Holding a training exercise on the Potomac River the morning of the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was “ill-advised,” the U.S. Coast Guard has concluded.
A Coast Guard report released Tuesday said the unit responsible for the training exercise didn’t know President Obama would be attending a 9/11 memorial service nearby at the Pentagon during the training. The report concluded that if the unit had known of the president’s whereabouts, it would not have conducted the exercise at that particular time.
The training originally been scheduled for a week before Sept. 11, but was postponed several times due to crew shortages.
During the Sept. 11 exercise, Coast Guard operators broadcasted “bang, bang, bang” over an open radio channel to simulate rounds being fired. CNN picked up on the channel and aired an erroneous report saying that the Coast Guard had fired shots at a suspicious vessel on the Potomac between the Memorial and 14th Street bridges. The report was then quickly picked up by other news organizations.
The chain of false reports sent law enforcement and federal agencies into a frenzy, fearing the nation’s capital could be under attack again, eight years to the day after a high-jacked jetliner crashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people. Reacting to this year’s exercise, the Federal Aviation Administration briefly shut down flights at Reagan National Airport, while FBI agents and D.C. police rushed to the river.
Despite being contacted by various media outlets about the “shots” that were fired, the Coast Guard did not end the training exercise. The report determined that this, too, was a mistake.
The Coast Guard has ordered a series of actions to avoid another scenario like last month’s: Its first step will be to identify a drill over the radio channel in the future before simulating explosions or shots fired. The Coast Guard will also incorporate high-profile or politically sensitive events into its training schedule, which it will from now on provide other law enforcement agencies with copies of.
