CAUGHT ON TAPE:
During the past week, the right wing has attacked the Associated Press for
reporting that a new video contradicted what Bush told Diane Sawyer a few
days after Katrina: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the
levees."
His defenders argued the new video showed Bush was merely warned the storm
could "top" -- not "breach" -- the levees.
Fox News anchor Brit Hume claimed "we learned next to nothing" from the tape
and that Bush "received no such warning" about levee breaches. Hume misses
the point. First, we already know experts warned Bush repeatedly about a
levee breach.
In the early morning hours of Aug. 29, the Department of Homeland Security
sent a "Fast Analysis Report" to the White House situation room. "The
potential for severe storm surge to overwhelm Lake Pontchartrain levees is
the greatest concern for New Orleans," the report said. "Any storm rated
Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson (hurricane) scale will likely lead to
severe flooding and/or levee breaching.
This could leave the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months."
Additionally, a White House aide sat in on the "Hurricane Pam Exercise" in
2004. That exercise concluded that a Category 3 storm could "cause flooding
that would leave 300,000 people trapped in New Orleans, many of whom would
not have private transportation for evacuation." More generally, the AP
video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of
the blue or unforeseeable" and that our government "failed to deliver."
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=90623434&url_num=41&url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030300642.html
Bush's legacy will be blunder upon blunder, failure upon failure. What
makes a man so cruel and apathetic?
.
|
