==> The Truth About Political Stuff <==

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Bush slashed funding year after year. That is made clear. Beyond that, an extremely important point is not made until the very end of this article. It is stated here, but the entire article is worth the read:

In 2002, New Orleans officials held the simulation of what would happen in a category 5 storm. Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, recounted the outcome to PBS’ NOW With Bill Moyers:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence
that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the
[simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because
anybody who was here as that category five storm came across... was gone.

FactCheck.org
Is Bush to Blame for New Orleans Flooding?

He did slash funding for levee projects. But the Army Corps of Engineers says Katrina was just too strong.

Summary

Some critics are suggesting President Bush was as least partly responsible for the flooding in New Orleans. In a widely quoted opinion piece, former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal says that "the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature," and cites years of reduced funding for federal flood-control projects around New Orleans.

Our fact-checking confirms that Bush indeed cut funding for projects specifically designed to strengthen levees. Indeed, local officials had been complaining about that for years.

It is not so clear whether the money Bush cut from levee projects would have made any difference, however, and we're not in a position to judge that. The Army Corps of Engineers – which is under the President's command and has its own reputation to defend – insists that Katrina was just too strong, and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.

Analysis

We suspect this subject will get much more attention in Congress and elsewhere in the coming months. Without blaming or absolving Bush, here are the key facts we've been able to establish so far:

Bush Cut Funding

Blumenthal's much-quoted article in salon.com carried the headline: "No one can say they didn't see it coming." And it said the Bush administration cut flood-control funding "to pay for the Iraq war."

He continues:

Blumenthal: With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico . But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

…By 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year…forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze.

We can confirm that funding was cut. The project most closely associated with preventing flooding in New Orleans was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Hurricane Protection Project, which was “designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Missisippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain,” according to a fact sheet from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (The fact sheet is dated May 23, long before Katrina). The multi-decade project involved building new levees, enlarging existing levees, and updating other protections like floodwalls. It was scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Over at least the past several budget cycles, the Corps has received substantially less money than it requested for the Lake Pontchartrain project, even though Congress restored much of the money the President cut from the amount the Corps requested.

In fiscal year 2004, the Corps requested $11 million for the project. The President’s budget allocated $3 million, and Congress furnished $5.5 million. Similarly, in fiscal 2005 the Corps requested $22.5 million, which the President cut to $3.9 million in his budget. Congress increased that to $5.5 million. “This was insufficient to fund new construction contracts,” according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ project fact sheet. The Corps reported that “seven new contracts are being delayed due to lack funds” [sic].

The President proposed $3 million for the project in the budget for fiscal 2006, which begins Oct. 1. “This will be insufficient to fund new construction projects,” the fact sheet stated. It says the Corps “could spend $20 million if funds were provided.” The Corps of Engineers goes on to say:

Army Corps of Engineers, May 23: In Orleans Parish, two major pump stations are threatened by hurricane storm surges. Major contracts need to be awarded to provide fronting protection for them. Also, several levees have settled and need to be raised to provide the design protection. The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs.

The Corps has seen cutbacks beyond those affecting just the Lake Pontchartrain project. The Corps oversees SELA, or the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control project, which Congress authorized after six people died from flooding in May 1995. The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans reported that, overall, the Corps had spent $430 million on flood control and hurricane prevention, with local governments offering more than $50 million toward the project. Nonetheless, "at least $250 million in crucial projects remained," the newspaper said.

In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

A long history of complaints

Local officials had long complained that funding for hurricane protection projects was inadequate:

*
October 13, 2001: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that “federal officials are postponing new projects of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Program, or SELA, fearing that federal budget constraints and the cost of the war on terrorism may create a financial pinch for the program.” The paper went on to report that “President Bush’s budget proposed $52 million” for SELA in the 2002 fiscal year. The House approved $57 million and the Senate approved $62 million. Still, “the $62 million would be well below the $80 million that corps officials estimate is needed to pay for the next 12 months of construction, as well as design expenses for future projects.”
*
April 24, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that “less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Missisippi River valley this year and next year.” Meanwhile, an engineer who had direct the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study – a study of how to restore coastal wetlands areas in order to provide a bugger from hurricane storm surges – was sent to Iraq "to oversee the restoration of the ‘Garden of Eden’ wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,” for which President Bush’s 2005 gave $100 million.
*
June 8, 2004: Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune:

Walter Maestri: It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq , and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

*
September 22, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that a pilot study on raising the height of the levees surrounding New Orleans had been completed and generated enough information for a second study necessary to estimate the cost of doing so. The Bush administration “ordered the New Orleans district office” of the Army Corps of Engineers “not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money.”
*
June 6, 2005: The New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper reported that the New Orleans district of the Corps was preparing for a $71.2 million reduction in overall funding for the fiscal year beginning in October. That would have been the largest single-year funding loss ever. They noted that money “was so tight" that "the New Orleans district, which employs 1,300 people, instituted a hiring freeze last month on all positions,” which was “the first of its kind in about 10 years.”

