Tag: Hurricane Katrina

No friends in high places: You can tell it’s a lame-duck administration when Congress threatens to withhold appropriations from the Department of Homeland Security until the agency fills a bunch of top-level posts, including director. Come on, there must be some ex-horse show execs or wives of admin flunkies out there somewhere to fill these high-level positions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

With hurricane season only two months away, those of us who live in the subtropics are distressed to learn that FEMA is staffed at only 73 percent of its funded capacity and that, besides the fact that “Brownie” has not been permanently replaced, 40 percent of the agency’s division and regional chiefs are only “acting.”

According to the Congress Daily, the House committee that oversees DHS appropriations thinks this situation deserves attention. House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-KY, offered up a hilarious quote while threatening to withhold fiscal 2007 appropriations for the positions if they are not filled:

“I want people in these positions where we can look them square in the eye . . . and get a commitment from them,” Rogers said. “Let the word go forth from this place that we want a permanent director of FEMA and we want these regional directors and division directors to stop acting and be permanent.”

“Let the word go forth from this place” sounds rather biblical to me, and I think we’ve all had quite enough “acting” from the FEMA folks. In an attempt to top Rogers’ over-the-top quote, the “acting” director gave the kind of emphatic reply we’ve all come to expect from FEMA:

Acting FEMA Director R. David Paulison told the panel that he has directed the agency to achieve a 95 percent staffing level by June 1, the start of the next hurricane season. He said the agency probably will not meet that goal, but will come “very darn close.”

He also said FEMA will have a permanent director by June 1, but declined to say if that will be him. “I serve at the pleasure of the president and will do what he asks me to do,” Paulison said.

With that kind of attitude, Paulison likely will go far — heckuva job, Paulie!

Now there is videotape of President Bush being briefed on Katina in which damage to the levees is anticipated:

Federal officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief of possible devastation just before Hurricane Katrina struck.
Six days of video footage from briefings and transcripts were obtained by The Associated Press.

The warnings were that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.

A-P reports Bush didn’t ask any questions during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on August 29th.

He assured state officials that the government was fully prepared.

VIDEO

• Crooks & Liars has the video

Several hundred thousand Louisiana evacuees ended up in Texas and other states after Katrina hit.

The tapes and documents show federal officials were fatally slow to realize they didn’t have enough resources.

So when the president told Diane Sawyer on September 1 that, “No one could have anticipated the levees being breached,” it was a lie.

“I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved.”

— Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser

So the White House is now saying that President Bush was fully engaged in the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina by his government. This means that he was “fully involved” during the first 48 hours while thousands of Americans in New Orleans were dying and injured in the flooded streets or clinging to rooftops in the pouring ran with no help on the way.

Funny — what most of us remember was Mr. Bush cavorting with a guitar and Sen. McCain’s birthday cake.

Most tellingly, Townsend also said that the president’s critics were trying to “rewrite history” about the president’s actions. That was a dead giveaway that she — working from a script written by Karl Rove — was rewriting history even as she was speaking.

This is a remarkable revision of reality from the earlier revised reality that the White House floated in the weeks after the disaster. In the original concoction of events, Bush was a disengaged Bubble Boy who hates watching the news — even, apparently, the Fox News Channel where the news mullahs call the faithful to worship at his feet 24 hours a day.

In the original fictional narrative, it was the president’s phobia of the news, you see, that led to his confusion during the first 48 hours after Katrina. His aversion to information prevented him from watching live coverage of the destruction of America’s 44th largest metro area on television. This phobia was so bad that no one around the surly 59-year-old boy king — including his wife Laura or his parents, George I and Queen Bar — could muster the courage to convince him that something bad was happening in New Orleans, much less to tune in to the wall-to-wall coverage. It got so bad, finally, that one cowering but courageous courtier burned a DVD of news coverage and compelled Dear Leader to watch it.

The White House must have been surprised how readily the media and the public were willing to believe that Bush was such a dunce and a lout.

Now Bubble Boy is dead and the Mission Accomplished action figure preznint is back. So you know that something is up — a trick is in the works, records have been destroyed, memories have been cleansed, reality has been rewritten — if this strutting aristocratic popinjay is allowing anything close to blame to be laid at his own feet.

For one thing, it can only mean a fall guy has been chosen to take a bullet for Dear Leader. The question is, who will it be.

Fix is in: A report on the investigation into the Bush government’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina by Republicans in the House of Representatives will be released this week. Excerpts that have been leaked to the media show that while the report criticizes President Bush, it lays the blame for his government’s response at the feet of Sec. of the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff.

The current scapegoat, Michael Brown, who was fired in September because of his negligence in handling the disaster, has provided damning testimony against Chertoff, who was his boss.

You may recall that House Democrats refused to participate officially in the investigation because it was clear from the start that the Republicans’ over-arching motivation was to protect President Bush from blame.

