9/11 chairmen: Bush should have seen the catastrophe earlier

[sabra]

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12643641.htm

9/11 chairmen: Bush should have seen the catastrophe earlier

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration should have realized that Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe of national proportions and have mobilized federal troops and equipment even before the storm struck, the co-chairmen of an independent investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks said Wednesday.


“Anyone watching that storm knew it was going to affect Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana,” said Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. “This is not a disaster for the mayor of New Orleans to deal with.”
“It was a disappointing response,” said Thomas Keane, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Why Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff waited until about 36 hours after Katrina had struck to declare an “incident of national significance,” triggering massive federal response, has become a key question in the aftermath of the storm. Neither Hamilton nor Keane said they knew.

“It was obvious nobody knew who was in charge,” Keane said. “There was no unified command structure . . . the mayor is saying one thing, the governor says another. The president is in the state, and the governor learns about it on TV.”

[leveymg]

1. Keep telling us what we already knew, guys. Looking for a new gig?

Next time, don't shut the door on the whistleblowers.

"Not historically significant."

[indepat]

2. Like 9-11, they purportedly knew something big was brewing and did much

too little too late. When will the Congress, the MSM, and the typical schmuck on the street realize that W's party, unlike the Gipper's which cost only about one trillion dollars, will cost mucho multiples of that, all for the joy of having a far RW PNAC agenda implemented?

[Raster]

3. Here's the pisser (emphasis mine):

"But he doubted that dismay over the response would have much political impact in next year’s mid-term elections. “You can hardly lose an election in the House of Representatives unless you murder someone on the Capitol steps,” he said. “You have to be pretty stupid to lose re-election.” Hamilton served 34 years in the House. Keane said he feared that government officials might have been influenced by early news reports that the storm had skirted New Orleans and that the city had emerged largely unscathed. “I have a feeling everybody went ‘whew,’ ” he said.
_____________
We need to break that cycle. The problem with Congress is we keep re-electing the same idiots whose allegiance is to the almighty dollar and those lobbyists supplying same. Not only should bushco* be held accountable but also their collaborators in Congress. We need to make sure 2006 is a veritable House cleaning. Literally.

2006: Time for a House Cleaning!

[cliss]

4. (dad closes his story book) OK, kids.

The Moral of the story is:

"Do not count on your government to save you, even care for you in the slightest way. You are on your own. When Bush came into office, it became "Darwin's Law".

----------------------
The key sentence here is, "anyone watching this storm" would have known. There is your answer. No one in the Bush group was watching, because they didn't care. They were on vacation.

[DinahMoeHum]

5. ". . .nobody knew who was in charge. . ." Contrast this to Clinton's FEMA

when the parties involved were on the same page:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/07/fema/print.html
(need a day pass if you're not a subscriber)

(snip)
Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with (James Lee)Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," (George)*Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."

Close coordination with state officials was key to the Clinton administration's capacity to act quickly in the heat of a disaster, Haddow says. "We had a really solid partnership, so we received solid, timely information from the ground. Then we managed that information and turned it into a mission assignment." In other words, when people on the ground needed something, they knew who in the federal government to ask, and when the federal government had extra resources at the ready -- cops from Chicago, say, or water from Wal-Mart -- it would know where to send them. Contrast that situation to what happened after Katrina, when both Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, the FEMA director, admitted to several reporters that they had no idea that people were starving at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the grim scene there had been played and replayed on television all day.
(snip)

FYG:
* James Lee Witt was head of FEMA during the Clinton Administration.
George Haddow was deputy chief of staff at FEMA.