Would Increased Funding Have Prevented Flooding?

Blumenthal implies that increased funding might have helped to prevent the catastrophic flooding that New Orleans now faces. The White House denies that, and the Corps of Engineers says that even the levee project they were working to complete was not designed to withstand a storm of Katrina's force.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, at a press briefing on September 1, dismissed the idea that the President inadequately funded flood control projects in New Orleans :

McClellan: Flood control has been a priority of this administration from day one. We have dedicated an additional $300 million over the last few years for flood control in New Orleans and the surrounding area. And if you look at the overall funding levels for the Army Corps of Engineers, they have been slightly above $4.5 billion that has been signed by the President.

Q: Local people were asking for more money over the last couple of years. They were quoted in local papers in 2003 and 2004, are saying that they were told by federal officials there wasn't enough money because it was going to Iraq expenditures.

McClellan: You might want to talk to General Strock, who is the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, because I think he's talked to some reporters already and talked about some of these issues. I think some people maybe have tried to make a suggestion or imply that certain funding would have prevented the flooding from happening, and he has essentially said there's been nothing to suggest that whatsoever, and it's been more of a design issue with the levees.

We asked the Corps about that “design issue.” David Hewitt, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said McClellan was referring to the fact that “the levees were designed for a category 3 hurricane.” He told us that, consequently, “when it became apparent that this was a category 5 hurricane, an evacuation of the city was ordered.” (A category 3 storm has sustained winds of no more than 130 miles per hour, while a category 5 storm has winds exceeding 155 miles per hour. Katrina had winds of 160 mph as it approached shore, but later weakened to winds of 140 mph as it made landfall, making it a strong category 4 storm, according to the National Hurricane Center.)

The levee upgrade project around Lake Pontchartrain was only 60 to 90 percent complete across most areas of New Orleans as of the end of May, according to the Corps' May 23 fact sheet. Still, even if it had been completed, the project's goal was protecting New Orleans from storm surges up to "a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane,” according to the fact sheet.

We don't know whether the levees would have done better had the work been completed. But the Corps says that even a completed levee project wasn't designed for the storm that actually occurred.

Nobody anticipated breach of the levees?

In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on September 1, President Bush said:

Bush: I don’t think anyone anticipated breach of the levees …Now we’re having to deal with it, and will.

Bush is technically correct that a "breach" wasn't anticipated by the Corps, but that's doesn't mean the flooding wasn't forseen. It was. But the Corps thought it would happen differently, from water washing over the levees, rather than cutting wide breaks in them.

Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:

Breerword: We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached.

And while Bush is also technically correct that the Corps did not "anticipate" a breach – in the sense that they believed it was a likely event – at least some in the Corps thought a breach was a possibility worth examining.

According to the Times-Picayune, early in Bush's first term FEMA director Joe Allbaugh ordered a sophisticated computer simulation of what would happen if a category 5 storm hit New Orleans. Joseph Suhayda, an engineer at Louisana State University who worked on the project, described to the newspaper in 2002 what the simulation showed could happen:

Subhayda: Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail. It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high, so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee.

Whether or not a "breach" was "anticipated," the fact is that many individuals have been warning for decades about the threat of flooding that a hurricane could pose to a set below sea level and sandwiched between major waterways. A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report from before September 11, 2001 detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans. In 2002, New Orleans officials held the simulation of what would happen in a category 5 storm. Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans , recounted the outcome to PBS’ NOW With Bill Moyers:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across... was gone.

--by Matthew Barge

Sources

Sidney Blumenthal, “ No one can say they didn’t see it coming ,” salon.com, 31 August 2005

Deon Roberts, “Bush budget not expected to diminish New Orleans district’s $65 million,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 07 February 2005

Manuel Torres, “Flood work to slow down; Corps delays new projects,” Times-Picayune, 13 October 2001

Mark Schlefistein, “Corps sees its resources siphoned off; Wetlands restoration officials sent to Iraq ,” Times-Picayune, 24 April 2004

“Mark Schleifstein, “Ivan stirs up wave of safety proposals; Hurricane-proofed stadium is one idea,” Times-Picayune, 22 September 2004

Deon Roberts, “Bush budget not expected to diminish New Orleans district’s $65 million ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 07 February 2005

Mark Schleifstein, “Bush budget cuts levee, drainage funds; Backlog of contracts waits to be awarded,” Times-Picayune, 08 February 2005

“Bush budget fails to fund flood control in New Orleans ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 14 February 2005

Deon Roberts, “ New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers faces ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 06 June 2005

Will Bunch, “ Did New Orleans catastrophe have to happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ had repeatedly raised federal spending issues,” Editor & Publisher, 31 August 2005

Toby Eckert, “Could disaster have been prevented?,” Copley News Service, 02 September 2005

Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker, “ Critics say Bush undercut New Orleans flood control ,” Washington Post, 02 September 2005

“ The City in a Bowl ,” Transcript, NOW, Public Broadcasting Service, 20 September 2002

Jon Elliston, “ A Disaster Waiting to Happen ,” bestofneworleans.com, 28 September 2004

Scott Shane and Eric Lipton, “ Government saw flood risk but not levee failure ,” New York Times, 02 September 2005

Paul Krugman, “ A can’t-do government ,” New York Times, 02 September 2005

“ Lake Pontchartrain, LA and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project, St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Charles Parishes, LA ,” Project Fact Sheet, US Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, website, 23 May 2005

“ Fiscal Year 2006: Civil Works Budget for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ,” Department of the Army, February 2005

“ Press Briefing by Scott McClellan ,” whitehouse.gov, 01 September 2005

Karen Turni, “Upgrade of levees proposed by corps; gulf outlet levee may be too low, officials worry,” Times-Picayune, 12 November 1998

John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “The big one: A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It’s just a matter of time,” Times-Picayune, 24 June 2002

Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

washingtonpost.com
Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top
Homeland Security Agency in Flux Was Ill Prepared to Handle Katrina

By Susan B. Glasser and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the most sweeping possible relief effort.

Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.

"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."

The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Current and former officials say that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."

The DHS experiment is so far-flung that the department's leadership has focused much of its attention simply on the massive complications that resulted from creating one entity out of agencies as varied as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Transportation Security Administration. When Chertoff took office earlier this year, he made his top priority an entirely new bureaucratic reorganization less than two years after the department's creation, dubbed the "second-stage review." The review, still pending, recommends taking away a key remaining function, preparedness planning, from FEMA and giving it to "a strengthened department preparedness directorate."

The procedures for what to do when the inevitable disaster hit were also subjected to a bureaucratic overhaul, still unfinished, by the department.

Indeed, just last Tuesday, as New Orleans was drowning and DHS officials were still hours away from invoking the department's highest crisis status for the catastrophe, some department contractors found an important e-mail in their inboxes.

Attached were two documents -- one more than 400 pages long -- that spelled out in numbing, acronym-filled detail the planned "national preparedness goal." The checklist, called a Universal Task List, appeared to cover every eventuality in a disaster, from the need to handle evacuations to speedy urban search and rescue to circulating "prompt, accurate and useful" emergency information. Even animal health and "fatality management" were covered.

But the documents were not a menu for action in the devastated Gulf Coast. They were drafts, not slated for approval and release until October, more than four years after 9/11.

"Basically, this is the rules of engagement for national emergency events, whether natural or manmade. It covers every element of what you would have expected to already have been in place," said the contractor who provided the e-mail to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his firm's work. "This is the federal government template to engage, and this is being discussed in draft form."
FEMA Lost in the Shuffle

Until 1979, the federal government had no one agency responsible for dealing with disaster.

But that year, President Jimmy Carter created FEMA out of a patchwork of smaller agencies. Born at the tail end of the Cold War, FEMA had a mission largely defined as nuclear fallout shelters and other civil defense measures, though in reality it dealt with "hurricane after hurricane," as Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran who was FEMA chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, noted.

After Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, federal response was panned, and FEMA was due for an overhaul. It got it in 1993, when Clinton brought in James Lee Witt, a veteran emergency manager and political ally, to take over, granted the agency Cabinet-level status and gave it a highly visible role it had not previously had. Its response to crises such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing received high marks, though some Republicans complained it was used as a pot of money doled out to bolster Clinton's political standing.

But after 9/11, FEMA lost out in the massive bureaucratic shuffle.

Not only did its Cabinet status disappear, but it became one of 22 government agencies to be collapsed into Homeland Security. For a time, recalled Ervin, even its name was slated to vanish and become simply the directorate of emergency preparedness and response until then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge relented.

On Capitol Hill, members from hurricane-prone states fought a rear-guard action against FEMA's absorption. "What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast on its feet, independent agency," said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.). In creating DHS, "people were thinking about the possibility of terrorism," said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "They weren't thinking about the reality of a hurricane."

Hurricanes were not totally absent from the calculations about the new department, according to several former Bush administration officials. Bush tapped his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to supervise DHS's creation; a decade earlier, Card had been personally deputized by Bush's father to go to Florida and take charge of the much-criticized response to Hurricane Andrew.

"We definitely did worry about it," recalled Richard A. Falkenrath, who served as a White House homeland security adviser at the time DHS was being formed. "We knew we should do no harm to the disaster management side. The leadership of the White House knows the political significance of disasters."

From the day it came into existence on March 1, 2003, the department of 180,000 employees and a nearly $40 billion annual budget was tasked by a presidential directive with developing a comprehensive new plan for disasters. The National Response Plan was supposed to supersede the confusing overlay of federal, state and local disaster plans, and to designate a "principal officer in the event of an incident of national significance." An accompanying new National Incident Management System would integrate all the cascades of information.

