| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2005 09:11:18 PM |
| Object: |
OT: How Bush Blew It |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
How Bush Blew It
Bureaucratic timidity. Bad phone lines. And a failure of imagination.
Why the government was so slow to respond to catastrophe.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top
aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public,
Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe
before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as
he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early
morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had
ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut
short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to
Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy
chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his
spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the
question of the president's early return and the delicate task of
telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground,
would do the deed.
The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to
return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the
following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from
their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to
do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and
its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because
it might displease the president, did not really sink in until
Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening
news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports
coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the
newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to
the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
How this could be—how the president of the United States could have
even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than
the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is
one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that,
despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a
national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself
in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media
elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he
doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy
for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from
the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there.
Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with
disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by
people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's
mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate
around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald
Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the
arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they
didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When
Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell
President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments
had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only
institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a
declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's
response to Katrina—like the failure to anticipate that terrorists
would fly into buildings on 9/11—was a failure of imagination. On
Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be
able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days
later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be
able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very
quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge—and, in effect,
send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a
brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort
Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been
action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush
aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this
time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. *****
Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit,
characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private
advice is not known.
Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor
African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive
neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of
Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though
it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded
considerations about the balance of power between state and federal
government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at
least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team
are numb.
The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked
like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake
made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster;
Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god.
But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of
New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.
Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to
blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the
storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture
combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.
Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New
Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street
funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the
years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965,
longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on
commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications,
he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old
guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with
New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign,
the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.
But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin
talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. "Max
Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia
Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared,"
responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the
city—about a day later than for most other cities and counties along
the Gulf Coast.
As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt
Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out,
Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell
decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly.
Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that
was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing
neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "Holy God," she thought
to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.
At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city
council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man
in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter
flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography,
but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see,"
he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in
1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a
conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a
little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city
budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were
poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few
old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had
trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got
someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You
don't understand, you don't understand."
Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The
city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But,
incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register,
not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post
upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the
state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal
officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying
it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week.
"We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling
the governor it could have been even worse."
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by
the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't
quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President,"
she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the
conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask
for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't
know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official
in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking
about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number
of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal
takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by
now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the
region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a
speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally
realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that
the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast
time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior
advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of
lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major
event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans
immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in
the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of
his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and
pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."
Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see
the fearful faces on some young police officers—the ones who actually
showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police
headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet
deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting
and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the
storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty.
Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers
would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a
sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter
last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the
eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a
baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL
officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by
the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans
cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm
not going to judge you.")
At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more
than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on
their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell
people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the
state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take
too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor
Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the
rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly
enough buses, boats or helicopters.
Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was
transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on
the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security
adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics.
Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the
president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just
asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops.
"I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.
The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before
the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters
and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the
effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews
seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was
nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the
military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and
flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans
airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force
operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By the week after the
storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of
helicopters—but it took at least two days and usually four and five to
get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV
crews, moved faster.
In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk
of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the
state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops.
But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved
in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked
the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides
say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old
soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an
American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs
were on the way.
The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—FEMA—was
dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing
outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's
phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told
news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'."
Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out
aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the
Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of
Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster
response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland
Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend
Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant,
Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts
for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college
buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his
official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the
International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown
("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him
from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast
Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that
performed well, rescuing thousands.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few
days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes
"metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him
reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly
rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals
and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice.
Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned
into a Third World hellhole.
The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One
on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans
airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one
participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service
getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various
congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the
opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the
lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal,
whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had
called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told
to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district
underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How
does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost
everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how
the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the
president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was
hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee
who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to
his aides and said, "Fix it."
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the
meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught
discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the
table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it
takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means
federalizing it, let's do it."
A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in
Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under
the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over—if the
governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore,
the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to
Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what
do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to
you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't
you do that now?"
The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a
week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give
up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush
appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll
take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He
told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to
Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown
was on his way back to Washington.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But
another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as
"strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by
this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an
effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange,
especially in defeat.
With T. Trent Gegax, Arian Campo-Flores, Andrew Murr, Susannah
Meadows, Jonathan Darman and Catharine Skipp in the gulf coast region,
and Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball, Tamara Lipper, John
Barry, Daniel Klaidman, Michael Isikoff, Michael Hirsh, Eve Conant,
Martha Brant, Patricia Wingert, Eleanor Clift and Steve Tuttle in
Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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| User: "duke" |
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| Title: Re: OT: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 05:01:36 AM |
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On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:11:18 -0700, stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
How Bush Blew It
He expected the city and state to show some leadership.
duke
*****
"The Mass is the most perfect form of Prayer."
Pope Paul VI
*****
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| User: "Yang, AthD h.c, Kicking AWOLs Cocaine Snorting Ass" |
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| Title: Re: OT: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 09:23:52 AM |
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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:01:36 -0500, duke <duckgumbo32@cox.net> wrote:
On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:11:18 -0700, stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
How Bush Blew It
He expected the city and state to show some leadership.
Now watch this drive.
-----
Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec (aka aka Yang's little poltregeist *****)
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 1.6 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12.5 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -1894 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush ***** up my country: Worthless
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