WASHINGTON (AP) - de natie treft ooit voorbereidingen in de loop van de maand voor zijn grootste terrorismeoefening wanneer drie fictieve „vuile bommen“ afgaan en vervoersslagaders in de twee belangrijke V.S. verlammen. steden en Guam, volgens een document dat door de Geassoci�ërde Pers wordt verkregen.

Maar toch zelfs aangezien deze boor begint, van de vorige nationale oefening detailleert die in 2005 wordt gehouden hebben nog openbaar worden bevrijd - informatie die verondersteld is om ambtenaren te helpen voor de volgende echte aanval voorbereidingen treffen.

Leden van het huis eisten antwoordenWoensdag, die waarom „na-actie“ verslag vanaf 2005 niet openbaar is uitgebracht omvat. Het congres heeft de oefening sinds 2000 vereist, maar weinig op de manier van onoplettendheid voorbij het bijwonen van de daadwerkelijke gebeurtenissen gedaan.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, did not get a direct answer to why it has taken the department two years to finish the after-action report.

“I’m just wondering how much of that information you gleaned is actually current enough to move forward with,” Thompson, D-Miss., told Dennis R. Schrader, a preparedness official at the Department of Homeland Security. Wednesday was Schrader’s 45th day on the job at the department, and he did not have most of the answers lawmakers were seeking on the $25 million exercise.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., suggested the department might be hiding something by not releasing the report. “Is it so sensitive because there was a lot of failures in this exercise?” he asked. “You know Katrina wasn’t exactly a home run.”

The fourth Top Officials exercise — dubbed TOPOFF — takes place during the week starting Oct. 15. The program costs about $25 million a year and involves the federal government’s highest officials, such as top people from the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

“The challenge with TOPOFF is not the exercise itself. It’s to move as quickly as possible to remedy what perceives to be the problems that are uncovered,” former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in an interview with AP this week.

Ridge, who launched his own security consulting company on Monday, said he’s a big fan of the TOPOFF exercises. But he said “it’s not acceptable” that the review from the 2005 exercise is still not released publicly.

The House Homeland Security emergency communications, preparedness and response subcommittee was holding a hearing Wednesday on the terrorism exercise program.

This year’s TOPOFF will build on lessons learned from previous exercises, according to the Homeland Security Department, which runs the program. The agency said the Oct. 15-19 exercise would be “the largest and most comprehensive” to date.

According to an internal department briefing of the coming exercise obtained by AP, a dirty bomb will go off at a Cabras power plant in Guam; another dirty bomb will explode on the Steel Bridge in Portland, Ore., impacting major transportation systems, and a third dirty bomb will explode at the intersection of busy routes 101 and 202 near Phoenix.

Local hospitals and law enforcement agencies will be involved in the “attacks” by the dirty bombs, which are conventional explosives that include some radioactive material that would cause contamination over a limited area but not create actual nuclear explosions.

“Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for securing the nation against terrorist attacks, disasters and other emergencies,” according to the department’s Web site.

The after action report from TOPOFF 3, which deals with issues that came up in the 2005 exercise, is supposed to identify areas for improvement. That report is still going through internal reviews.

According to a brief summary of the 2005 exercise — marked For Official Use Only, but obtained by AP — problems arose when officials realized the federal government’s law for providing assistance does not cover biological incidents.

The exercise involved a mustard gas attack from an improvised explosive device in Connecticut and the release of the pneumonic plague in New Jersey. This caused certain federal disaster programs to be unavailable to some residents suffering from the attack, according to the summary.

A 2005 Homeland Security inspector general report suggested the department start tracking the lessons learned from these exercises.

And a 2006 White House report on Hurricane Katrina criticized the department for not having a system to address and fix the problems discovered in the TOPOFF exercises.

“The most recent Top Officials (TOPOFF) exercise in April 2005 revealed the federal government’s lack of progress in addressing a number of preparedness deficiencies, many of which had been identified in previous exercises,” according to the White House.

Previously, a more detailed version of lessons-learned from TOPOFF 2, held in 2003 was not released to states for security reasons.

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