"The problem was, who was in charge on 9/11? Who the hell knew? They kept asking and asking. You needed some clarity," Falkenrath recalled. "It was supposed to pull it all together. . . . But FEMA was grousing about that, they thought it was taking things away from them."
Focus on Terrorism

In creating the department, President Bush made one of its central missions "all-hazards preparedness," operating on the philosophy -- as the government has for at least the last two decades -- that most disaster preparation is the same, whether the crisis is natural or manmade.

Yet DHS in reality emphasized terrorism at the expense of other threats, according to several current and former senior officials in the department and experts who have closely monitored its creation, cutting funding for natural disaster programs and downgrading the responsibilities and capabilities of the previously well-regarded FEMA. In theory, spending resources on response to terrorism should result in improved response to any disaster, but FEMA's supporters argue that the money was being spent outside the framework of the agency actually equipped to respond.

"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards versus $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."

The White House's Homeland Security Council developed 15 scenarios for the new department to concern itself about -- everything from a terrorist dirty-bomb attack to a Baghdad-style improvised explosive device. Only three were not terrorism scenarios: pandemic flu, a major earthquake and a major hurricane.

By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office found in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.

New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."

"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, like Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."

But experts in emergency response inside and outside government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security . When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it."

Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing fixed."
Rebuffed Offers of Aid

On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2 hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there was surprisingly little action. "It was like nobody's turning the key to start the engine," the official recalled.

Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.

"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."

But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.

In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he "knew for a fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than Sunday morning.

But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview, the general charged with operations for the military's Northern Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come our way."

"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5 storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the United States. . . . I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."

Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Bureaucratic red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."

Federal authorities say there is blame enough to go around. In a news conference yesterday, Chertoff cautioned against "finger-pointing" and said no one had been equipped to handle what amounted to two simultaneous disasters -- the hurricane and subsequent levee break.

Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. "Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."

But many outraged politicians in both parties have concluded that the federal government failed to meet the commitments it made after Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee, said DHS had failed. "We've been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."

Thompson said, for example, that oil pipelines in the Southeast have been identified by DHS as critical national infrastructure to be protected against terrorist attack. In the wake of the hurricane, they have been crippled by floods." We have to review all our systems," Thompson said. "If a byproduct of what happened in New Orleans is we have this gas crisis all over the country, it doesn't matter whether a terrorist hits it or a hurricane hits it. You have the same effect."

Staff writers Peter Baker, Bradley Graham, Spencer S. Hsu, Dafna Linzer and Michael Powell and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

The Bursting Point

The New York Times

The Bursting Point
By DAVID BROOKS

As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.

Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.

Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.

Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.

The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.

Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."

Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. [Editors note: The economy and life are only good for people like the author of this article, not for the average U.S. citizen.] But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

Nicholas D. Kristof is on vacation.

Navy Turns to Halliburton for Help on Damaged Bases

(Guess the Navy doesn't feel Halliburton has stolen enough of our money!!!!)

The New York Times

Navy Turns to Halliburton for Help on Damaged Bases
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - Facing extensive damage by Hurricane Katrina to naval installations in Mississippi, the Navy turned immediately to the Halliburton Company's KBR subsidiary for tasks like restoring electricity, repairing roofs and clearing debris at bases that are urgently needed for response efforts.

It is a familiar role for KBR, which under longstanding contracts has delivered the engineering equivalent of first aid to the Navy and other military and government agencies after natural disasters for more than 15 years. This time, the Halliburton unit's performance is likely to be watched especially closely, as its work under separate contracts in Iraq has come under extensive criticism in the past two years.

The U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command turned to Halliburton after the hurricane under terms of a five-year contract worth up to $500 million, renewed in 2004 after competitive bidding, that calls on the company to provide immediate services on demand after natural disasters, in humanitarian crises or in military conflicts. Last year, the Navy invoked the same contract after Hurricane Ivan hit Florida.

Although Halliburton has not yet been asked to work on installations around New Orleans, it said on Friday that it would begin performing damage assessments there "as soon as it is deemed safe to do so."

The Navy faces urgent problems repairing installations such as the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Gulfport, Miss., which was heavily damaged and has become a key staging point for recovery operations in the coastal area hit hardest by the hurricane.

Almost all the base's personnel were evacuated before the storm, and there were no military casualties reported, but many buildings were damaged, power and communications were out, and roads were blocked or flooded.

But even as the Halliburton contract was being announced on Friday, the base was getting back in business, feeding 1,200 personnel each day, sheltering 350 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees in a warehouse, preparing to build a tent city for FEMA, supporting 1,000 employees of Mississippi Power, and deploying Seabees into nearby communities.

Even as it prepared for new jobs in the disaster area, both under its military contract and in its broader civilian role as a major engineering and construction company involved in ports and oil services, Halliburton and its employees faced problems of their own from the storm.

