Ooops, They Did It Again?

Homeland Security officials in Washington are distancing their department from what appears to have been a bungled Coast Guard training exercise at 9:30 a.m. in the Potomac River Friday morning. Precisely what happened is still being sorted out, but in a statement, the Coast Guard confirmed that as part of a "training event," Coast Guard boats were "operating in the vicinity" of the Memorial Bridge and 14th Street Bridge, which connect Virginia to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon, which was the only Washington-area target attacked by Al Qaeda hijackers exactly eight years ago, is located near the river between the two bridges, and President Obama was heading to the nearby Pentagon to attend a commemoration of the 9/11 attacks at the same time that the training event took place.  (Article continued below...)

According to a government source who was working nearby at the time, an internal Pentagon message system flashed an alert indicating that shots had been fired. The source said the alert indicated that this information may have originated with CNN. According to the Coast Guard statement on the incident, media reports about alleged gunfire "were based on overheard radio calls made over a training frequency." While insisting that no shots—involving either live ammunition or blanks—were fired during the training activity, Lt Nadine Santiago, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that as part of the exercise, one of the crewmen may have said "bang bang."  She said that one of the scenarios that is frequently practiced during exercises like the one conducted today is a drill in which Coast Guard boats challenge a boat which fails to heed an order to stop. She said that this may have been the scenario which the four-boat Coast Guard fleet, based at the service's Washington Station, was practicing on the Potomac today.

She said that the Coast Guard was currently conducting an investigation to determine why this particular exercise was scheduled for a time and location which might have caused alarm, given the resonance with the 9/11 anniversary and President Obama's visit to the Pentagon. "We're trying to get a clearer picture as to why this was chosen for today," she said.

"We are still gathering information of how this training event might have been misconstrued as an actual incident," the Coast Guard statement continued, adding that it had not yet been confirmed whether the Coast Guard boats were the same boats using the marine radio frequency over which the purported training messages apparently were transmitted. 

The Coast Guard insisted that in order to be prepared for contingencies, the service had to engage in "constant training and exercise" but declared that it would "conduct a thorough review of this incident." A government official, who requested anonymity when discussing a matter still under investigation, described the Coast Guard activity as a "low-level training exercise" which was not sanctioned by, or even known to, high-level Homeland Security officials.