Looks like things could get even more heated between the White House and Capital Hill this week:
Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government’s failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.
A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government, according to a senior investigation staffer who requested anonymity because the document is not final. Titled “A Failure of Initiative,” it is one of three separate reviews by the House, Senate and White House that will in coming weeks dissect the response to the nation’s costliest natural disaster.
The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
Article continues here.
Of course the White House is in defense mode and Trent Duffy is quoted later in the article:
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush had full confidence in his homeland security team, both appointed and career. “The president was involved from beginning to end,” implementing emergency powers before the storm and taking responsibility afterward, Duffy said.
Duffy objected to a leaked draft of an unpublished report, and said the White House is completing its own study. “The president is less interested in yesterday, and more interested with today and tomorrow,” he said, “so that we can be better prepared for next time.”
Less interested in yesterday? Well tomorrow can bring more Katrinas so he should be interested in yesterday. I guess learning from mistakes is not a policy this administration likes to take. As far as Bush being involved from the very beginning, if he was so involved then why did he even lie about the knowledge of the levees breaking?
I would imagine the White House will try a “they don’t have all the facts” defense. Of course Congress doesn’t have all the facts because so many of them were held by the White House on the all to usual claim of executive privilege. I doubt those facts would help the White House’s position any as I am sure they data mined out all the good information and kept all the bad.
I also find this part of the article very interesting:
The report said the single biggest federal failure was not anticipating the consequences of the storm. Disaster planners had rated the flooding of New Orleans as the nation’s most feared scenario, testing it under a catastrophic disaster preparedness program in 2004.
About 56 hours before Katrina made landfall, the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center cited an “extremely high probability” that New Orleans would be flooded and tens of thousands of residents killed.
Given those warnings, the report notes Bush’s televised statement on Sept. 1 that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” and concludes: “Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional.”
One of the biggest wingnut defenses of the administration I have heard was saying the state and local officials did not prepare or get the people out of harms way. I have argued with numerous right wingers over this and tried to outline the problems of an evacuation of that scale. This is the harshest criticism I have heard of the administrations lack of planning prior to the storm hitting land though. When those warnings came out that Katrina was going to hit land and knowing the geographical problems that lie within NOLA, the White House should of shifted all its focuses to the storm starting the weekend before landfall. They didn’t do that before the storm or right after the storm. Instead they followed business as usual.
With everything we have learned since those horrible days in September, I think it should be time to look at criminal neglect charges. I got a feeling the other congressional report will reaffirm this belief in me and the White House report will be as big of a waste as Bush is.