More on the Coast Guard Drill on the Potomac

CNN got their knickers in a knot this morning thinking there was an attack of some sort being repelled by the Coast Guard on the Potomac River in the vicinity of The Pentagon where Obama was speaking. A little more on that story has come out:

He said that unspecified "members of the public" had "intercepted" clear-channel, unencrypted Coast Guard radio transmissions regarding the exercise and apparently concluded erroneously that a real interdiction of a suspect vessel was taking place on the Potomac, near Memorial Bridge. Not far from the river, President Obama attended a ceremony Friday morning at the Pentagon to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Currier said that although no shots were fired during the exercise, there was "verbalization of gunfire" in the radio transmissions.

"Somebody said, 'Bang! Bang!' on the radio at an appropriate time in the training exercise when the actual interdiction of the boat would have taken place," he said.

I have a little experience myself with Coast Guard communications. Back when I was a kid in the 60's we went down to Sears and bought a pair of walkie-talkies for my birthday. My dad and I started using them around our house in Westminster, only to be rudely scolded by another voice on the frequency. He informed us that we were conversing with the U.S. Coast Guard at a base that should have been many miles beyond what our civilian walkie-talkies should have been able to reach. Of course, they shouldn't have been on a Coast Guard frequency at all.

We took them back and got some that kept us out of trouble.

And at no time did any new agencies mistake our conversations for a terrorist attack.