Considering how much info they collect, gummint security is not doing a very good job

Three feet away from our Prez, a hallucinating schizophrenic with a history of violence:



Interpreter at Mandela event: I was hallucinating
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ALAN CLENDENNING, AP
55 minutes ago
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Thamsanqa Jantjie gesticulates at his home during an interview with the Ass...
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The man accused of faking sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service said Thursday he saw "angels" at the event, has been violent in the past and suffers from schizophrenia.

Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were "armed policemen around me." He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year.

Jantjie, who stood gesticulating three-feet (1 meter) from Obama and others who spoke at Tuesday's ceremony that was broadcast around the world, insisted that he was doing proper sign-language interpretation of the speeches of world leaders.

But he also apologized for his performance that has been dismissed by many sign-language experts as gibberish.

The statements by Jantjie raise serious security issues for Obama, other heads of state and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who made speeches at FNB Stadium in Soweto, Johannesburg's black township. The ceremony honored Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon and former president who died on Dec. 5.

"What happened that day, I see angels come to the stadium ... I start realizing that the problem is here. And the problem, I don't know the attack of this problem, how will it come. Sometimes I get violent on that place. Sometimes I will see things chasing me," Jantjie said.

"I was in a very difficult position," he added. "And remember those people, the president and everyone, they were armed, there was armed police around me. If I start panicking I'll start being a problem. I have to deal with this in a manner so that I mustn't embarrass my country."

Asked how often he had become violent, he said "a lot" while declining to provide details.

Contacted by telephone Thursday by AP, SA Interpreters, the organization that reportedly hired Jantjie to do the sign language interpreting at the memorial, declined to comment.

That's a whole other level of trolling.

I think that for the amount of freedoms we are losing in the name of security, it appears that not enough was done so that the other staff present would have realized what was going on while it was happening

Well...I suspect none of the staff was deaf. I know a good bit of sign language and I just assumed it was non-standard or specific to SA. It's like hiring programmers without seeing their code - happens daily, completely stupid.