The company said on Friday that it has 3,000 employees working in the affected region and that "many have suffered devastating losses with many homes and vehicles flooded and some with a total loss of all of their belongings." The company, headed by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, has close ties to the Bush administration, and earlier this year confirmed that it had hired Joseph M. Allbaugh as a consultant on issues including disaster relief and homeland security. Mr. Allbaugh was the director of FEMA during the first two years of the Bush administration.

Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed

Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press Writer

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Mississippi hurricane survivors looked around Saturday and wondered just how long it would take to get food, clean water and shelter. And they were more than angry at the federal government and the national news media.

Richard Gibbs was disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans and upset at the lack of attention hurricane victims in his state were getting.

"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."

Gibbs and his wife, Holly, have been stuck at their flooded home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Water comes up to the second floor, they are out of gasoline, and food supplies are running perilously low.

Until recently, they also had Holly's 75-year-old father, who has a pacemaker and severe diabetes, with them. Finally they got an ambulance to take him to the airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.

In poverty-stricken north Gulfport, Grover Chapman was angry at the lack of aid.

"Something should've been on this corner three days ago," Chapman, 60, said Saturday as he whipped up dinner for his neighbors.

He used wood from his demolished produce stand to cook fish, rabbit, okra and butter beans he'd been keeping in his freezer. Although many houses here, about five miles inland, are still standing, they are severely damaged. Corrugated tin roofs lie scattered on the ground.

"I'm just doing what I can do," Chapman said. "These people support me with my produce stand every day. Now it's time to pay them back."

One neighbor, 78-year-old Georgia Smylie, knew little about what's happening elsewhere. She was too worried about her own situation.

"My medicine is running out. I need high blood pressure medicine, medicine for my heart," she said.

Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he's been watching hours of Katrina coverage every day and most of the national media attention has focused on the devastation and looting in New Orleans.

"Mississippi needs more coverage," Sabato said. "Until people see it on TV, they don't think it's real."

Along the battered Mississippi Gulf Coast, crews started searching boats for corpses on Saturday. Several shrimpers are believed to have died as they tried to ride out the storm aboard their boats on the Intracoastal Waterway.

President Bush toured ravaged areas of the Mississippi coast on Friday with Gov. Haley Barbour and other state officials. They also flew over flooded New Orleans.

"I'm going to tell you, Mississippi got hit much harder than they did, but what happened in the aftermath - it makes your stomach hurt to go miles and miles and miles and the houses are all under water up to the roof," Barbour said.

Keisha Moran has been living in a tent in a department store parking lot in Bay St. Louis with her boyfriend and three young children since the hurricane struck. She said National Guardsmen have brought her water but no other aid so far, and she was furious that it took Bush several days before he came to see the damage in Mississippi.

"It's how many days later? How many people are dead?" Moran said.

Mississippi's death toll from Hurricane Katrina stood at 144 on Saturday, according to confirmed reports from coroners and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Barbour had said Friday the total was 147, but he didn't provide a county-by-county breakdown.

In a strongly worded editorial, The Sun Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport pleaded for help and questioned why a massive National Guard presence wasn't already visible.

"We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan (area) and ours," the newspaper editorialized, saying survival basics like ice, gasoline and medicine have been too slow to arrive.

"We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible," the paper wrote.

----

Associated Press reporter David Royse and Brian Skoloff in Gulfport and Jay Reeves in Bay St. Louis contributed to this report.

Senators call hurricane response "immense failure"

Reuters

Senators call hurricane response "immense failure"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two key U.S. senators said on Friday they will open a bipartisan investigation into what they described as an "immense failure" of the government response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the panel's top Democrat, said they plan to begin an oversight investigation next week when the full Senate returns from a summer recess.

"We intend to demand answers as to how this immense failure occurred, but our immediate focus must and will be on what Congress can do to help the rescue and emergency operations that are ongoing," the senators said in a joint statement.

"It is also our responsibility to investigate the lack of preparedness and inadequate response to this terrible storm," they said, adding that it was "increasingly clear that serious shortcomings in preparedness and response have hampered relief efforts at a critical time."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, called for the investigation saying he hoped the lessons learned would improve the government's response to future disasters.

The Bush administration's handling of the disaster that wreaked havoc in the Gulf Coast and spilled a devastating flood into New Orleans has come under sharp criticism.

As President George W. Bush toured the disaster area, Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu said the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Bush administration placed under the Department of Homeland Security, failed to deploy enough resources to the area quickly.

She called on Bush to appoint a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response to the calamity.

"There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," Landrieu said. "Unfortunately that no longer seems to be their approach."

Congress sent Bush a $10.5 billion emergency spending bill on Friday to cover some of the initial costs of the recovery effort and lawmakers have promised much more.

Civil rights pioneer to testify at Roberts' hearing

Reuters

Civil rights pioneer to testify at Roberts' hearing

By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A civil rights pioneer along with a key figure in the scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon will be among the witnesses called by Democrats at U.S Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' confirmation hearing next week, aides said on Friday.

