http://www.wonkette.com/politics/staggering-lapses-of-taste-and-moral-sense/index.php
Category: staggering lapses of taste and moral sense
SEP
09
2005
I Don't Know, Mr. Majority Leader, Why Don't You Sleep in a Sporting
Facility After Enduring Days of Diminished Food, Water, Plumbing, and
Public Safety and Tell Us How Fucking Fun It Is?
Blogged live from the Astrodome, a charming photo-op exchange between
Tom DeLay and three young boys evacuated from New Orleans:
The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked,
"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"
They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.
Their perplexity grew when DeLay continued, "Now you all understand
that this is entirely the fault of your state and local officials,
don't you? Because one thing Uncle Tommy would hate to do would be to
have to send you all to a camp that isn't any fun at all." -- HOLLY
MARTINS
DeLay to Evacuees: "Is This Kind of Fun?" [domeblog]
READ MORE: astrodome , katrina , staggering lapses of taste and moral
sense , tom delay
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?ei=5094&en=29839ee3ffe8c2ba&hp=&ex=1126238400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
September 9, 2005
Political Issues Snarled Plans for Troop Aid
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT
and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week
and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's
senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival
of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief
mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice
Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not
to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the
Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National
Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen
Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had
exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans
created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's
senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that
local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of
the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available
more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials
in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse,
they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority,
weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past
each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the
Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to
command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement
duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco
would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration
officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty
combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal
authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say
that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New
Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order
challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the
message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern
governor of another party from command of her National Guard,
according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department
officials.
"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of
the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female
governor of another party the command and control of her forces,
unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was
unable to effectively execute her command authority and that
lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior
administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were
confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up
control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been
required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area.
But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed
assistance by active-duty soldiers.
"I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush
last Monday, after the storm hit.
In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts
of soldiers. "Nobody told me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco
said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were
living in a war zone by then."
By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.
In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether
active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the
Guard.
By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne,
which has a brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours, could not
arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are
specially trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties.
In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard soldiers,
especially military police, was accelerated from other states.
"I was there. I saw what needed to be done," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum,
chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. "They were
the fastest, best-capable, most appropriate force to get there in the
time allowed. And that's what it's all about."
But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty
troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were
ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the
hurricane hit.
The call never came, administration officials said, in part because
military officials believed Guard troops would get to the stricken
region faster and because administration civilians worried that there
could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot
looters.
Louisiana officials were furious that there was not more of a show of
force, in terms of relief supplies and troops, from the federal
government in the middle of last week. As the water was rising in New
Orleans, the governor repeatedly questioned whether Washington had
started its promised surge of federal resources.
"We needed equipment," Ms. Blanco said in an interview. "Helicopters.
We got isolated."
Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of
active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state
officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice
Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection
Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was
restored.
In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also rejected a
more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the
Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an
active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn
into the Louisiana National Guard.
Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the military's
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon in August streamlined a
rigid, decades-old system of deployment orders to allow the military's
Northern Command to dispatch liaisons to work with local officials
before an approaching hurricane.
The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time Hurricane Katrina
reached full strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later
when Mr. Bush ordered 7,200 active-duty soldiers and marines to the
scene.
After the hurricane passed New Orleans and the levees broke, flooding
the city, it became increasingly evident that disaster-response
efforts were badly bogged down.
Justice Department lawyers, who were receiving harrowing reports from
the area, considered whether active-duty military units could be
brought into relief operations even if state authorities gave their
consent - or even if they refused.
The issue of federalizing the response was one of several legal issues
considered in a flurry of meetings at the Justice Department, the
White House and other agencies, administration officials said.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice Department lawyers
to interpret the federal law creatively to help local authorities,
those officials said. For example, federal prosecutors prepared to
expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like
anti-carjacking laws that can be prosecuted by either state or federal
authorities.
On the issue of whether the military could be deployed without the
invitation of state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit
within the Justice Department that provides legal advice to federal
agencies, concluded that the federal government had authority to move
in even over the objection of local officials.
This act was last invoked in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots, but at
the request of Gov. Pete Wilson of California, and has not been
invoked over a governor's objections since the civil rights era - and
before that, to the time of the Civil War, administration officials
said. Bush administration, Pentagon and senior military officials
warned that such an extreme measure would have serious legal and
political implications.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said deployment of National
Guard soldiers to Iraq, including a brigade from Louisiana, did not
affect the relief mission, but Ms. Blanco disagreed.
"Over the last year, we have had about 5,000 out, at one time," she
said. "They are on active duty, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That
certainly is a factor."
By Friday, National Guard reinforcements had arrived, and a truck
convoy of 1,000 Guard soldiers brought relief supplies - and order -
to the convention center area.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security say the experience
with Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated flaws in the nation's plans to
handle disaster.
"This event has exposed, perhaps ultimately to our benefit, a
deficiency in terms of replacing first responders who tragically may
be the first casualties," Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of
defense for domestic security, said.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has suggested
that active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if
front-line emergency personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon's
leadership remains unconvinced that this plan is sound, suggesting
instead that the national emergency response plans be revised to draw
reinforcements initially from civilian police, firefighters, medical
personnel and hazardous-waste experts in other states not affected by
a disaster.
The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan
after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage
any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed
local "first responders," including civilian police and the National
Guard.
At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said, "The unusual set
of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a
still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional
model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an
ultra-catastrophe.""
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this
article, and Eric Lipton from Baton Rouge, La. David Johnston
contributed reporting.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
--
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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