Things to Get Used to in the Next Three Years

huffingtonpost.com
Adam McKay: Things to Get Used to in the Next Three Years

As the brackish poisonous flood waters finally recede under the aid of man-made pumps in New Orleans, many things are becoming clearer (note: this will be the most overused opening line for Op-Ed pieces in the next week. Let's count how many times we see it. The over-under is 28.) The first slowly revealing truth is that the Bush administration will get away with their absolutely pathetic and incompetent response to this disaster.

Two days before Katrina hit ground, me and some friends were talking at work about how vulnerable New Orleans is and how this hurricane could really devastate the city. Somehow we, a bunch of Hollywood flunkies on the set of a silly comedy, knew this and the Bush administration did not.

It was the same with Bin Laden. After the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole I remember sitting with friends in a New York bar talking about the rise of the extremist threat in the Middle East and wondering if they would attack us here. And, keep in mind, Bush went to Yale and I went to Temple University. I still watch Sponge Bob with my five-year-old daughter and laugh heartily at it. Dick Cheney does not watch Sponge Bob. Though Condi did watch Spamalot.

So what were they doing that a bunch of dudes on a movie set knew this was coming and they did not? Obviously we're not that smart and the truth is half the country was having the same conversation. So what the frig? It's a really, really important question. Yet once again forty percent of the country calls these queries disgusting or unpatriotic. Maybe the sound of the word "query" makes them feel sexually uncomfortable.

Fine, then why do people get mad when legitimate questions are asked? As though critical analysis of a government response to a disaster were the equivalent of running a steam engine fueled by burning flags to power a giant robotic middle finger that slowly rises to greet the Daughters of the American Revolution's next lunch meeting (Wow. Come to think of it, that sounds awesome. Is there anyone out there that wants to finance this?).

So as it sinks in that we have some really stubborn people in this country who would rather trade not admitting they were wrong in supporting Bush for oh, I don't know, a whole damn city, we must brace ourselves for the next three years. Because there are certain images and happenings that we will just have to get used to so long as Bush and the modern Republican Party are in power.

1. Turning on the TV and seeing Sheryl Crow singing a song with an 800-number on the bottom of the screen.

Now I personally don't want to see this anymore but so long as Bush is in power we will continue to do things like cut the FEMA budget to finance cutting the estate tax or hugely expensive pointless wars. So please Sheryl, keep some extra strings in your guitar case. Because the Dupont family wants their kids to inherit $650 million instead of 400 million, we'll need you and Emmylou Harris or Paul Simon to keep America giving. And bless you for it. But after a few more years of this, one can't help but wonder if Ms. Crow will stop answering the phone. We could turn on the TV and see Don Johnson and Clay Aiken raising money to pay the property taxes on the Capitol building.

2. Resignation speeches from scapegoated lackeys.

George Tenet bit the bullet over 9/11 and now Michael Brown has done the same. He did nothing to change the perception that he was not tuned into the significance of this event by saying that he was going to get a "Mexican meal and a good stiff Margarita" after being reassigned. And then, just like his current boss, he blamed the press for his troubles. Who will take the fall for Bush's next total failure as a leader? The White House floor buffer? Or maybe someone even more irrelevant -- like Congressional Democrats.

3. Newscasters saying "this is the greatest tragedy in the history of our great nation."

During the Clinton administration, we had zero "greatest tragedy" moments. Heck, during Bush Sr, Reagan and Ford's tenures we had zero. We had bad times but no "this is a time we shall never stop mourning" incidents. Bush Jr has already had two. So God forbid, according to the math we have one more coming. Unless of course these lazy arrogant corporate shills actually start reading government agency reports that aren't written by GE and Merck.

4. The definition of "liberal" getting broader and broader.

A little while back the corporate right redefined liberal to mean those who want to give handouts to lazy people, create drive-thru abortion clinics and dismantle the military in favor of mime troops. Okay, fine. That has now become the accepted definition. Well done. But of late I've noticed that liberal now means anyone who disagrees in any way with how the Bush White House is leading our nation. So according to recent polls 61% of our nation are now whining liberals. Why does it feel like this will end like an old Twilight Zone episode with W under his desk, covered in sweat, whimpering "There's liberals everywhere...there's liberals in my salad...in my shoes! Liberals!!!"? When men like Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil fall under the heading of liberal you know the label has run out of gas.

5. And speaking of gas: Crazy ups and downs in gas prices.

Go look at the stock prices for oil companies over the last five years. Then go buy a horse or a Ginger.

So as we go into the last three years of the disaster that is the Bush administration, I hope those that still support him are at least asking some questions. Not a ton but just a few. Like, "was it worth not having gay marriage in exchange for the very stability of our whole country?" Or "How will I spend that three hundred dollar Bush tax break when the local Target is under water and/or too far away to drive to because gas costs twenty dollars a gallon?" But then if you ask these questions you might then become a whining liberal -- so, on second thought, don't risk it for the next three years.

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Promises not kept

nydailynews.com
Promises not kept

Where are the memorials, the gleaming new buildings?

BY PETE HAMILL


Smoke pours from the twin towers after the deadly terror strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. All that remains are gaping wounds.

Four years gone, and the void remains.

Four years gone, and the fence still surrounds our ruined 16 acres, while nothing rises to the skies.

Four years gone. Longer than it took the United States to fight World War II.

Tourists still arrive at the site of the vanished World Trade Center, aiming digital cameras at each other, or past the fence, but there are fewer of them now. Some gaze at the three panels of the Ground Zero time line on the fence, with its scenes of destruction and heroism. A few seem choked with memory, or anger, recalling where they were when the south tower fell. A few are New Yorkers. For many, it was a television event.

"It was right over there, Margaret," a pudgy man says to his wife, pointing at the void. "Right there." A pause. "Remember?"

The void is, of course, filled with memory - of life, of death, neither of which can be photographed. The visitors move on, merging with platoons of people selling bootleg DVDs, and Yankee caps, and T-shirts bearing the initials of the Police and Fire departments, as if the valor of cops and firefighters could be transferred to the wearers by paying $10. Some cross to Century 21, the first of the area's businesses to open after the horror, now expanding. Some gaze into the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel, now green and pristine after its long season of dust and disaster.

Four years gone, and the emotions have faded, and still there is nothing to fill the emptiness. On Monday, work will at last begin on the PATH station so beautifully designed by Santiago Calatrava. But the transportation hub which it will serve as a crown won't be complete until 2009.

The other plans, once filled with so much energy and passion and insistence on memory, are snarled in wretched quarrels. Architecture is being edited by real estate operators and anti-terrorism experts. Various factions have different visions of what should go into those 16 acres, and they can't easily be resolved. How can you have a freedom museum, for example, without dealing with slavery? How can anything at all be placed upon land that is considered sacred ground? Mix those conflicting visions with New York's own gifts for vehemence, and you begin to understand the void.

But there are surely other reasons for the emptiness. The site itself was cleared of its millions of tons of rubble in an astonishing eight months. This was a triumph of planning, muscle and will. But even before it was cleared, the site was the focus of various forces: real estate and political interests, the wishes of the families of the almost 3,000 dead, the desires of New Yorkers in the immediate neighborhood and beyond. They were not all cynical. Many were idealistic. For some it was sacred ground, never to be touched. Others resisted turning the site into a necropolis, a place inhabited by ghosts. They wanted it brimming with life, filled with children's laughter, while providing a place of repose for the old. Most of the opposing viewpoints were valid. But the result has been paralysis.

And there are other factors. One of them was George W. Bush. He was warned by memo on Aug. 6, 2001, while on his first vacation in Crawford, Tex., that followers of Osama Bin Laden were preparing "hijackings and other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." We don't know if he read the memo. But he did not instantly order increased security at the nation's airports, and in the following month, those 19 hijackers boarded four airliners armed only with box cutters, and came to kill. Of the 19 Islamic fanatics, 15 were Saudis. Bush then went on to invade Iraq, and continues to insist on a linkage not supported by hard facts. It was no surprise that in 2004 74.3% of New Yorkers voted for John Kerry.