Two Democrats from the region — Reps. Charlie Melancon and William J. Jefferson — did participate unofficially in the investigation, and from their statements it appears that the House GOP did indeed bend over backwards to let the president off the hook:

In their response [to the report], Melancon and Jefferson pointed out that the White House refused to release communications from Brown, who told the House committee and a Senate committee investigating the disaster response that he warned the White House in 30 conversations that he could not establish command and control, that the levees had failed and that he needed help.

“When the White House refused to provide any of these communications, the committee rejected our requests to subpoena them, effectively shielding the White House from scrutiny,” the two Democrats said.

The committee refused to provide a copy of its report to the Democrats, allowing them only to take notes as they read it in the committee staff offices, they said.

Once again, Republicans put their worship of George W. Bush and their quest for poltical power ahead of the national interest.

After Chertoff is gone, the next candidate for blame will probably be President Bush’s assistant Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who took the most of the 30 calls from Brown that night. Republicans will blame him for not waking the president up to deal with disaster, or not dealing with it in the presidents’ stead.

They can set up all the scapegoats they want, but the buck stops at the top. It may be cold comfort now but whether or not Republicans in charge of federal oversight impute Bush today, history will record that it was the president’s incompetence that created the crisis within the disaster that cost the lives of hundreds of Americans.

At hearings into the Hurricane Katrina disaster by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, Chairman Susan Collins and Ranking Member Joe Lieberman revealed that they had received conflicting testimony about what President Bush and other top officials knew about the extent of the damage after the storm hit New Orleans last summer.

Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005, at 7 a.m. For the next 48 hours, President Bush stuck to his schedule, relaxing at his vacation home in Texas and touring Arizona and California on Air Force One to appear at events that were political as well as official. The disaster escalated over the next two days almost entirely because federal help never came.

The Bush Administration’s response in the critical first 48 hours after landfall was a fiasco. By 72 hours into the disaster, Team Bush was facing a Category 5 political crisis. No presidential administration in memory had performed so poorly. They were drawing fire from their supporters — and even from their usually reliable stooges in the news media.

Gaming it out, Bush and his handlers realized that if they did not take corrective action immediately, the criticism could pave the way to nasty congressional hearings, at best, and criminal charges of official negligence, and worse.

Something had to be done. So they did what they do best: They created a new reality — a quasi-fictional version of events in which Bush and his lackeys were simply confused and misinformed, not apathetic about the loss of the last Democratic bastion in the South — and inserted it retrospectively into the narrative of the storm’s first 48 hours.

Using carefully coordinated statements in the media, both in public and anonymously sourced, Bush and his senior officials created a picture in the public mind of a president so out of touch with the country that he was simply unaware of the severity of the situation on the ground in New Orleans.

The created “Bubble Boy,” a caricature of President Bush who would appease public anger by excusing his negligence by tying it to his infamous lack of curiosity and aversion to watching the news. The strategy called for four parallel counter-attacks:

[…]

Demands Money and Political Cover to Keep Quiet

Ousted FEMA leader Michael Brown says he has emails from and to President Bush that were sent as New Orleans was being destroyed — and that if the Bushistas down’t pony up to cover his legal fees, he’s going to rat them out.

Too bad the Republicans in the Senate who are investigating the tragic bungling of the federal response to Katrina are powerless to get those emails otherwise. Oh, wait — this just in — they have subpoena power. (Not that Chairman Susan Collins will use it.)

From the Associated Press:

Former disaster agency chief Michael Brown is indicating he’s ready to reveal his correspondence with President Bush and other officials during Hurricane Katrina.

That’s unless the White House forbids it and offers legal support.

Brown’s stance, in a letter obtained yesterday by The Associated Press, follows senators’ complaints that the White House is refusing to answer questions or release documents about advice given to Bush concerning the August 29th storm…

In a February sixth letter to White House counsel Harriet Miers, Brown’s lawyer wrote that Brown continues to respect Bush and his “presidential prerogative” to get candid and confidential advice from top aides.

The letter from Andrew Lester also says Brown no longer can rely on being included in that protection because he’s a private citizen.

Days of reckoning: The General Accounting Office has issued a report that is highly critical of the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. DHS, typically, has responded by crying foul and accusing the government oversight organization of not playing nice.

According to GovExec.com, the GAO said DHS exhibited a “leadership vacuum” before, during and after the hurricane.

“In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command, a myriad of approaches and processes for requesting and providing assistance, and confusion about who should be advised of requests and what resources would be provided within specific time frames,” Comptroller General David Walker concluded.

DHS responded quickly to the report, which was issued at a press conference Wednesday.

“Apart from its obvious errors, it displays a significant misunderstanding of core aspects of the Katrina response that could have easily been corrected in the most basic conversations with DHS leaders,” department spokesman Russ Knocke said in a statement.

Methinks DHS protests too much. Remember the truckloads of ice that were “staged” in Maryland? Remember Michael Brown’s concerns over his haberdashery? Remember the dead people?