Coast Guard’s Statement on Reports of Potomac Gunfire
September 11, 2009 by national
Filed under Incident Reports
UPDATE: The White House derided CNN Friday for misreporting a Coast Guard training exercise near the Pentagon that the network represented as a possible suspicious incident complete with gunfire.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he wasn’t going to second guess the Coast Guard’s decision to hold an exercise on the day the United States was commemorating eight years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but suggested the cable channel may have wanted to use a little more discretion before going with its report.
“Let’s understand that best I can tell there was reporting based on listening to a police scanner that was not verified, and then it was on television and now we’ve raced back to find out that it’s a training exercise. So I think it appears as if a lot of this might have been avoided,” Gibbs said.
Confusion reigned following a CNN report of the Coast Guard firing 10 rounds at a suspicious boat and then aired images of vessels circling in the water. Coast Guard Chief Keith Moore said immediately after media inquiries that no shots were fired as part of the exercise and Coast Guard Chief of Staff Vice. Adm. John Currier later announced that no suspicious boats were in the area.
Original Post
The U.S. Coast Guard conducted a training exercise on the Potomac River this morning, although reports that shots were fired are false, said Lt. Commander Tony Russell. The incident grabbed attention because today is the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and President Barack Obama had earlier crossed the river to attend a remembrance at the nearby Petnagon. Here, the Coast Guard’s statement:
The U.S. Coast Guard reported on Friday that reports in the media were based on overheard radio calls made over a training frequency.
We are still gathering information of how this training event might have been misconstrued as an actual incident. We will conduct a thorough review of this incident.
How and when this exercised was conducted will be reviewed.