They said Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who was young leader for civil rights in the 1960s, will testify at the hearing by the Republican-led U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Also set to testify at the invitation of Democrats is John Dean, who served as Nixon's White House counsel. Dean was a key witness at Senate Watergate hearings into abuse of power that helped lead to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

Since 2000, Dean has written an online column on law and politics and is a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.

Thirteen other Democratic witnesses will include: Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration; Reginald Turner, president of the National Bar Association, and Roderick Jackson, a high school teacher and basketball coach in Alabama, aides said.

In a statement, Democrats described their witnesses as "national leaders and courageous Americans, who represent many of the vital issues facing the nation today, including civil rights, women's and disability rights, Americans' right to privacy, and the importance of an open government that serves the interests of the American people."

No Senate Democrat has announced opposition to Roberts in advance of the hearing, set to begin on Tuesday.

But many Democrats have voiced concerns about Roberts' commitment to civil rights and women rights, based largely on memos he wrote while a lawyer two decades ago in the Reagan administration.

Republicans began unveiling the names of their 15 witnesses on Thursday. They include Dick Thornburgh, an attorney general in the Reagan administration and in the first Bush administration, and two members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Jennifer Braceras and Peter Kirsanow.

Together, these witnesses are expected to provide sharply opposing views of President George W. Bush's nomination of Roberts to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Friday released another 18,000 pages of documents stemming from Roberts' work in the administration. The library said the vast majority of the materials were not written by Roberts or duplicated previously released 50,000 pages of documents.

The outside witnesses are expected to testify on next Friday, following at least two days of public questioning of Roberts, a federal appeals court judge the past two years.

Chief Justice William H Rehnquist has died.

Chief Justice William H Rehnquist has died.

Chief Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist (October 1, 1924–September 3, 2005) was an American jurist and former law clerk and Assistant Attorney General. He was a member of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1972 until his death in 2005, and served as the 16th Chief Justice of the United States since he was elevated from associate justice by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. He was the longest serving Chief Justice since Melville Fuller died in office in 1910.

Source and more comprehensive life story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rehnquist

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush

Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them
http://www.bringthemhomenowtour.org/userdata_display.php?modin=50
before they get to DC on September 21st.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Politicians Failed Storm Victims

kwg.com
Politicians Failed Storm Victims

By RON FOURNIER
AP Political Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who's at fault?

There's plenty of blame to go around - the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.

It wasn't a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers.

Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.

Just last year, the Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans. The White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request.

Yet the lawmakers and Bush agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers. Congress spent money on dust control for Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie Canal and a $231 million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

How could Washington spend $231 million on a bridge to nowhere - and not find $42 million for hurricane and flood projects in New Orleans? It's a matter of power and politics.

Alaska is represented by Republican Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a senior member of the all-important Senate Appropriations Committee. Louisiana's delegation holds far less sway.

Once the hurricane hit, relief trickled into the Gulf Coast. Even Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, whose agency is in charge of disaster response, pronounced the initial results unacceptable.

The hurricane was the first major test of FEMA since it became part of the Homeland Security Department, a massive new bureaucracy that many feared would make the well-respected FEMA another sluggish federal agency.

Looting soon broke out as local police stood by. Some police didn't want to stop people from getting badly needed food and water. Others seemed to be overwhelmed. Thousands of National Guard troops were ordered to the Gulf Coast, but their ranks have been drastically thinned by the war in Iraq.

On top of all this, Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The best leaders running the most efficient agencies would have been sharply challenged.

"Look at all they've had to deal with," former President Clinton told CNN. "I'm telling you, nobody every thought it would happen like this."

That's not true. Experts had predicted for years that a major hurricane would eventually hit New Orleans, swamping the levees and filling the bowl-shaped city with polluted water. Yet even Bush insisted that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees in a serious storm.

The politicians are doing what they do in time of crisis - shifting the blame.

"The truth will speak for itself," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said of potential lapses by government. Later, her office blamed the White House for budget cuts.

If it's not the Republicans' fault, perhaps some in Washington would like to blame New Orleans itself. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., questioned whether a city that lies below sea level should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said.

But for anybody living - or dying - in the devastated region, there are far too many villains to name.

"We're out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center.

Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.

"Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability."

Thus, Americans are doing what people do when government lets them down - they're turning to each other. Donations are pouring into charities. Internet sites are being used to find relatives. Residents of far-off states are opening their homes to victims.

The community spirit is reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. So is the second-guessing. It will happen again after the next crisis. You've heard the warnings: a cataclysmic California earthquake, another terrorist strike, a flu pandemic, a nuclear plant meltdown, a tsunami, the failure to address mounting U.S. debt - and on and on.

Will the public and its leaders be better prepared next time?

