Bush's Post-Katrina Recovery Disaster

As someone famous once said, it is in times of crisis that one's true character is revealed.  So what we now know about President Bush, is that he and his administration are profoundly imcompetent, and when the President feared that was about to be exposed, he simply lied to cover it up.

From today's WaPo: 

Three days after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of New Orleans, President Bush appeared on television and said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." His staff has spent the past six months trying to take back, modify or explain away those 10 words.

The release of a pre-storm video showing officials warning Bush during a conference call that the hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast posed a dire threat to the city and its levees has revived a dispute the White House had hoped to put behind it: Was the president misinformed, misspoken or misleading?
   
The video leaves little doubt that key people in government did anticipate that the levees might not hold. To critics, especially Democrats but even some Republicans, it reinforces the conclusion that the government at its highest levels failed to respond aggressively enough to the danger bearing down on New Orleans. To Bush aides, the seeming conflict between Bush's public statements and the private deliberations captured on tape reflects little more than an inartful statement opponents are exploiting for political purposes.

According to USA Today-On Deadline, GOP Rep. Peter King says the Bush administration failed to investigate the ports deal before approving it.

Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, told radio ranger Don Imus this morning that contrary to what President Bush and administration officials have been telling the public, the Dubai port deal was not scrutinized first, according to officials involved.

This is yet another example of a troubling lack of character in the Bush administration.  As in the case with Hurricane Katrina, they fail to take actions to keep up safe, and then when they get caught failing us, they lie about the situation.

According to the AP, President Bush was fully aware of the risks posed by Katrina.

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage of the briefings.

In this piece, NDN Chair Simon Rosenberg lays out how he sees 2006 shaping up.

 Here's his bottom line:

I've been skeptical about the fall elections becoming a 1994-like "change election." But given that in Mid-February the President has dropped below 40 percent, their weak agenda has nowhere to go, foreign policy and security issues are as likely to be as damaging to them as helpful, and the criminal cases against their leadership will spread and deepen, I think even the skeptics have to now acknowledge that 2006 is likely to become an historically bad year for the governing party.

The Bush administration's respones to Hurricane Katrina that even the GOP isn't willing to cover up for them on that one.

Here's the NY Times story on the report to be issued on Wednesday by the all-Republican committee that investigated the Bush administration's response to Katrina:

House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.

An examination of documents shines a new light on the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.

That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.

"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.

The Bush administration is profoundly incompetent.  What other explanation can possibly be offered for this?

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Cherhoff's performance before the sham committee in the House investigating Bush's Post-Katrina Recovery Disaster was inexcusable.

The blurb from the KR story pretty much sums it up:

Michael Greenberger, a law professor and director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security, disputed that Brown had adequate authority prior to Chertoff's designating him the principal federal official.

This story from the AP is just the latest example of how the Bush administration just ignores information that they don't want to hear.

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown was warned weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit that his agency's backlogged computer systems could delay supplies and put personnel at risk during an emergency, according to an audit released Wednesday.

The internal review of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's information-sharing system showed that it was overwhelmed during the 2004 hurricane season. In an Aug. 3 response, Brown and one of his deputies rejected the audit, calling it unacceptable, erroneous and negative.

In an extraordinary post-resignation hearing on Capitol Hill, former FEMA head Mike Brown claimed that his agency, designated by the President of the United States to organize the full force and resources of the federal government to respond to an emergency, was helpless to avert disaster in New Orleans because the mayor (of the 36th largest U.S. city) and governor (of the 24th largest state) were unprepared to deal with a category 5 hurricane bearing down on their shores.  

At last check, Brown was part of an Administration renowned for its self-proclaimed leadership capabilities and willingness to take bold action in the face of an urgent threat.  In its National Security Strategy, issued in 2002, this Administration asserted confidently that "preemptive action" must be taken to "counter a sufficient threat to our national security."  "The greater the threat," they claimed, "the greater is the risk of inaction."  The President personally opined in this Strategy document that "history will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act." 

George Bush enjoyed his Hurricane Rita fact-finding mission to the United States Northern Command headquarters in Colorado Springs so much, that he came home and decided to ask Congress to give the military the lead responsibility for dealing with all natural disasters.   These are the same forces that stayed on the sideline when Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, rudely interrupting the President's vacation and the Secretary of State's shopping trip to New York.

But the "fact-finder in Chief" has failed to explain why the entire system needs to be changed when the response to Rita, with civilian authorities in charge, worked so well.