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:
- Revise reality: Position President Bush as Bubble Boy, the clueless president whose nonchalance about the disaster was a reflection of his being out of touch and ill-informed — not a projection of his real attitude: Apathy.
- Reform his image: Starting Wednesday, they photo-opped him to look engaged and set up a busy schedule dealing with the crisis. He even cut his five week vacation short by one day.
- Stave off criticism: Team Bush issued talking points instructing all operatives to answer all criticism by saying, “Now is not the time to play the ‘blame game.'” By punting the laying of blame down the road, they bought themselves more time to reinforce the ruse that Bush was confused not disengaged.
- Spread the blame: This was the easiest of all. Both the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana were Democrats. To this day, when Republican speak of Katrina, they add the rote line: It was a failure of government on all levels. This may be true but it is completely irrelevant to what Bush did, or did not do, during the disaster. The heads of local government can be killed in disasters. The feds should be ready to move in, in any case.
Incurious George
Operation Bubble Boy was rolled out by the president himself early Thursday morning after he returned to Washington. In an interview with Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America,” Bush said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Sawyer barely batted an eyelash and allowed this statement to pass.
Since then, we have learned that the president was lying. Just four days prior, on Sunday, August 28, less than 24 hours before Katrina made landfall, he was present in a videoconference — along with Michael Brown, then head of FEMA, and Michael Chertoff, Sec. of Homeland Security — in which he was warned that Katrina might cause the levees to fail. In the teleconference, Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, offered a grim forecast of coming events. Later he would recall, “We were briefing them way before landfall. … It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.” If levees overflow for too long, breaching becomes inevitable.
The idea that four days after the Mayfield briefing President Bush couldn’t think of anyone who “anticipated” the breaching is absurd. Everyone in the meeting “anticipated” the breach, including himself.
Now it seems clear that the president made the deliberately provocative statement on “Good Morning America” to raise doubts about his situational awareness. He must have been surprised when Diane Sawyer let the statement pass.
“Dodged the Bullet”
The next phase of the disinformation campaign was the “dodged a bullet” ruse. The purpose of this phase was to create plausible deniability among top officials, including the president, to excuse their failure to respond to the crisis.
Starting the next Sunday, September 11, Chertoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers and President Bush made apparently coordinated statements in the media that offered the impression that key decision makers in the government had been misinformed by news accounts into believing that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet.” The suggestion being that the Bush leadership team was confused by conflicting reports and misinformation.
However, in the five months since the disaster, no contemporaneous news accounts describing New Orleans as having dodged a bullet have been found. (The Newseum has the front pages of 46 major newspapers showing their coverage of the day the hurricane hit — go here.) In fact, there was a solid consensus among all the news organizations about the basic facts of the disaster that day, even including the Republican in-house news organ, Fox News.
But all of this is a smoke screen. For one thing, the president and his team never relied on the news media for accurate reporting on Katrina. They had their own weather service, as Media Matters points out:
The assertion that the president relied on news reports to apprise himself of the situation in New Orleans — rather than the National Weather Service, which reported the first levee breaches before and shortly after Hurricane Katrina passed through New Orleans — is an incredible one.
Beyond that, the record shows that both the White House and DHS were informed about the levee breaches on Monday night, within hours after the walls failed. Evidence includes an email sent from FEMA headquarters at 9:27 to Chertoff’s chief of staff at DHS detailing an eyewitness report of flooding in New Orleans from a FEMA field officer who had taken a helicopter tour of the destruction. And Michael Brown testified that he called Joe Hagen, the president’s senior staffer traveling with him in California, and personally informed him about the flooding at midnight.
Furthermore, according to Sen. Lieberman, the Ranking Member on the committee conducting the investigation, the White House issued a statement about the breaches Monday night:
[At] 11:13, [Monday night] the White House Homeland Security Council issues a report that says in part, “Flooding is significant throughout the region, and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached, sending six to eight feet of water throughout the Ninth Ward area of the city. The Homeland Security’s Operation Center reports that due to rising water in the Ninth Ward, residents are in their attics and on their roofs.”
Nobody — nobody — believed New Orleans had dodged a bullet that night, including especially President Bush.
Bubble Boy
A week or so after the storm, the final piece of the “Bubble Boy” hoax was put into place. Top officials close to Bush did something new — they offered to leak a warts-and-all behind-the-scenes tell-all about Bush’s response to the disaster. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the Bush staffers told Evan Thomas of Newsweek a bizarre story that made the president appear to be disengaged, out of touch and cranky.
It seems laughable now but in the fictional version of events Bush refused to watch the live coverage of the disaster on television and his aides were so terrified of him that they burned a DVD of cable news stories from New Orleans that he watched on the plane back to D.C. Thomas wrote:
How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
Good news, Evan. The answer is, Bush couldn’t — and didn’t — have less awareness than other Americans. He knew exactly what was happening in New Orleans. It wasn’t important to him. He didn’t see how he could grab any glory from it since terrorism wasn’t involved. It is amazing that anyone bought such a ridiculous charade, but almost everyone did, including yours truly.
The brilliance of the Bubble Boy meme is that it was structured on well-established public impressions of George Bush — that he is a lout, a guy who is both incurious and disengaged. The president took a hit from the Bubble Boy campaign. His poll numbers have never recovered — but at least he wasn’t charged with dereliction of duty and forced to step down.
Here is just one illustration of evidence that the president was criminally negligent:
At about 8 p.m. [Monday night, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco] spoke to Bush. “Mr. President,” she said, “we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.”
…There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
While he slept, the 44th largest metropolitan area of the United States was drowning in a toxic stew.