Bush faces new challenge amid flood of bad news

Reuters

Bush faces new challenge amid flood of bad news

By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is a dangerous political challenge for President George W. Bush even as he grapples with a string of bad news on the Iraq war, soaring gas prices and slumping approval ratings.

The widespread destruction on the Gulf Coast, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, threatens to hit all Americans in the pocketbook by wreaking havoc on gas prices and the U.S. economy.

The result, analysts say, could be new questions about Bush's leadership and priorities, particularly his decisions to push for big tax cuts and pour billions of dollars into an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

"This is a supreme test of Bush's leadership at a time when resources are thin and his approval ratings are perilously low," pollster John Zogby said.

The hurricane's aftermath also could be more bad news for Republicans already worried about the political fallout in the 2006 congressional elections from the Iraq war. Republicans counting on domestic issues to trump Iraq in the minds of voters could find little solace there.

"The U.S. economy in the hurricane's aftermath is going to be a lot more important to a lot more voters than Iraq, no matter how well or poorly it's going over there," said California-based Republican consultant Dan Schnur.

"If the situation in Iraq has not improved, and if the hurricane causes an economic downturn, then Republican candidates have something to worry about," Schnur said.

Bush cut short a month-long vacation by two days to return to Washington on Wednesday, swooping low over the flooded coast for a first-hand view on the way back. He then headed a meeting of emergency officials and made a short public statement from the White House Rose Garden.

The New York Times, in an editorial on Thursday, called his statement "one of the worst speeches of his life."

On Thursday Bush called Katrina a temporary setback for the economy and appeared in public with former Presidents George Bush, his father, and Bill Clinton. He asked them to head a drive for disaster relief similar to the one they conducted after the Asian tsunami.

Some Democrats were quick to attack Bush for a feeble and late response, and drew links between the administration's focus on Iraq while domestic priorities like flood prevention were starved for funds.

"We are watching this devastation unfold on our televisions for days and you have to ask: where is the federal government?" Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said. "We should have had a significant amount of troops and supplies there on the ground Monday."

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, noting gas prices were rocketing past $3 a gallon in many parts of the country, said everyday Americans had made sacrifices while Bush's "pals in big oil" reaped record profits.

"While he's asking ordinary Americans to do more, he ought to show some real leadership and call on his friends in Big Oil to join in the sacrifice and stop gouging American families at the gas pump," Dean said in a statement.

Critics asked why there were not better plans for emergency disaster relief and why decades of repeated warnings about the potential for disaster on the levees were ignored. They accused the administration of diverting funds for maintenance of the levee system to homeland security programs and the Iraq war.

"Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice," The New York Times said.

Bush brushed off the charges and said this was no time for politics.

"What we need to do as a nation is come together to solve the problem and not play politics, and there will be ample time for politics," Bush said in an ABC television interview.

Bush, criticized as slow to respond in the hours after the September 11 attacks, later won plaudits for his leadership, including his appearance with a bullhorn in the rubble of New York's World Trade Center to speak to rescue workers. He plans a visit to the devastated hurricane region on Friday.

"It's time for symbolic gestures," Zogby said. "The president is going to have to do a lot more than a 25-minute flyover."

Comparing his responses to the September 11 attacks and to the hurricane, the conservative New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester blasted the president.

"The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months immediately following September 11, 2001, has vanished," the paper said. "In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty."

Three more assert Pentagon knew of 9/11 ringleader

Reuters

Three more assert Pentagon knew of 9/11 ringleader

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three more people associated with a secret U.S. military intelligence team have asserted that the program identified September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta as an Al Qaeda suspect inside the United States more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

The Pentagon said a three-week review had turned up no documents to back up the assertion, but did not rule out that such documents relating to the classified operation had been destroyed.

Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer last month came forward with statements that a secret intelligence program code-named "Able Danger" had identified Atta, the lead hijacker in the attacks that killed 3,000 people, in early 2000. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, also went public with the allegations.

Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters that as part of the review, the Pentagon interviewed 80 people.

Downs said that three more people, as well as Phillpott and Shaffer, recalled the existence of an intelligence chart identifying Atta by name. Four of the five recalled a photo of Atta accompanying the chart, Downs said.

Pentagon officials declined to identify the three by name, but said they were an analyst with the military's Special Operations Command, an analyst with the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center and a contractor who supported the center.

Downs said all five were considered "credible people."

But officials said an exhaustive search of tens of thousands of documents and electronic files related to Able Danger failed to find the chart or other documents corroborating the identification of Atta. Phillpott has said Atta was identified by Able Danger by January or February of 2000.

"We have not discovered that chart," Downs said.

Asked whether it ever existed, she said, "We don't know. We don't have it at the moment." Downs said it was possible that the chart and any other document that might have referred to Atta were destroyed by the military.

"Able Danger," now disbanded, was a small, classified military operation engaged in data-mining analysis of information including media reports and public records through the use of powerful computer systems.