The war in Iraq robbed us in New York of the emotional focus that followed Sept. 11. Bush kept invoking Sept. 11 to justify his war - a war of choice, not necessity.

In New York, they keep telling us that great things will soon fill the emptiness. Soaring buildings. Ponds of memory. But many New Yorkers stopped caring a long time ago about what was coming to those 16 acres. They're too busy working and living. On my street - nine blocks to the north - I haven't heard it mentioned for a couple of years.

And yet ... and yet each time I pass on my daily walk to the Battery, it is impossible to erase memory. There is the corner at Church and Vesey where I stood with my wife, Fukiko, watching human beings leaping from the flames of the north tower. She is a journalist, too. We were both doing what journalists do, looking, and making notes. There is the street where I saw the immense wheel of one of the airliners, and the puddle of fresh blood and the spilled coffee cup and the unopened bottle of juice and the single high-heeled shoe.

Sometimes my heart trembles as I remember the way the south tower abruptly tipped, as if it would fall across Church St., and then righted itself, and then came straight down, with a high-pitched sound that must have contained a chorus of screams. In memory the fall took a long time, like a slow-motion vision from a Sam Peckinpah movie. In reality, it came down in a bit more than 10 seconds. It came down and instantly erupted into that immense cloud of pulverized matter and pulverized human beings, like some evil genie rising from the horror. It engulfed us at Church and Vesey, engulfed firefighters and cops and civilians and reporters.

For a small eternity, I lost my wife. She thought I was behind her, I thought she was behind me. I was shoved by cops and firefighters into the vestibule of a building on Vesey St. She was hurled toward Broadway by a cop shouting, "Run, run, run, run, run!" We found each other an hour later, at the entrance to our home. Others were much less fortunate. There were wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, friends who would never find each other. Not that day. Not ever.

All of that comes back each time I pass the void. All that, and my own fury in the days that followed. I'm from Brooklyn. One of the Brooklyn codes - and, by extension, one of the New York codes - is very simple: If you come to hurt us, we will hurt you back. So I was for the attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It took too long. It allowed Bin Laden and Mullah Omar to escape. But I support it now. Alas, the purity of that response was eroded in Iraq, by the way our calamity was used to justify something entirely different, a process now leading to an Islamic republic, while Iraq has become the Parris Island of terrorism. When I pass the void now, my old fury is too often replaced by another.

Still, I often pause, and bow my head in sorrow and communion. Everybody involved deserved better. Four years gone, and the void remains.

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Shielding a Basic Freedom

The New York Times

Shielding a Basic Freedom

For 69 long days, Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, has been sitting in a Virginia jail as punishment for doing her job. It should be clear by now that keeping Ms. Miller behind bars for refusing to testify in an investigation into how the name of a C.I.A. operative was leaked to another journalist concerns more than one reporter or one news organization or even one prosecutor's investigation. It increasingly endangers one of the pillars of the nation's freedoms: an unfettered press telling the public what is really going on. It is time for those in Congress who talk about freedom so eloquently and so often to stand up for this basic principle.

Some members of Congress have proposed a federal shield law that would protect the right of journalists to refuse to identify confidential sources except in extreme cases of imminent national danger. But those efforts appear stalled. The Department of Justice did not even bother appearing at the only hearing this year on the subject. We don't want the issue to fall to the bottom of a pile that includes Supreme Court nominations.

The District of Columbia and every state except Wyoming offer legal protections to reporters. These laws make it possible for whistle-blowers or insiders to let out the truth. Think about the Watergate burglary or the deadly addictiveness of tobacco or the stories about how the government was ill prepared for 9/11. In such cases, press secretaries and public relations people are paid not to give out the whole story. Instead, inside sources trust reporters to protect their identities so they can reveal more than the official line. Without that agreement and that trust between reporter and source, the real news simply dries up, and the whole truth steadily recedes behind a wall of image-mongering, denial and even outright lies.

There is legislation with bipartisan backing in the House and Senate that deserves immediate consideration. The bills offer protections from subpoenas issued to reporters in federal courts that are similar to those recognized by the states. They would require journalists to reveal confidential sources only for imminent threats to national security. The bills are a good way to balance the public's right to know with the fair administration of justice.

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Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush

washingtonpost.com
Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer

Hurricane Katrina has thrust the twin issues of race and poverty at President Bush, who faces steep challenges in dealing with both because of a domestic agenda that envisions deep cuts in long-standing anti-poverty programs and relationships with many black leaders frayed by years of mutual suspicion.

In the storm's aftermath, the White House has been scrambling to quell perceptions that race was a factor in the slow federal response to Katrina and that its policies have contributed to the festering poverty propelled into public view by the disaster.

Last week, Bush summoned faith-based relief organizations and religious leaders -- many of them African American -- to a White House meeting to discuss his vision for providing long-term help for impoverished people displaced by the storm.

He dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to her home state of Alabama. He also has had his political surrogates reach out to civil rights groups that previously felt ignored by the White House.

"Katrina has been an attention-getting experience for this administration," said Bruce S. Gordon, president and chief executive officer of the NAACP. "It's clear that the administration has not had [black and poor people] as high on their priority list as they should have."

Angry about how an affiliate of the NAACP portrayed him in a 2000 political ad, Bush has rejected invitations to speak at the organization's past five conventions, making him the first sitting president in more than 80 years not to address the group. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond has excoriated Bush as a reactionary conservative. In the past week, however, Gordon has had multiple conversations with top administration officials and fielded calls from aides to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

"They wanted to be sure they knew what we were thinking," Gordon said.

Bush also has resolved to tackle the poverty that ensnared 28 percent of New Orleans residents and many others on the Gulf Coast. Many of those poor people were unable to heed warnings to evacuate as the storm approached, compounding the disaster as tens of thousands of mostly black residents overwhelmed sparse government provisions when they sought shelter at the Superdome and convention center in New Orleans.

"Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster," said Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner's, a liberal evangelical journal.

During Tuesday's White House meeting with 20 religious leaders and representatives from relief groups, Bush vowed to provide job programs, health care, life-skills training and housing aid to those displaced by the storm. Echoing a position taken by some civil rights leaders, he asserted that it was insensitive to refer to the poor people fleeing New Orleans as "refugees," a term that for some evokes people fleeing their native country.

When some people at the meeting said that New Orleans residents and local businesses should reap much of the economic benefit from the huge investment that will be required to rebuild the city, Bush readily agreed, according to one participant.

"He didn't receive many of these concerns as some kind of 'race' issue," said C. Jay Matthews, a Cleveland minister who attended the meeting. "There was a feeling that maybe what we have been doing up to now to fight poverty maybe hasn't been effective and we need to move toward long-term solutions."

But some skeptics fear these reassuring words are a disguise for pursuing long-held conservative goals that are viewed with hostility by many black leaders. Congressional Republicans, for example, have voiced opposition to federal programs that set aside government contracts for minorities. And Bush has already moved to suspend the law requiring federal contractors to pay workers the average wage in the region, holding down salaries for many minority laborers.

In the place of traditional poverty programs, Bush has touted faith-based social service programs, calling them more efficient and effective than those run by the government. Many programs of an earlier generation, he says, have served only to perpetuate the plight of the poor.

Overcoming mistrust of blacks compounded by Katrina is an important hurdle in one of Bush's political goals -- making the GOP more competitive with traditionally Democratic African Americans.

"What we've been trying to do is what we believe will help us close the gap we see in America in terms of education, health care, home ownership and wealth," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "We have policies that will actually achieve those goals."

To underscore his outreach efforts, when the president toured a hurricane evacuee shelter near Baton Rouge last week, he was accompanied by the Rev. T.D. Jakes, a prominent black evangelist who has known Bush for years. He also went to New Orleans yesterday. Those trips came after Bush was criticized for having little contract with poor, black victims during an earlier visit.

"I mean, it's puzzling, given his immediate response during 9/11, that he did not feel a greater sense of empathy towards the folks that were experiencing this enormous disaster," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said yesterday on ABC's "This Week."

