Obama Hates Safety Forces

One recommendation that the 9/11 Commission made was to standardize communications between safety responders. On 9/11, the Police and Fire had no way of communicating.

For years the Democrats have been complaining that the Bush administration hasn't acted on this recommendation. On September 11, 2008, former security adviser Richard Clarke said:

On 9/11, firefighters and police died because they did not have secure, interoperable, reliable communications. We said we would fix that. But seven years on, the Federal Communications Commission is still considering how to give first responders the radio spectrum frequencies they need for reliable communications.

What is unsaid was where the frequencies were going to come from. The idea was to switch TV broadcast over to digital on new frequencies and use the old analog frequencies for safety forces. This is set to happen next month.

But last week, President-elect Barack Obama said that the date for the analog to digital cut over should be delayed. If Bush had suggested this the press would have flayed him over the safety forces issue. Since it came from Obama, this aspect isn't even mentioned in most articles.