"There are strict regulations about collection, dissemination and destruction procedures for this type of information. And we know that did happen in the case of Able Danger documentation," Downs said.

But Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope of the Special Operations Command said that "we have negative indications" that destruction of such a chart was advised by military lawyers.

When Shaffer, currently on paid leave as an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, went public, he said analysts involved in Able Danger were blocked by military lawyers when they sought to provide the team's findings to the FBI in 2000 in an effort to find Al Qaeda suspects.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said the review turned up no evidence that the Pentagon prevented the disclosure of Atta's name to other agencies of the U.S. government.

Shaffer also has said Able Danger identified some of Atta's fellow hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, as part of an al Qaeda cell inside the United States.

Budget cuts delayed New Orleans flood control work

Reuters

Budget cuts delayed New Orleans flood control work

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.

The former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that handles the infrastructure of the nation's waterways, said the damage in New Orleans probably would have been much less extensive had flood-control efforts been fully funded over the years.

"Levees would have been higher, levees would have been bigger, there would have been other pumps put in," said Mike Parker, a former Mississippi congressman who headed the engineering agency from 2001 to 2002.

"I'm not saying it would have been totally alleviated but it would have been less than the damage that we have got now."

Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water after Katrina blew through with much of the flooding coming after two levees broke.

A May 2005 Corps memo said that funding levels for fiscal years 2005 and 2006 would not be enough to pay for new construction on the levees.

Agency officials said on Thursday in a conference call that delayed work was not related to the breakdown in the levee system and Parker told Reuters the funding problems could not be blamed on the Bush administration alone.

Parker said a project dating to 1965 remains unfinished and that any recent projects would not have been in place by the time the hurricane struck even if they had been fully funded.

"If we do stuff now it's not going to have an effect tomorrow," Parker said. "These projects are huge, they're expensive and they're not sexy."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had funded flood control efforts adequately.

Tensions over funding for the New Orleans levees emerged more than a year ago when a local official asserted money had been diverted to pay for the Iraq war. In early 2002, Parker told the U.S. Congress that the war on terrorism required spending cuts elsewhere in government.

Situated below sea level, New Orleans relied on a 300-mile

network of levees, floodgates and pumps to hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

Levees were fortified after floods in 1927 and 1965, and Congress approved another ambitious upgrade after a 1995 flood killed six people.

Since 2001, the Army Corps has requested $496 million for that project but the Bush administration only budgeted $166 million, according to figures provided by the office of Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Congress ultimately approved $250 million for the project during that time period.

Another project designed to shore up defenses along Lake Pontchartrain was similarly underfunded, as the administration budgeted $22 million of the $99 million requested by the Corps between 2001 and 2005. Congress boosted spending on that project to $42.5 million, according to Landrieu's office.

"It's clear that we didn't do everything we could to safeguard ourselves from this hurricane or from a natural disaster such as Katrina but hopefully we will learn and be more prepared next time," said Landrieu spokesman Brian Richardson.

The levee defenses had been designed to withstand a milder Category Three hurricane and simply were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina, said senior project manager Al Naomi.

"The design was not adequate to protect against a storm of this nature because we were not authorized to provide a Category Four or Five protection design," he said.

A study examining a possible upgrade is under way, he said.

Bush's Emergency Responses

Jonathan Larsen's blog on airamericaradio.co

Bush's Emergency Responses

Bush says no one could have predicted that the levees would break.

Not only COULD his administration predict it -- his administration DID predict it. So did Republican members of Congress.

FEMA itself predicted in 2001 that the three most likely, most catastrophic disasters facing America were a terrorist attack on New York (check), a New Orleans flood (check) and a major San Francisco earthquake.

We've seen how Pres. Bush responded. (A quick look at how Pres. Bush responded to the earthquake threat can be found here.)

The point is that his response to these warnings has been a political response. That's not a slur, that's a valueless, definitional label. Of course it's politics, it's in the realm of politicians. So, his decision to use national resources to wage war on Iraq was also a political decision. His mortgaging of America's future to fund tax cuts and shortchange current funding levels was a political decision. So when the right-wing accuses us of politicizing his response, don't believe it.

His response is entirely political. Preparing for a disaster is the JOB of politicians. Responding to a disaster is the JOB of politicians. This is inherently political and we're both entitled and patriotic to criticize the politicians involved.

If you still think that's a leftie position to take, check out what the notoriously conservative Manchester Union-Leader had to say about it:

Bush and Katrina:
A time for action, not aloofness

AS THE EXTENT of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation became clearer on Tuesday — millions without power, tens of thousands homeless, a death toll unknowable because rescue crews can’t reach some regions — President Bush carried on with his plans to speak in San Diego, as if nothing important had happened the day before.

Katrina already is measured as one of the worst storms in American history. And yet, President Bush decided that his plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day with a speech were more pressing than responding to the carnage.

A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease.

The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, has vanished. In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty.

Wherever the old George W. Bush went, we sure wish we had him back.