Whatever approach the administration takes as it moves forward, any Katrina-inspired increase in federal outlays to alleviate poverty would represent a sharp turn for an administration that has moved to reshape government by reducing outlays for social programs by encouraging individual ownership of -- and responsibility for -- everything from housing to health care and retirement accounts. Meanwhile, White House budget makers have projected deep cuts in traditional poverty programs, including food stamps and public housing.

But the calamity spawned by New Orleans has placed Bush under new pressure. A poll last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that two-thirds of African Americans believe the government's response to the storm would have been faster if most of the victims had been white. Also, 71 percent of blacks agree that the disaster revealed that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country -- a sentiment shared by 32 percent of whites.

A prominent Louisiana politician called this perception unfair. "The two parishes south of New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, are mostly white. They are devastated and they arguably got a lot less attention than New Orleans," said former Louisiana senator John Breaux (D), who has worked closely with Bush. "A lot of people didn't get out because they didn't have a car. This is more a problem of poverty, rather than race."

Rep. Barbara T. Lee (D-Calif.), however, accused Bush of being indifferent to the poor. "If anyone ever doubted that there are two Americas, this disaster and our government's shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see."

Addressing a meeting of black Baptists in Miami last Wednesday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said the government's slow response revealed "the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not."

Michael L. Williams, the only black member of the elected Railroad Commission of Texas and a longtime Bush friend, said the racial and class divisions pushed into the national debate by Katrina present a formidable test for Bush. The answers, he said, will come with how Bush addresses the underlying issues.

"It isn't surprising that African Americans across the country feel pain for the victims of this disaster," Williams said. "When people feel pain, they want to find someone to blame. There is no doubt that it adds to the challenge facing us. But the real story is going to be what it always is: What is really being done about education? About jobs? About housing?"

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Fraud Reveals Workings of Internet Theft

ABC News
Fraud Reveals Workings of Internet Theft
Unraveled Web Fraud Reveals Inner Workings of an Internet Theft Scam Traced to Quebec
By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press

Sep. 12, 2005 - The illicit haul arrived each day by e-mail, the personal details of computer users tricked by an Internet thief: a victim's name, credit card number, date of birth, Social Security number, mother's maiden name.

One more Internet "phishing" scam was operating. But this time, private sleuths soon were hot on the electronic trail of a thief whose online alias indicated an affinity for the dark side. The case moved ahead in part because of an underground tipster and the thief's penchant for repeatedly using the same two passwords "syerwerz" and "r00tm3."

Unraveling a scheme that also had hacked Kenyon College in Ohio leapt across continents and ultimately pointed toward a neighborhood in Granby, Quebec. It offers an extraordinary glimpse behind an Internet fraud that targets the most trusting computer users.

"This is really lousy," said Johan Fabris of Holmes, Pa. The 82-year-old grandmother had her online bank account hijacked. Her teenage grandson set up the account for her to sell hand-sewn doll clothes in Internet auctions.

"This was my first foray into the modern computer world. These damn people, life is complicated enough," Fabris said.

In such phishing scams, victims are fooled by realistic-looking e-mails that appear to come from banks or other financial institutions. The urgent-looking messages direct recipients to verify their accounts by typing personal details credit card information, for example into a Web site disguised to appear legitimate.

Despite warnings from the government, banks and security experts, consumers fall victim with disturbing frequency.

One industry organization, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, estimated that thieves collectively launch more than 14,000 such schemes monthly and that about 5 percent of computer users respond to the fraudulent messages.

"They make it look completely real," said Jennifer Phillips, 25, of Martinsville, Ill. She was tricked into disclosing her card number, mother's maiden name, bank routing number and more. "You wouldn't think this could happen to anybody living in the middle of cornfields," she said.

Internet sleuths from CardCops Inc. of Malibu, Calif., uncovered the latest plot.

A tipster pointed them to the thief's e-mail account and gave up the thief's favorite passwords, which the thief previously had shared with the informant, chief executive Dan Clements said.

CardCops monitors Internet chat rooms and other hacker communications for stolen credit card numbers, then notifies merchants and consumers to block bad purchases.

Clements said he logged into the thief's account despite concerns this could be illegal and found what he described as a "den of treasure" for identity crooks.

Clements said he discovered copies of victims' financial information plus tantalizing clues to the thief's real identity. They included an invoice for two Gamecube video games purchased with a stolen credit card and delivered to a family's home in Quebec, plus evidence the thief had tested his schemes using a high-speed Internet connection traced to a home computer in Canada.

"I'm so furious," said Cindy Brenneke of Sunnyvale, Calif., whose Bank of America credit card was used to buy the games.

She had been similarly tricked into disclosing her card number. "It was total stupidity," she said. Brenneke said roughly $4,000 in fraudulent charges were run up for music, movies and video games on Web sites within days of her mistake.

The person listed on the invoice as receiving the video games in Quebec denied any involvement in Internet fraud, telling The Associated Press in a brief interview he did nothing wrong.

But shortly after the interview, the e-mail inbox used for the purchases was mysteriously emptied and the password changed, said Clements, who said he kept copies of everything he found.

The fraud illustrates the conflict between quickly warning potential victims and preserving evidence for police to investigate. Clements said he immediately notified each consumer whose information he found in the inbox and later reported the findings to police before the AP called the home in Quebec.

The case also shows how hard it can be to get the attention of police.

Phillips said she called police in Illinois to complain, but a detective never called back. Brenneke said police in California offered to open a file on her case as a courtesy, but told her Canadian authorities would have to investigate. "It kind of stinks," Brenneke said.

Such experiences are common.

"Unquestionably, there are online crooks who are getting away with impunity," said Beryl Howell, a former top lawyer with the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Victims are fending for themselves."

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Quebec said it does not investigate online financial crimes. A city detective in Granby referred the case to provincial police but cautioned that any investigation would take months.

"There's sort of a hole in enforcement," acknowledged Marc Gosselin, a cybercrimes investigator for the Mounties.

Clements said he was unconcerned about the legal risks of reading the thief's e-mails, even though a former Justice Department lawyer said it could land Clements in trouble.

"Law enforcement can't allow self-help vigilantes to go around and do this," said Marc Zwillinger, a former cybercrimes prosecutor.

In the Canadian-based scheme, messages were routed through a computer in Macedonia. Official-looking e-mails were sent randomly on Aug. 23 directing computer users to visit a Web page and confirm details about their bank accounts. The counterfeit e-mails reassured would-be victims "this security measure will protect our customers from account thefts and any other fraudulent activities."

But the Web page did not belong to any bank.

Officials at Kenyon College in Ohio said someone hacked into a school computer Aug. 22 and set up the fake banking page. It transmitted victims' personal information to the Canadian e-mail inbox plus two other addresses believed to belong to thieves.

"It looked very genuine," said Tam Nguyen of Huntersville, N.C., who was tricked into revealing his credit card number, Social Security number, mother's maiden name and more.

"My wife saw the e-mail and told me to take care of it right away. Stupid me, I just went ahead and gave up everything," he said.

The school's director of information systems, Ron Griggs, said the break-in was traced to the same high-speed Internet account in Canada used to run early tests of the fraud scheme. He said 32 people visited the fake banking Web site before someone complained. The college shut off access Aug. 24.

In Illinois, Jennifer Phillips canceled her compromised credit account and is more suspicious these days. But she is under no illusion that what happened to her was an isolated case.

In the days after discovering she had been tricked, Phillips said she received two more urgent-looking e-mails pressing her to verify her bank account online.

This time, she deleted them.

Associated Press writer Phil Couvrette in Montreal contributed to this story.

On the Net:

CardCops: http://www.cardcops.com

Anti-phishing Working Group: http://www.antiphishing.org

FTC advice: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/phishingalrt.htm

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Democrats Rip Bush Hurricane Response

ABC News
Democrats Rip Bush Hurricane Response
Louisiana's Senior Senator Escalates Rhetoric Against White House Over Hurricane Response
By LARRY MARGASAK
The Associated Press

Sep. 12, 2005 - Louisiana's senior senator on Sunday escalated the Democrats' rhetoric against the Bush administration's hurricane response, accusing the White House of a "full court press" to blame state and local officials for the initial sluggish rescue effort.

