State Department Denies Security Flaw

State Deptartment officials have denied the information they gave NewsMax for the report "New York Blackout a Security Nightmare", which reported that the U.S./United Nations Mission was blinded by the power blackout last Thursday.

Most of the building housing the mission lost power, despite the fact that the facility has some emergency generators.

More importantly, U.S. mission officials confided that they lost most of their secure communications lines and all voice channels on the system with Washington.

A secure conference room, used by senior U.S. and occasionally U.N. officials for "sensitive" converstations with Washington, was off-line for most of the blackout, confided a State Department official.

Ironically, the State Department, while officially blasting the NewsMax report as "wrong" and denying that the breakdown even happened, also told several reporters they were upset because NewsMax was given the information off the record (NewsMax reported the information, but revealed no sources).

Does that mean the State Department gave NewsMax a wrong story off the record? Or does it mean that Washington is trying to downplay a major security problem?

Various news sources have reported that President Bush was angry that on 9/11 he kept losing contact with Vice President Cheney. After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush made it a point to protect secure communication lines with New York City should another catastrophe occur.

Whatever efforts Washington made to protect those lines of communication were obviously not enough.

Meanwhile, acting Russian U.N. Ambassador Gennady Gatilov told reporters that the emergency generators at his mission worked "just fine" during the blackout.

Perhaps it is time for Washington to open channels with Moscow on how to handle future blackouts.

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Homeland/Civil Defense