,” said Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. “To me, it was all summed up by one of the officers who was heard on the radio that day asking a tragically simple question: ‘Does anybody have a plan?’ Sadly, no one did.”

In response to the report, the Capitol Police said in a statement that its leaders agreed that the force needed improvement, including changing the way it collects and shares intelligence. But it insisted that law enforcement officials had no way of knowing that a pro-Trump rally would turn into a mass assault.

“Before Jan. 6, the Capitol Police leadership knew Congress and the Capitol grounds were to be the focus of a large demonstration attracting various groups, including some encouraging violence,” the statement said. But, it added, “neither the U.S.C.P., nor the F.B.I., U.S. Secret Service, Metropolitan Police or our other law enforcement partners knew thousands of rioters were planning to attack the U.S. Capitol. The known intelligence simply didn’t support that conclusion.”

Yet the Senate investigation found that the department had ample warning weeks earlier that violent extremists, including members of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, were planning such action, and failed to share it widely or incorporate the warnings into its operational plan for Jan. 6.

Remember, Trump was still the president and commander in chief.

“Several comments promote confronting members of Congress and carrying firearms during the protest,” a Capitol Police intelligence analyst wrote in a threat report on Dec. 21, which included a map of the Capitol complex that had been posted on the pro-Trump blog thedonald.win. Among the posts cited in the threat report: “Bring guns. It’s now or never,” and, “We can’t give them a choice. Overwhelming armed numbers is our only chance.”

The Senate’s investigative report is the product of a collaboration among Peters, Klobuchar and the top Republicans on the two committees they lead: Senator Rob Portman of Ohio on the Homeland Security Committee and Roy Blunt of Missouri on the Rules Committee. It is limited by its bipartisan nature, given that Republicans have refused to ask questions about the riot that could turn up unflattering information about Trump or members of their party, as they try to put its political implications behind them before the 2022 midterm elections — and attempt to cover up the role the president and other Republicans played in planning and inciting the insurrection.

Though the report states flatly that Trump “continued to assert that the election was stolen from him” and promoted the “Stop the Steal” gathering in Washington before the riot, it does not chart his actions or motivations, state that his election claims were false or explore the implications of a president and elected leaders in his party stoking outrage among millions of supporters.

Many of the findings in the report were culled from public testimony from committee hearings, though five people sat for detailed interviews with the committee: Christopher C. Miller, who was the acting defense secretary; Ryan D. McCarthy, the Army secretary; Gen. James C. McConville, the Army chief of staff; Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police; and J​. Brett Blanton, the architect of the Capitol.

The committee staff solicited more than 50 statements from Capitol Police officers that painted a vivid portrayal of the rioters, some of whom gave Nazi salutes and hurled racist slurs at them. One officer described being crushed by the mob. Another told the committee that she still suffered from chemical burns she experienced that day.

About 140 law enforcement officers reported injuries from the riot. The bipartisan report also tied seven fatalities to the assault, including five protesters who died and three police officers who died in its aftermath, two from suicide.

The document lays out profound problems with the special Capitol Police unit that handles civil disturbances, only a fraction of which was adequately trained to respond to a riot, and which was poorly equipped. On Jan. 6, its officers were not authorized to wear protective gear at the beginning of their shifts or to use their most powerful nonlethal weapons — such as grenade launchers and sting ball grenades — to push back crowds, because they lacked the training to do so.

“Let’s be honest: Capitol Police were put in an impossible situation,” Portman said. “Without adequate intelligence, training and equipment, they did not have the tools to protect the Capitol.”

The committees recommended 20 improvements, including beefing up police training and equipment and forming a single intelligence bureau in the Capitol Police to better share information. Their suggestions followed those from Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, a retired Army officer whom Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California chose to lead a House task force that recommended the hiring of more than 800 Capitol Police officers, the construction of mobile fencing around the complex and changes to Capitol Police Board procedures to allow the agency’s chief to quickly summon the National Guard in an emergency.

Blunt said that he and Klobuchar would soon introduce legislation to grant the Capitol Police chief power to unilaterally summon the National Guard in emergencies. He said they were also likely to assemble a spending bill to increase funding for the department and carry out other changes.

There was much information the panel was unable to learn. The senators secured only limited cooperation from key agencies, including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the House sergeant-at-arms. Other agencies failed to meet deadlines to hand over documents.

The findings — and their limitations — are likely to fuel renewed calls for an independent commission like the one created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, populated by experts and armed with subpoena power to investigate what happened that day and why. Senate Republicans blocked the creation of such a body late last month, arguing in part that it would duplicate the work already underway by the Senate committees and prosecutors at the Justice Department.

The Senate document offers a detailed accounting of more than a dozen intelligence failures. It faults the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis for issuing “no intelligence products specific to Jan. 6” while it issued 15 other documents on unrelated domestic extremism without “any mention of the joint session of Congress or the Capitol.”

The report also describes the “absolutely brutal” abuse of the Capitol Police, which employs more than 1,800 sworn officers and whose $500 million budget exceeds that of the police forces in Detroit, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

“At one point, I was pushed so hard and crushed in between people that I could not breathe,” one officer reported.

“I specifically remember being sprayed with bear spray at least six to eight times while tussling with rioters who were trying to use the bike racks against us as weapons,” another told the committee.

Many questions remain unanswered, ranging from the criminal — such as who was responsible for the pipe bombs that were placed outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees — to the strategic: Is law enforcement doing enough to combat right-wing extremism?

The senators said they planned to press on with their investigation.

“The American people certainly do deserve to get all the facts about this attack,” Peters said.

Yes, and they deserve to be told the whole truth and nothing but the truth by their representatives in Congress.

Trump and Republicans loyal to him planned the insurrection to stop the certification of the election and overturn a duly elected American democratic government, which is in fact an attempted coup by people who should be tried and executed for treason.

Is that just too horrible to admit? Would it topple the entire system to just tell the American people the damned truth and let justice fall down like rain?