The government's emergency managers came under fire from the lone black senator, Democrat Barack Obama, who said they were clueless about the inner-city in New Orleans when they failed to plan for the evacuation of poor people.

The White House sought to deflect criticism ahead of President Bush's third trip to the stricken Gulf Coast, saying blame could be assessed later.

"It's not the time for blame. It's the time for helping the people on the ground that have been severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina," White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said. "We'll continue to provide aid and assistance to those who have been severely impacted."

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said officials at all levels eventually would share blame for an inadequate response, but she cited only the administration for the finger-pointing that followed the killer storm.

"While the president is saying that he wants to work together as a team, I think the White House operatives have a full court press on to blame state and local officials whether they're Republicans or Democrats. It's very unfortunate," she told CBS' "Face the Nation."

She said Washington was obligated to support local and state officials, "particularly in times of tragedy and stress, not to pile on them, not to make their suffering worse."

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said on `Fox News Sunday" he would give "the entire big government organized relief effort a failing grade, across the board." But, he added that state and local governments shared in the blame, too.

Landrieu's office said the senator based her accusation in part on comments by the Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, and by administration allies on Capitol Hill, who cited the responsibility of state and local officials in planning for and responding to disasters. She also cited several news stories about a White House campaign to deflect criticism.

Obama was asked on ABC's "This Week" whether there was racism in the lack of evacuation planning for poor, black residents of New Orleans. He said he would not refer to the government response in that way, but said there was a much deeper, long-term neglect.

"Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner city life in New Orleans ... that they couldn't conceive of the notion that they couldn't load up their SUV's, put $100 worth of gas in there, put some sparkling water and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card," Obama said.

"There seemed to be a sense that this other America was somehow not on people's radar screen. And that, I think, does have to do with historic indifference on the part of government to the plight of those who are disproportionately African-American." He added that "passive indifference is as bad as active malice."

The House Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., proposed an independent commission to watch for contractor scams in hurricane repairs.

"Already we have seen despicable stories of those trying to profit off desperate Gulf Coast residents," she said. Her plan would investigate waste and fraud as soon as contracts are awarded.

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Your Tax Cuts At Work

Your Tax Cuts At Work

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I need a vacation

I need a vacation

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The Blame Game

The Blame Game

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Now we'll see if teflon can float

Now we'll see if teflon can float

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Mission Accomplished

Mission Accomplished

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Bush says he will lead the investigation . . .

Bush says he will lead the investigation . . .

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The Post Katrina Press Conference

The Post Katrina Press Conference

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Young Man George Bush, That . . .

Young Man George Bush, That . . .

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Two Pleas For Help

Two Pleas For Help

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BABS

BABS

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Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals

Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Experts say it has been common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations for policy makers to take lobbying jobs once they leave office, and many of the same companies seeking contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.

Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq.

But the web of Bush administration connections is attracting renewed attention from watchdog groups in the post-Katrina reconstruction rush. Congress has already appropriated more than $60 billion in emergency funding as a down payment on recovery efforts projected to cost well over $100 billion.

"The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight.

TWO BUSH APPOINTEES AT HALLIBURTON

Allbaugh formally registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root in February.

In lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate, Allbaugh said his goal was to "educate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief and homeland security issues affecting Kellogg Brown and Root."

Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Allbaugh has not, since he was hired, "consulted on any specific contracts that the company is considering pursuing, nor has he been tasked by the company with any lobbying responsibilities."

Allbaugh is also a friend of Michael Brown, director of FEMA who was removed as head of Katrina disaster relief and sent back to Washington amid allegations he had padded his resume.

A few months after Allbaugh was hired by Halliburton, the company retained another high-level Bush appointee, Kirk Van Tine.

Van Tine registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton six months after resigning as deputy transportation secretary, a position he held from December 2003 to December 2004.

On Friday, Kellogg Brown & Root received $29.8 million in Pentagon contracts to begin rebuilding Navy bases in Louisiana and Mississippi. Norcross said the work was covered under a contract that the company negotiated before Allbaugh was hired.

Halliburton continues to be a source of income for Cheney, who served as its chief executive officer from 1995 until 2000 when he joined the Republican ticket for the White House. According to tax filings released in April, Cheney's income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company, which has also won billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq.

Cheney's office said the amount of deferred compensation is fixed and is not affected by Halliburton's current economic performance or earnings.

Allbaugh's other major client, Baton Rouge-based Shaw Group, has updated its Web site to say: "Hurricane Recovery Projects -- Apply Here!"

Shaw said on Thursday it has received a $100 million emergency FEMA contract for housing management and construction. Shaw also clinched a $100 million order on Friday from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Shaw Group spokesman Chris Sammons said Allbaugh was providing the company with "general consulting on business matters," and would not say whether he played a direct role in any of the Katrina deals. "We don't comment on specific consulting activities," he said.

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Administration Refuses To Acknowledge Reality: The National Guard Is Stretched Thin

ThinkProgress.org

Administration Refuses To Acknowledge Reality: The National Guard Is Stretched Thin

The AP reports today:

The National Guard is stretched so thin by simultaneous assignments in Iraq and the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast that leaders in statehouses and Congress say it is time to reconsider how the force is used. … The head of the National Guard Bureau said Friday the assignment of thousands of Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana to Iraq delayed those states’ initial hurricane response by about a day. “Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear,” said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the bureau’s chief.

And the Washington Post reports that civilian and military leaders say the response could have been quicker had National Guard troops from Louisiana and Mississippi been in their home states rather than Iraq:

In Louisiana and Mississippi, civilian and military leaders said the response to the hurricane was delayed by the absence of the Mississippi National Guard’s 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana’s 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

But the administration recognizes this obvious problem and is thinking of policy solutions to address it, right? Wrong. Bush administration officials have gone on a public relations offensive over the last week to incredulously claim that our troops aren’t stretched thin. Here’s what Rice and Rumsfeld have said:

TAVIS SMILEY: There are a lot of folk, and I know you’ve heard this, who believe and it’s been everywhere expressed that this sentiment that the money and other resources that we have been spending on Iraq put us in a situation where we didn’t have the resources available quickly enough to move into the Gulf Coast. Do you accept that?

SECRETARY RICE: No, it’s just not true. Frankly, it’s hogwash. And I’ll use that term very, very clearly. There are plenty of resources to deal with this. There are military resources to deal with it. There were National Guard resources to deal with it.

______

KMOX RADIO: Does that mean we’re stretched a little bit thin?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: No. In fact the implication that we’re stretched thin is an inaccurate one and it ought to be knocked down hard.

So once again, faced with an accountability moment, the Bush administration shucks responsibility and suggests that those who question them just don’t know what they’re talking about.

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Bush's Witt-less FEMA

The Nation
David Corn

Bush's Witt-less FEMA

In a perfect world--or, at least one not so imperfect--people who make the right call about important stuff would be rewarded and those who are wrong would not be. That's not how things work in Bushland. Remember those lovely medals George W. Bush handed to CIA chief George Tenet and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, even though both were responsible for tremendous miscalculations on Iraq? In recent days, there have been calls for the firing of Michael Brown, the FEMA director--who got his job because he was a college chum of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign manager. Like DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Brown screwed the pooch, and both in recent days have issued CYA statements rather than acknowledge responsibility. Yet Bush praised his FEMA guy last week, saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

Let's consider an obvious comparison: Michael Brown and James Lee Witt, who Bill Clinton appointed head of FEMA. As has been widely noted, before joining FEMA, Brown was a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association. Before Witt was tapped as FEMA chief, he had served for four years as director of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services. Bush placed a crony--Brown was also an attorney for the Oklahoma Republican Party--in charge of FEMA (and permitted the agency's disaster work to be downgraded). Clinton gave the job to a fellow with years of experience in disaster management and maintained a close connection to Witt and FEMA, which then had Cabinet-level status.

