Now that Michael Brown has resigned as head of FEMA, more questions must be
asked about the failures of the Katrina response. Was the failures caused by the
former FEMA head or were they just compounded by other failures? Is Michael
Brown becoming a fall guy for higher ups in the Department of Homeland Security?
It seems the answers are deep and complicated but government documents are
starting to emerge that shows Michael Brown is not the sole reason for the
failure into the response.
Michael Brown was not in charge of the disaster until late in the evening on
August 30, some 36 hours after Katrina struck. Prior to that Michael Chertoff
was heading up the show. A memo obtained by
Knight Ridder
news services reaffirms this fact.
According to the NRP-CIA (National Response Plan – Catastrophic Incident
Annex), the power to mobilize forces to respond to the area lies in the hands of
the Director of Homeland Security, or his designee. Michael Brown was not that
designee until late on Tuesday, August 30.
Accordingly, upon designation by the Secretary of Homeland Security of a
catastrophic incident, Federal resourcesâ€â€Âorganized into incident specific
“packagesâ€ÂÂâ€â€Âdeploy in accordance with the NRP-CIS and in coordination with
the affected State and incident command structure.
On Monday, President Bush said that it was an “extraordinary” effort
considering he declared a federal emergency two days prior to the storm hitting.
It may have been an “extraordinary” effort on his part but once that was done it
seems that the whole hurricane was forgotten by the feds.
Under the National Response Plan, Michael Chertoff can mobilize all necessary
federal and state resources to respond to the incident. Ironically a spin the
White House was trying to put on this was that Louisiana Governor Blanco did not
ask for the federal help. This was proven to be wrong when her letter to the
President dated Friday, August 26 emerged showing that she did request the
necessary help. Further more an
independent
commission was asked to look into that claim by Congress. They also ruled
that Governor Blanco did in fact properly request the necessary assistance in a
timely fashion.
Further evidence in the
Knight Ridder
article shows that the President’s “Katrina Recovery Task Force” was not a
necessary step. Under the NRP, Chertoff does hold the power to initiate what
forces he needed and the task force is not being looked at as a possible stall
tactic to allow the President time to return to Washington.
Raw Story reported yesterday on Emails the Wall Street Journal obtained from
FEMA that shows there was a delayed response and “bungling” in the actions of
FEMA. One email points out the fact that Michael Brown did not contact the
Department of Transportation, a necessary step to acquire busses for
evacuations, until the early hours of Wednesday, August 31. This would
immediately make it look like a failure on Michael Brown’s part, but in fact we
now know that Chertoff did not pass the torch of power to Brown until late
Tuesday night.
As more details keep emerging in regards to this disastrous response, it
appears more and more that there could be a cover up on the federal level.
Michael Brown’s resignation seems to come at a time where he can be labeled “the
fall guy”. Incidentally, there are more failures being found out about higher up
the chain and one of them is with our Homeland Security chief – Michael Chertoff.