August 31, 2005

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372455,00.html
FORMER CLINTON ADVISOR

"No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of
the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration
cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq
war.


REUTERS
An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left
millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to
thousands reportedly dead. 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.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New
Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush
administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a
flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana
Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened
and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane
striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the
U.S.,
including a terrorist attack on New York City. But 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 (for a total reduction in
funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of
the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds
for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a
series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now
underwater,
reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the
wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked
about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers
almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm
surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands
surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent
City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no
net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration
and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003,
unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the
Environmental
Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands
unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental
groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that
without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by
an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's
no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes
to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The
chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality
dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "
Everybody loves what we're doing."



"My administration's climate change policy will be science
based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002,
when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study
on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert
research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy,
" and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's
annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first
comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate
change has global consequences for human health and the
environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the
line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in
Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common
action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have
continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising
temperature of the oceans, which has produced more
severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists,
including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement,
"Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking":
"Successful application of science has played a large
part in the policies that have made the United States
of America the world's most powerful nation and its
citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ...
Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by
presidents and administrations of both parties in
forming and implementing policies. The administration
of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this
principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge
for partisan political ends must cease." Bush
completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the
trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special
interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration
announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after
contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific
evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's
scientific advisory board. The United Nations special
envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush
administration of responsibility for a condom
shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's
evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the
chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice
Department was ordered by the White House to delete its
study that African-Americans and other minorities are
subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops a
and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of
his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief
oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion
no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton
(the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO),
she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings.
At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide,
a political appointee lacking professional background,
drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices
and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing
sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered
a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War
II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew
that the best way to bring peace and stability to the
region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had
boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to
President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is
writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.



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