Brown, Chertoff and Bush were not prepared for this foreseen tragedy, but FEMA's lack of readiness was predicted. By Witt, it turns out. In March 2004, he testified at a hearing conducted by two House subcommittees. The issue at hand was DHS's plan to consolidate--that is, reduce the number of--FEMA's regional and field offices. Witt's comments were all-too perceptive. He practically predicted the mess to come in New Orleans. As you read his remarks--which I excerpt below--think about two things. First, disaster-management experts outside the administration were worried about FEMA long before Hurricane Katrina came howling. Second, the poor people of New Orleans might have been much better off had someone who knew about disaster relief been in charge during this tragedy. Here's a portion of Witt's testimony:

As you continue to examine DHS and its growth, I want you to know that I and many others in the emergency management community across the country are deeply concerned about the direction FEMA is headed. First, we are greatly concerned that the successful partnership that was built between local/state/federal partners and their ability to communicate, coordinate, train, prepare, and respond has been sharply eroded. Second, FEMA, having lost its status as an independent agency, is being buried beneath a massive bureaucracy whose main and seemingly only focus is fighting terrorism while an all hazards mission is getting lost in the shuffle.

I firmly believe that FEMA should be extracted from the DHS bureaucracy and reestablish it as an independent agency reporting directly to the President, but allowing for the Homeland Security Secretary to task FEMA to coordinate the Federal response following terrorist incidents. Third, the FEMA Director has lost Cabinet status and along with it the close relationship to the President and Cabinet Affairs. I believe we could not have been as responsive as we were during my tenure at FEMA had there had been several levels of Federal bureaucracy between myself and the White House. I am afraid communities across the country are starting to suffer the impact of having FEMA buried within a bureaucracy rather than functioning as a small but agile independent agency that coordinates Federal response effectively and efficiently after a disaster.

FEMA was assembled in 1979 in much the same way that the various agencies of DHS have been put together. Although the reorganization that brought the various agencies together under FEMA was on a much smaller and more manageable scale, it took our country close to 15 years to get it right. When FEMA was formed there were several cultures all being thrown together under one new roof. The dominant "top down" culture within early FEMA traced its roots to the days of civil defense. This culture was probably necessary for those types of national security oriented activities. As a State Director of Emergency Management, I was often on the receiving end of FEMA's "top down," rigid, and sometimes inflexible approach. It is for this reason that I was determined, as FEMA Director, to take the Agency in a new direction. I wanted to move towards becoming an organization where the needs of the stakeholders and employees were valued and heeded. DHS is struggling with growing pains similar to what FEMA struggled with for the first 15 years of its existence.

However, I continue to be concerned about the scope of the task that has been given to Under Secretary Hutchinson and Secretary Ridge. FEMA was an agency of 2,600 permanent employees and 4,000 disaster reservists and it took 15 years to get on the right track. The reorganization taking place with DHS is several scales above the FEMA reorganization and they are being asked to accomplish this massive effort in a world full of uncertainty regarding future terrorist activity and the certainty of future natural disasters. As you may know, I was not in favor of creating such a large Department all at once. I supported the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, but I do not think this was accomplished in the right way. I always thought we should start with the areas that needed the greatest and most immediate attention--specifically those activities involving the gathering, assimilation, and dissemination of terrorist intelligence to state and local officials. Also, I thought it made sense to engage in efforts to improve the security of our most vulnerable critical infrastructure and targeted industries. I felt that many of the pieces in place to manage the consequences of a disaster or terrorist attack were not broken and didn't need "fixing." I saw no need to reinvent the wheel on the consequence management side of emergency management--particularly when there were several other more pressing areas that needed to be addressed regarding counterterrorism efforts.

In an effort to build other Directorates within DHS that need more help, vital pieces of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate--FEMA--are being moved or underfunded to prop up these other very critical areas. Programs--like the very successful Fire Grants--are being moved out of FEMA. And the Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG) which provide the backbone to our emergency management systems are being cut and significantly restructured in a very detrimental way. In fact some estimates suggest that the 25-percent cap on personnel costs within the EMPG could result in more than half of the country's 4,000-plus emergency managers losing their jobs. By throwing all of these disparate pieces together in the DHS stew, we have not only diluted the concentration on some of the most critical parts of our counterterrorism efforts, but we are allowing scarce resources to be directed away from consequence management. Our Nation's emergency management system has often been held up as an international model; however, this country's well-oiled emergency management infrastructure--that has been built over many years--is now in great jeopardy as DHS attempts to build capabilities in other areas of the Department.

Imagine if Witt--or anyone with such expertise--had been running FEMA in recent years. How many less deaths would there have been in New Orleans and Mississippi? That question cannot be answered. But it is clear that Bush, Chertoff and Brown let FEMA slide. And the cost for that is dead bodies floating in the dirty waters of New Orleans. Now there's a debate over what investigation will come in Katrina's wake. Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman--who led the effort to create the DHS that swallowed up FEMA--announced on Tuesday that their government affairs committee would conduct hearings. Tom DeLay, though, seemed to say he was not eager to see any House committees do the same. And Bush vowed that he would look into "what went wrong" but did not endorse the creation of an independent investigation. As the Bush administration and the Republican Congress dither over this, here's a suggestion: at least one investigation should be independent of the administration, and it should be led by James Lee Witt.

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Fawlty Towers Comes to the Pentagon

huffingtonpost.com
RJ Eskow

Fawlty Towers Comes to the Pentagon

These days Department of Defense is looking a lot like Fawlty Towers, the ramshackle hotel from the British TV show. And Donald Rumsfeld seems more and more like Basil Fawlty every day - with the same ineptitude, bullying, double-talk, and mendacity that John Cleese brought to the role.

Why? For one thing, the base closings that were supposed to save tons of money and increase military efficiency apparently do - er, ah - neither. For another, the GAO just confirmed that the Fawlty DoD left radiological materials in easy reach of passing terrorists for six months.

Blast it, Manuel - er, Wolfowitz - you should've done something! To top it off, those wacky Pentagoners may have left thousands of experimental monkeys - perhaps even some that were used for bioweapons research - where they could get free in the hurricane. And that's as the entire town Biloxi was turning into a bioweapon, while Homeland Security and the Republican rulers of Mississippi neglected it.

If it weren't so tragic and terrifying, it would be funny. Somebody remind me why the GOP is called the "national security party." And when you're ready to make that Don Rumsfeld biopic, call John Cleese.

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Lawyer Is Fired After Talking About Rove

Lawyer Is Fired After Talking About Rove

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A lawyer with the Texas secretary of state was fired after she spoke to a reporter about presidential adviser Karl Rove's eligibility to vote in the state.

Elizabeth Reyes, 30, said she was dismissed last week for violating the agency's media policy after she was quoted in a Sept. 3 story by The Washington Post about tax deductions on Rove's homes in Washington and Texas.

Scott Haywood, a spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, confirmed Reyes' firing but wouldn't discuss specifics. He had earlier told the Post that Reyes "was not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency."

Reyes told the Post on Friday a superior told her that her bosses were upset about the article. Williams has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Republicans, including President Bush, who relies heavily on Rove for political strategy.

While Reyes said she didn't know she was talking to a reporter, she said the press policy doesn't bar her from speaking with the media.

"The policy allows us to talk to members of the media," she told the Post. "The policy says if it's a controversial issue or a special issue, it needs to be forwarded on to someone else. Just talking to the media doesn't violate it, as I read it. ... Karl Rove didn't come up. It wasn't something you could classify as controversial."

She said she sent a certified letter to Williams's office asking that her dismissal be reconsidered.

The Post earlier reported that Rove inadvertently received a homestead tax deduction on his home in Washington, even though he had not been eligible for the benefit for more than three years. Rove was eligible for the deduction when he bought the home in 2001, but a change in the tax law in 2002 made the deduction available only to property owners who do not vote elsewhere. Rove is registered to vote in Texas.

The tax office admitted the mistake, saying it failed to rescind the deduction, and Rove agreed to reimburse the city an estimated $3,400 in back taxes, the Post reported.

Rove is registered to vote in Kerr County, Texas, where he and his wife own two rental homes that he claims as his residence. But two local residents told the Post they had never seen Rove there.

