Coast Guard admits Sept. 11 training exercise was a bad idea

For anyone who still thinks it impossible that the U.S. military was caught napping on the fateful day that terrorists crashed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 comes news of an internal U.S. Coast Guard investigation that found that scheduling a training exercise on the Potomac River on the anniversary of that attack was a mistake. Gee, you think? False reports of gunfire near the Pentagon, where President Barack Obama was attending a memorial ceremony, prompted FBI agents to rush the scene and caused the grounding of 17 flights at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the New York Times said, citing a report yesterday by the Associated Press. CNN and Fox News reported the shots on television after hearing about them on a police radio, even though no shots were actually fired, the Times said. Instead, the exercise raised unnecessary fears that Washington had again come under attack on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the report found. The Coast Guard said it did not know that Obama was in the vicinity and would not have conducted the drill if it had known, and promised to use more-secure communications in the future. Of course, the biggest question has to be why the Coast Guard didn't figure any of this out before. Like the incident in April when an airplane painted to look like Air Force One caused panic in New York City when it flew dangerously close to skyscrapers in a publicity exercise without notifying local authorities, federal authorities display stupidity at best or contempt for the citizenry at worst when they pull such stunts. If it's only stupidity, it certainly seems a likely explanation for what happened, or failed to happen, on the real Sept. 11.

The gang that wouldn't give up

Nice to hear from George W. Bush-era CIA director warning against release of secret memos authorizing invasive interrogation techniques -- NOT. The new Obama administration ought to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for agreeing to release the memos, which reveal who in the Bush administration was in on decisions to break international treaties and violate the country's fundamental principles. But these characters never give up, not even after U.S. voters resoundingly rejected the former administration's cavalier attitude toward human rights as it preached them to other countries. The latest outrage comes from Gen. Michael V. Hayden, CIA director during the last two years of the Bush government, who Sunday that release of the so-called torture memos would hamper the country's ability to fight terrorism, according to the New York Times. Hayden said the CIA had already stopped using waterboarding, a technique involving simulated drowning, by the time he became the agency's director, and told a Congressional committee in 2007 that he thought its use was probably illegal. But in an interview broadcast on Fox News Sunday, Hayden said release of the memos gave Al-Qaida an advantage by revealing what practices the CIA used in the past. “It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond,” he said, according to the Times. “To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.” The memos released this week Thursday detailed interrogation techniques used by the CIA from 2002-2005, apparently with the approval of the White House.