Also incompetence, but it's the irony I'm mainly appreciating here.
This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama's motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn't think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident.
Oops.
Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government's great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day -- come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc.
The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says:
The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies.
Umm, yeah. I think they need to work on that.
Angie
4 comments:
All that comes to mind is, "Smooth move, Exlax."
Charles -- yeah, that works too. :)
Angie
While "The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies" is true, the main issue at the time of the merging was then to merge the CIA and FBI into one agency with the others. Because They were the ones who weren't sharing! (And guess which two agencies are still independent of DHS? Hmmmm...)
WW -- It's certainly true that the CIA and FBI have had a major rivalry for pretty much as long as long as they've both existed, just about every security or law enforcement agency has massive territorial issues.
My husband works for the government (Customs, in fact, which is part of Homeland Security now) and I used to work for an R&D/systems integration company which did work for pretty much everyone, and expecting any two agencies (or branches of the military, or whatever) to talk to one another without brandishing firearms is pretty much a dream. It's all about territory and one-upsmanship and who has the bigger dick with those people.
Congress or the president can direct or mandate all they want, but I don't see any of those folks cooperating significantly, to the point of actually trusting one another enough to communicate perfectly freely, at any point in my lifetime.
Angie
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