The Post reported Saturday that when its reporter called the Texas secretary of state's office for her story, she was told the press officer was on vacation and she was transferred to Reyes.

The attorney told the reporter that it was potential vote fraud in Texas to register in a place where you don't actually live, and she was quoted as saying Rove's cottages don't "sound like a residence to me, because it's not a fixed place of habitation."

The Post ran a correction Saturday saying Reyes had not been asked about Rove by name and that the story should have mentioned Reyes's further explanation that an individual's intent to return to a home owned in Texas is a primary factor in qualifying for residency.

However, the reporter did identify herself as working for the Post during two phone conversations with Reyes, and in the second one she said she was asking about a presidential adviser who had moved from Texas to Washington, the newspaper said.

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Presidents Judged Over Crises

Presidents Judged Over Crises

By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Disasters are a tricky business for presidents. Handle them well and you're a hero. Respond slowly or uncertainly and you could be in trouble.

President Bush's father, in the middle of a what became a losing re-election campaign, was slammed for his administration's lackluster response to Hurricane Andrew. Bill Clinton, by contrast, rebuilt his embattled presidency partially on the strength of his commanding reaction to the Oklahoma City bombings.

The current president is trying to recover from a stumbling start in dealing with Hurricane Katrina.

"A crisis is an opportunity for a president to step forward and exert effective leadership, and establish his credentials as a significant occupant of the Oval Office," historian Robert Dallek said.

Famous for his I-feel-your-pain sympathy, Clinton had proved his disaster bona fides with an emotional visit to the scene of the Midwest's Great Flood of 1993. But his on-the-scene empathy after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building is considered a high-water mark in presidential disaster response.

The bombing came at a low point in his presidency, not long after his party's loss of power in Congress in the 1994 midterm elections. Clinton's reaction helped send his approval rating over 50 percent, setting the stage for his successful battles with the Republican Congress and his 1996 re-election.

Ronald Reagan was a master of knowing how to react to a disaster. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, he went on television and offered words of comfort: "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave," said the man known as the great communicator.

Jimmy Carter won praise for his handling of the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Carter picked a little known staff member at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as his representative on site. Harold Denton came through as a calming and knowledgeable voice.

Under the first President Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was accused of botching South Carolina's recovery from Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

In 1992, when Hurricane Andrew smashed into Florida, the president was criticized for a by-the-book federal effort as thousands went without shelter and other necessities for days. He visited the area, but his administration declined an initial appeal to send a military engineering brigade and other troops.

The elder Bush later changed course and circumvented the embattled agency by appointing his transportation secretary, Andrew Card, to coordinate relief efforts. Card now is the current president's chief of staff.

The key to an effective response, said Dallek, is the ability to chart quickly a hopeful but realistic path forward, and deliver that message sincerely and compassionately.

"You have to reassure the country that it will sustain itself, but it's got to have some vision, and not in some glib way," he said.

For President Bush, his tough and empathetic response after the Sept. 11 attacks rang true with the public. People rallied around his leadership and he rode that support to a second term, despite questions about the economy and the war in Iraq.

Last year, he was omnipresent in Florida, making five surveys of the damage from four hurricanes in a state where his brother, Jeb, is governor.

Jeb Bush was praised widely for his common touch and strong response to those storms. By his side, the president time and again comforted victims, spoke sorrowfully about devastation and cheered on relief workers. The visits, late in the 2004 campaign in a state critical to his re-election, were assumed by many observers to have a significant political component. Bush captured the state on election night.

With Katrina, though, the president has struggled to find the right tone.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of respondents disapprove of the president's hurricane response. The survey also put his job approval at 39 percent.

By the end of last week, the administration itself was trying to recover and Bush planned to return to Mississippi and Louisiana on Sunday.

FEMA's chief, Michael Brown, was pulled back from oversight of the on-the-ground response, eliminating one persistent line of questioning from critics of the administration's response. That criticism, which early came from lawmakers in both parties, has taken on a more partisan air lately.

And blame is starting to point in several directions - from the administration for the sluggish federal response to state and local officials for what are perceived to be inept decisions.

---

Jennifer Loven has reported from Washington since 1993 and covers the White House for The Associated Press.

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Another question I'm hoping someone can provide more information on.

Talking Points Memo
Joshua Micah Marshall

Another question I'm hoping someone can provide more information on.

To assist with the recovery and disposition of the victims of Katrina, FEMA has hired Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management, a Houston-based company which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), another Houston-based corporation, which bills itself as the "dominant leader in the North American death care industry."

SCI is not only closely associated with the president (which is not surprising since the company is based in Houston), they were also at the center of what is probably the best-known scandal during Bush's six years as governor of Texas: the so-called 'funeralgate' case.

What's more, Joe Allbaugh -- President Bush's Chief of Staff in Texas and later his first FEMA Director -- was the central figure in that scandal, or at least the guy whose job it was to take care of the mess SCI had gotten into.

The last we heard, you'll remember, now-lobbyist Allbaugh was in Lousiana "helping coordinate the private-sector response to the storm."

One Tennessee mortician, Dan Buckner, who was on stand-by as a volunteer as part of the Department of Homeland Security's DMORT program told a local paper that morticians from around the country were available to do this work as volunteers. (DMORT works in conjunction with the National Funeral Directors Association).

"There's no telling how many dollars they'll spend on that contract," he told the paper.

Once SCI got the contract, the NFDA sent out a notification to their members which read in part ...

The company that FEMA has chosen to outsource the recovery work in Louisiana is Kenyon, a worldwide disaster management company, wholly owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International. Kenyon asked us to share the names and phone numbers of NFDA members and funeral directors who are interested in a paid three-week employment situation. If you have already volunteered with NFDA, we'd like to let you know about this paid option to help.

When questioned about the matter, a Nenyon spokesman said his company had had a contract with FEMA since 1997. And this list of catastrophes they've done work on does include several US passenger jet crashes from the late 1990s, i.e., before the beginning of the second Bush administration.

Still, companies based in Houston and/or companies with close ties to Joe Allbaugh do seem to be snapping up a whole lotta contracts. So perhaps someone out there can look into this a bit further.
-- Josh Marshall

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Pentagon document would alter nuclear weapons plan

Pentagon document would alter nuclear weapons plan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department has written a draft revision of its nuclear operations doctrine that outlines the use of nuclear weapons to pre-empt an enemy's attack with weapons of mass destruction, according to a copy of the document available online on Saturday.

The draft "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," dated March 15, revised the "discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations."

According to the document, combatant commanders could request approval from the president to use nuclear weapons under a variety of scenarios, such as to pre-empt an enemy's use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, multinational or alliance forces or civilian populations.

Commanders could seek approval to use nuclear weapons in the face of an enemy's imminent biological weapons attack that "only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy," the document said.

The draft also envisioned nuclear weapon use in attacks on enemy installations containing weapons of mass destruction, among other scenarios.

A Defense Department spokesman told Reuters the document had not yet been given to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It is due to be signed within the next few weeks by the director of the Joint Staff, the spokesman said.

The unclassified document was available on numerous Web sites such as GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy Web site. A Pentagon site, however, listed the document as unavailable.

Other scenarios envisioned in the draft doctrine include nuclear weapons use to counter potentially overwhelming conventional forces, for rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms, to demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter enemy use of weapons of mass destruction, and to respond to the use of weapons of mass destruction supplied by an enemy to a "surrogate."

The document said "numerous nonstate organizations (terrorist, criminal)" and about 30 countries have programs for weapons of mass destruction.

"Further, the possible use of WMD by nonstate actors either independently or as sponsored by an adversarial state, remain a significant proliferation concern," the draft said.

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Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy

The New York Times

Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy
By ERIC LIPTON, CHRISTOPHER DREW, SCOTT SHANE and DAVID ROHDE

This article is by Eric Lipton, Christopher Drew, Scott Shane and David Rohde.

The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.

Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.

They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.

The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a terrorist attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial examination of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.

Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.

FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause "human suffering incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29.

On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.

"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.

State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and order.

The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard officials said.

Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New Orleans convention center, which interviews show was even worse than previously described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging into the darkness, guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs' handguns, said Capt. Jeffrey Winn.

"In 20 years as a cop, doing mostly tactical work, I have never seen anything like it," said Captain Winn. Three of his officers quit, he said, and another simply disappeared.

Officials said yesterday that 10 people died at the Superdome, and 24 died at the convention center site, although the causes were not clear.

Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view shared by many in city and state government: that a national disaster requires a national response. "Everybody's trying to look at it like the City of New Orleans messed up," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "But you mean to tell me that in the richest nation in the world, people really expected a little town with less than 500,000 people to handle a disaster like this? That's ludicrous to even think that."

Andrew Kopplin, Governor Blanco's chief of staff, took a similar position. "This was a bigger natural disaster than any state could handle by itself, let alone a small state and a relatively poor one," Mr. Kopplin said.

Federal officials seem to have belatedly come to the same conclusion. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said future "ultra-catastrophes" like Hurricane Katrina would require a more aggressive federal role. And Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whom President Bush had publicly praised a week earlier for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed aside on Friday, replaced by a take-charge admiral.

Russ Knocke, press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that any detailed examination of the response to the storm's assault will uncover shortcomings by many parties. "I don't believe there is one critical error," he said. "There are going to be some missteps that were made by everyone involved."

But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising" about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath said.

Initial Solidarity

At midafternoon on that Monday, a few hours after the hurricane made landfall, state and federal leaders appeared together at a news conference in Baton Rouge in a display of solidarity.

Governor Blanco lavished her gratitude on Mr. Brown, the FEMA chief.

"Director Brown," she said, "I hope you will tell President Bush how much we appreciated - these are the times that really count - to know that our federal government will step in and give us the kind of assistance that we need." Senator Mary L. Landrieu pitched in: "We are indeed fortunate to have an able and experienced director of FEMA who has been with us on the ground for some time."

Mr. Brown replied in the same spirit: "What I've seen here today is a team that is very tight-knit, working closely together, being very professional doing it, and in my humble opinion, making the right calls."

At that point, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the storm, although some areas were already being flooded through breaches in levees. But when widespread flooding forced the city into crisis, Monday's confidence crumbled, exposing serious weaknesses in the machinery of emergency services.

Questions had been raised about FEMA, since it was swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11. Its critics complained that it focused too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for natural disasters, and that it had become politicized. Mr. Brown is a lawyer who came to the agency with political connections but little emergency management experience. That's also true of Patrick J. Rhode, the chief of staff at FEMA, who was deputy director of advance operations for the Bush campaign and the Bush White House.

Scott R. Morris, who was deputy chief of staff at FEMA and is now director of its recovery office on Florida, had worked for Maverick Media in Austin, Tex., as a media strategist for the Bush for President primary campaign and the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And David I. Maurstad was the Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska before he became director of FEMA's regional office in Denver and then a senior official at the agency's headquarters.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA employees, wrote to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff members are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and contractors."

With the new emphasis on terrorism, three quarters of the $3.35 billion in federal grants for fire and police departments and other first responders were intended to address terror threats, instead of an "all-hazards" approach that could help in any catastrophe.

Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a response. In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role. There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your backyard."

Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the hurricane response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when Hurricane Katrina hit. State officials said it did not yet address transportation or crime control, two issues that proved crucial. Col. Terry J. Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans since 2003, said he never spoke with FEMA about the state disaster blueprint. So New Orleans had its own plan.

At first glance, Annex I of the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" is reassuring. Forty-one pages of matter-of-fact prose outline a seemingly exhaustive list of hurricane evacuation procedures, including a "mobile command center" that could replace a disabled city hall.

New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was to be completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and water supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last resort," as part of a new deal with the tenants, the New Orleans Saints.

But the city's plan says that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they would be sheltered.

Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and cities to file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict standards for evacuation plans.

"There is a very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what the quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security. "There is not a lot of urgency."

As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans's population left, as many as 100,000 people remained.

Colonel Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter, assuming the city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48 hours, until the storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.

As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the need for buses.

Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there," recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.

"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."

Drivers Afraid

When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began resisting.

Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses."

FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, said Natalie Rule, an agency spokeswoman, only after a request from the state that she said did not come until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor's frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.

She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of the dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation problem arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.

State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans and signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies, according to Louisiana officials.

Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.

Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the city. An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during evacuation.

"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come, people were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home managers ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep their frail patients in place and wait out the storm.

Symbols of Despair

The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn two of the most visible features of the New Orleans skyline - the Superdome and the mile-long convention center - into deathtraps and symbols of the city's despair.

At the Superdome, the initial calm turned to fear as a chunk of the white roof ripped away in the wind, dropping debris on the Saints' fleur-de-lis logo on the 50-yard-line. The electricity was knocked out, leaving only dim lights inside the windowless building. The dome quickly became a giant sauna, with temperatures well over 100 degrees.

Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside were women, children or elderly, and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the Louisiana National Guard. And it didn't take long for the stench of human waste to drive many people outside.

Chief Swain said the Guard supplied water and food - two military rations a day. But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses expected early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.

Chief Swain and Colonel Ebbert said in interviews that the first buses arranged by FEMA were diverted elsewhere, and it took several more hours to begin the evacuation. By Friday, the food and the water had run out. Violence also broke out. One Guard soldier was wounded by gunfire and the police confirmed there were attempts to sexually assault at least one woman and a young child, Chief Swain said.

And even though there were clinics at the stadium, Chief Swain said, "Quite a few of the people died during the course of their time here."

By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were so dehydrated that guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while walking to the buses. State officials said yesterday that a total of 10 people died in the Superdome.

"I'm very angry that we couldn't get the resources we needed to save lives," Chief Swain said. "I was watching people die."

Mayor Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, P. Edwin Compass III, said in interviews that they believe murders occurred in the Superdome and in the convention center, where the city also started sending people on Tuesday. But at the convention center, the violence was even more pervasive.

"The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough security," said Capt. Winn, the head of the police SWAT team. "The only way I can describe it is as a completely lawless situation."

While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was no time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in a volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place nearly every night.

Capt. Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped - and that murders were occurring.

"We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions," Mr. Compass said. "And we essentially had to become the lion tamers."

Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the center's six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.

But the police were at a disadvantage: they could not fire into the crowds in the dimly lit facility. So after they saw muzzle flashes, they would rush toward them, searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.

Meanwhile, those nearby "would be running for their lives," Capt. Winn said. "Or they would lie down on the ground in the fetal position."

And when the SWAT team caught some of the culprits, there was not much it could do. The jails were also flooded, and no temporary holding cells had been set up yet. "We'd take them into another hall and hope they didn't make it back," Capt. Winn said.

One night, Capt. Winn said, the police department even came close to abandoning the convention halls - and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said a captain in charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the regular police officers by helicopter when 100 guardsmen rushed over to help restore order.

Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were dumped near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration, emergency medics have said. State officials said yesterday that 24 people died either inside or just outside the convention center.

The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of those deaths may have been murders. Capt. Winn said that when his team made a final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including one with multiple stab wounds.

Capt. Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials said that nearly 10 regular officers stationed at the Superdome and 15 to 20 at the convention center also quit, along with several hundred other police officers across the city.

But, Capt. Winn said, most of the city's police officers were "busting their asses" and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I just didn't expect for it to explode the way it did."

Divided Responsibilities

As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news briefings and interviews.

The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its role, offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local governments. "Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.

With Hurricane Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing with disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.

FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.

Telephone and cellphone service died, and throughout the crisis the state's special emergency communications system was either overloaded or knocked out. As a result, officials were unable to fully inventory the damage or clearly identify the assistance they required from the federal government. "If you do not know what your needs are, I can't request to FEMA what I need," said Colonel Doran, of the state office of homeland security.

To President Bush, Governor Blanco directed an ill-defined but urgent appeal.

"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on Monday. "I am going to need all the help you can send me."

"We went from early morning to late night, day after day, after day, after day. Trying to make critical decisions," Ms. Blanco said in an interview last week. "Trying to get product in, resources, where does the food come from. Learning the supply network."

