March 1, 2006

Video Shows Bush Was Warned Before Katrina
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP)—In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

The footage—along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press—show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush’s confidence on Aug. 28 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced “grave concerns” about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren’t enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

“I’m concerned about … their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,” Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

—Homeland Security officials have said the “fog of war” blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. “I’m sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,” National Hurricane Center’s Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

“I don’t buy the `fog of war’ defense,” Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. “It was a fog of bureaucracy.”

—Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility—and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

“I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One,” Brown said. “He’s obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he’s asking questions about reports of breaches.”

—Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. “I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off,” Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana’s emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn’t long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

“We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what’s going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up,” Smith said Aug. 30.

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

“We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we’ll have people dying—not because of water coming up, but because we can’t get them medical treatment in our affected counties,” said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government’s disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

“We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,” Brown warned. He called the storm “a bad one, a big one” and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary.

“Go ahead and do it,” Brown said. “I’ll figure out some way to justify it. … Just let them yell at me.”

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

“I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,” the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security’s operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina’s reach, for a bird flu event.

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: “Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?”

Brown: “We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now.”

Chertoff: “Good job.”

In fact, active duty troops weren’t dispatched until days after the storm. And many states’ National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center’s Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

“I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

“They’re not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they’re leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I’m very concerned about that,” Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome—which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response—would be safe and have adequate medical care.

“The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level…. I don’t know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane,” he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

“Not to be (missing) kind of gross here,” Brown interjected, “but I’m concerned” about the medical and mortuary resources “and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe.”

New Orleans seeks foreign aid to rebuild. Six months after Katrina, the city remains mostly in ruins. The billions of dollars promised to the city aren’t coming. There’s little sign that Bush’s committment that “we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes” was any more serious than any other promise he’s made during his presidency.

Halliburton really deserves some kind of corporate death penalty. They should be dissolved and their corporate offices demolished so that no foul corporate weed ever grows there again. Salon.com has an article on the crap that Halliburton and its subsidiaries were doing in the gulf coast Katrina clean-up effort. Truthout has the article mirrored if you don’t want to get a salon day pass.

Here’s a thought for you. Houston alone has picked up more than 150,000 refugees from Katrina. I’ve seen estimates up to a quarter million for Texas. Assume for a moment that half of them never have the means to go back to New Orleans or a place to go back to. Texas could gerrymander 100,000 primarily poor, black refugees into one or two existing minority congressional districts. The extra population, however, might be enough to tip them over the point at which they’d pick up yet another congressional seat in 2010, a seat they’d be sure to gerrymander so as to be an easy pickup for a white, conservative, Republican.

In a follow-up to my post from a couple of weeks ago, I found this article online a little bit ago. This reads more like some cyberpunk dystopian fantasy than anything I ever should be seeing on the ground in my own lifetime. This, by the way, is exactly the kind of thing that feeds into my notion that (sometimes unwittingly) the Libertarian party and its adherents are truly fascists. In the fantasy world that many of them conjure up, these heavily armed corporate thugs would be a common sight, enforcing private property rights in a more efficient and cost-effective way than public police ever could.

I wish I could post just about everything he said during the show, but the following is a nice representation:

Second, what I want to say is this: I think Jim is a good is doing a good job of demonstrating and this show is. the difference between left and right of center. It originated in the French parliament. The people left of center were liberals; the people right of center were conservatives. Broadly speaking. And generally speaking, people on the left of center on the right of center, I’m
sorry the conservatives, the right of center are interested in property values, property, property rights. The rights and the rights of property.

And generally speaking again it’s all generalized the left-of-center people are more concerned with humans and human beings and human concerns; to the care of humans, not the care and worry about property rights. That’s generally been true. And Bush is pushing this country farther down the hill, faster than anyone has before. [applause]

–George Carlin on RealTime with Bill Maher 9/16

In listening to the first ten minutes or so of Bush’s speech, I was ready to joke with my republican co-workers tomorrow that if I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was listening to a “big government” spending spree being outlined. I guess that was all just set-up to the Heritage Foundation’s agenda.

So, the central piece of the federal response to the largest natural disaster in our nation’s history is tax cuts. At least he’s consistent.

This is just horrifying. I have some real qualms with some of the wording, characterizations, and choice of language in the article, but that all takes a back seat to the facts of the situation. I have no real doubt that their intentions were good. I just can’t even imagine having to face that situation. My mom, from time to time, tries to convince me that I should go back to school and get an RN. I’ve often wished I’d done that right after high school. The flexibility and financial compensation that mom has in her work really is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to have in my life, particularly the chance to make a lot more money simply by working more hours. It’s also a field where you’re helping people, which is a definite component of my current job search. My response is always that, at my age, I think it’s too late to start a career where I would have other people’s lives in my hands. I don’t think I’d ever feel competent to take on that responsibility. This article put that into stark reflief.

My simple knee jerk reaction to the manner in which Bush has “taken responsibility” for failures in the way the Federal government handled Katrina is simple sarcasm about how apparently all of that “personal responsibility” crap from the Right is meaningless blather, that simply saying you “take responsibility” for something without suffering any consequences is cheap and pointless.

I think there really is a larger issue here beyond the partisan political implications. We are, in a very real sense, a post-political nation. It’s nothing new to note that politics in this country has a very real “root for the home team” aspect to it that allows people to condemn the other side for things they excuse on their own side. That particular type of intellectual prostitution isn’t even specific to us or our times. In a post by Bee Lavender, I was recently reminded of a very apropos quote by George Orwell on the subject:

There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function

The thing that our place and time has added to that is sort of inability to distinguish politics from partisanship, or perhaps it’s just we don’t even know what politics is anymore. We can’t distinguish policy from personality. Being liberal is more about the books you read, the things you buy, and the type of manners you want to see in a public debate than it is about wanting single payer healthcare or a clean environment or whatever. Oh sure, we want those things, too, but they’re just accessories to our liberal lifestyle. And it’s no better on the right. Being mean and insensitive just to prove you’re no damn effete elitist, bitching about “cultural elites” oppressing you while everything you do, culturally, is part of the entrenched, dominant cultural attitudes, and blindly supporting any jingoistic claptrap that the right spews forth is more important than traditionally responsible fiscal policy, small government, or public decency. If it were otherwise, the Republicans would have had no choice but to reject their own president en masse last year.

I don’t believe that there is any single thing George Bush could do or screw up that would hurt him with the 35-40% of the country that is in the “mainstream” of the right wing. To turn your back on Bush would be the same thing as turning your back on the lifestyle and values you claim to believe in. So long as he is consistent in his pronouncements, you must stand by him. To do otherwise would make you a hypocrite. And, boy, there’s nothing worse than being a hypocrite in modern society. I firmly believe that my side, for the most part, is no better. We’re a nation of political illiterates. We supported Clinton while he pushed NAFTA, cut the social safety net, and spent 8 years bombing Iraq. I know there are a few of you to the left of me reading this who may be feeling smug about your ideological purity, ready to blurt out that you didn’t support Clinton while he was doing those things. Well, I’ve got a post coming for you, too. You’re certainly not the role model that we liberals would want to pattern ourselves after.

I really can’t even believe this. This is worse than martial law.