She said she didn't always know what to request. "Do we stop and think about it?" she asked. "We just stop and think about help."

FEMA attributed some of the delay to miscommunications in an overwhelming event. "There was a significant amount of discussions between the parties and likely some confusion about what was requested and what was needed," said Mr. Knocke, the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered sending active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to have combat troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's arranged under our Constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted at a news briefing last week, "state and local officials are the first responders."

Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority, according to the officials involved in the discussions. They ultimately rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National Guard forces, including many trained as military police.

Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, explained that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically moved combat forces into an American city, without the governor's consent, for purposes of using those forces - untrained at that point in law enforcement - for law enforcement duties? Yes."

But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"

For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed remote. Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor Nagin and Colonel Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words of assurance federal relief officials had offered. "It was like, 'they are coming, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming,' " she said in an interview. "It was all in route. Everything was in motion."

'Stuck in Atlanta'

The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.

Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans.

"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?' " said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."

Ms. Rule, the FEMA spokeswoman, said there was no urgency for the firefighters to arrive because they were primarily going to do community relations work, not rescue.

William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies.

"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's ridiculous."

Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of Mr. Vines, said, "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA. Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA." When the state of Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people displaced by flooding, she said, "they were told they could not go. I don't really know why."

On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., and president of the National Sheriffs' Association, sent out an alert urging members to pitch in.

"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the paperwork," he said.

Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Mr. Sexton on Sept. 1 The next day, he led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks and 33 deputies, despite public pleas from Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to wait for formal requests.

"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn't in good conscience wait for a coordinated response," he said. He dropped off food, water and medical supplies in Mobile and Gonzales, La., where a sheriffs' task force directed him to the French Quarter. By Saturday, Sept. 3, the Michigan team was conducting search and rescue missions.

"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved," Sheriff Evans said.

Mr. Knocke said the Department of Homeland Security could not yet respond to complaints that red tape slowed relief.

"It is testament to the generosity of the American people - a lot of people wanted to contribute," Mr. Knocke said. "But there is not really any way of knowing at this time if or whether individual offers were plugged into the response and recovery operation."

Response to Sept. 11

An irony of the much-criticized federal hurricane response is that it is being overseen by a new cabinet department created because of perceived shortcomings in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And it is governed by a new plan the Department of Homeland Security unveiled in January with considerable fanfare.

The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end result is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."

The evidence of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina raised doubts about whether the plan had, in fact, improved coordination. Mr. Knocke, the homeland security spokesman, said the department realizes it must learn from its mistakes, and the department's inspector general has been given $15 million in the emergency supplemental appropriated by Congress to study the flawed rescue and recovery operation.

"There is going to be enough blame to go around at all levels," he said. "We are going to be our toughest critics."

Jason DeParle, Robert Pear, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker contributed reportingfor this article.

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Roberts May Be Sidelined in Some Cases

Roberts May Be Sidelined in Some Cases

By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- John Roberts is an appeals court judge with a multimillion-dollar portfolio, a spouse who is a successful lawyer and a broad roster of clients from his days in private practice.

Those all mean he probably will have to disqualify himself from dozens of Supreme Court cases should he become chief justice. It is an situation that, while not unusual, would leave the nine-member court with a potential for tie votes.

Roberts, whose confirmation hearings are to begin Monday, can minimize his problems. For example, he could put his money in mutual funds or other types of investments. But ethics experts say his early years on the Supreme Court will require diligence to avoid conflicts.

Potential personal conflicts, along with questions about his appellate opinions and correspondence as a lawyer during two Republican administrations, are expected to dominate the hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Supreme Court begins its new term Oct. 3 with a full lineup of cases on issues such as abortion and physician assisted suicide, as well as matters that affect a company's bottom line.

By law, judges must not participate in cases brought by companies in which judges or family members own stock - even one share. Justices police themselves when it comes to ethical conflicts and cannot be overruled.

"The justice is a law into himself or herself on that issue," said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University's School of Law.

The most frequent cause of conflicts is money.

"Most of the justices try to make their finances a nonissue by not holding significant stocks directly. But there are no rules, and it's ultimately a matter of personal choice," said Washington lawyer Thomas Goldstein who regularly argues cases at the high court and tracks voting trends.

Disqualifications are not uncommon, especially among the wealthier justices who have extensive stocks. Six of the current eight justices are millionaires.

In the past year, there were 112 recusals - when justices take themselves out of a case - in opinions and orders. The court deals with more than 8,000 appeals a year. By Goldstein's count, Justice Stephen Breyer stepped aside 60 times and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor 27.

O'Connor has done so about 730 times during her 24 years on the court, Goldstein said.

Roberts' investment portfolio includes stock Coca-Cola, Disney and telecommunications and prescription drug companies.

Papers Roberts submitted to the Senate over the summer put his wealth at more than $5 million - well above that of his mentor, William H. Rehnquist, who became chief justice in 1986 and died last weekend, and Rehnquist's predecessor, Warren Burger.

Burger was named chief justice in 1969 after ethics questions doomed Abe Fortas' nomination for the job.

Fortas, an associate justice, was filibustered in the Senate in 1968 part because he had received $15,000 for teaching college seminars. Fortas resigned the next year after it was revealed that he also accepted money from a private foundation.

Roberts, a Harvard Law School graduate with a squeaky clean image, is expected to be cautious.

"I don't think there will be any sloppiness. We're not talking Abe Fortas here," said A. E. Dick Howard of the University of Virginia, an expert on the high court. "I don't think he'll try to dance around the recusal problem. He may find ways not to overdo it."

If a chief justice stays out of a case, the next senior justice presides at oral argument and oversees the voting.

Judges also are required by law to withdraw when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

Last year, Justice Antonin Scalia refused to step aside in a case filed by Vice President Dick Cheney, a friend. Cheney and Scalia had taken a hunting vacation together shortly after the court agreed to consider whether the Bush administration had to release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force.

Roberts has told the Senate he would stay out of some cases involving his former law firm and clients, abiding by guidelines from the federal court's policymaking board. He could face conflict issues related to his wife's financial interest as a partner at a prominent Washington law firm.

Roberts was a top Supreme Court lawyer earning more than $1 million a year when Bush named him in 2003 to the federal appeals court based in Washington.

Roberts took himself out of a major case now at the Supreme Court: the administration's attempt to seek $280 billion in profits from tobacco companies. Roberts did not give a reason, but his former law firm has taken positions adverse to the tobacco industry on behalf of health care clients.

Roberts has come under criticism from Gillers and other legal ethicists for ruling on a case involving the administration while he was meeting with White House officials who were preparing for a vacancy on the high court.

Roberts was among the judges who said the Pentagon could hold military commissions, or tribunals, for a foreign terrorism suspect at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Supreme Court will decide this fall whether to review that case, which would be an important test of the president's wartime powers.

Roberts would immediately take himself out of the case and others he voted on as an appeals court judge. Although not required, it is considered unseemly for judges to attempt to judge their own opinions.

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Red Cross says needs 40,000 Katrina volunteers

Red Cross says needs 40,000 Katrina volunteers

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The American Red Cross said on Saturday it needs 40,000 additional volunteers in the next few weeks to replace worn-out relief workers helping Hurricane Katrina victims.

"This is a disaster of such scope and such significance that it is not going to go away in a few weeks or a few months," said Ken Degnan, public affairs specialist for the Red Cross. "We need more people."

The relief agency is sheltering 160,000 survivors, has provided 6 million meals and is operating 675 shelters in 23 U.S. states, an unprecedented effort that is taxing the 114-year-old organization, Degnan said.

The 36,000 Red Cross volunteers currently working the disaster will start rotating back to their homes beginning next week, so replacements are needed, he said.

The agency is asking recruits to contact their local Red Cross, which will provide training in such fields as shelter management, public health and working through government bureaucracies set up to assist disaster victims.

"It may seem like pretty simple to come into a shelter and help out," Degnan said. "But when you are dealing with large numbers of people in a congregate living facility you need to be trained."

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