Why this administration has failed (again)...

[nyhuskyfan]

There is no way to avoid the fact that bad things will happen when you are president. It's the way life is. Natural disasters occur, bad people do bad things. No president can guarantee 100 percent safety from anything.

Could 9/11 have been prevented? We'll never know for sure (unless LIHOP or MIHOP is someday proven). Could the damage from Katrina been reduced? You can make that case, but it's tough to prove something that's hypothetical.

All I think that you ask from your leadership is the reassurance that everything possible is being done to protect its citizens. When threats loom, you have a REPSONSIBLITY to prepare for the worst. You can hope or pray for the best, but you make damn sure that you are prepared for the worst-case scenario for the good of the citizens.

If Bush had taken the Hart/Rudman report and Richard Clarke's advice seriously, and actually taken tangible measures in response to the August 6 PDB, then I would have virtually no reason to hold 9/11 against them. But they didn't. They chose to ignore everything. No daily meetings the way Clinton had when building up to the Millennium bomb theat. Nothing.

On the actual day of 9/11, word comes of a hijacking at 8:30 and nothing is done. No jets scrambled. Nobody is on high alert. Then the first plane hits at 8:48. No jets scrambled. Nobody leaves Florida classrooms to get all necessary information on what's happening. We are supposedly in a period of heightened state of alert (the system was blinking red) a hijacking takes place and nobody reacts? The WTC gets hit by a plane and nobody reacts?

Once again, as a leader, you should immediately prepare for the worst. If you scramble jets and get the military on the scene and it turns out it was just some crazy cook in a single-engine plane who wanted to die and not even a single WTC window was broken, then you can breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe you spend a little money on jet fuel, but you also get a very realistic training exercise on how to handle potential threats. Then you can study reaction time and where breakdowns in communication took place so that you can perform better the next time. But if these measures had been taken immediately, maybe the second tower could have been spared. Or maybe the Pentagon.

So what happens this weekend? Katrina was obviously a looming threat for a week. The threat kept materializing and kept getting worse, peaking on Sunday evening when the storm reached a Category 5 with New Orleans dead in its sights.

Once again, responsible leadership should spend the 48 or so hours building up to that point PREPARING for the worst, and increasing their preparations as the threat got larger. That means available national guard or military activated, that means emergency plans to evacuate people are instituted, that means relief ships on call in Texas or Florida where they can get there within hours of the Hurricane passing through with supplies or to transport people to safety. If the storm weakens and the damage is minimal, you were at least ready for it -- and again, you could evaluate what was done and maybe create task forces to study areas need improving for the next big storm threat. You don't wait and see what happens and then make efforts to act on behalf of your citizens.

If the Millennium bombing occurred at LAX, it would have been tragic, but I would have been reassured to know that Clinton was meeting with his staff daily to deal with the threat and that all important people were on a heightened state of alert. You can do everything in your power, and bad things can still happen.

With this administration, though, they don't do a damn thing until well after the fact. And they are always, always too late. They are always reading children's books or hiding in Nebraska or strumming a guitar or something other than taking care of their citizens. If this administration did everything they could to prepare for Katrina (including ending vacation) and there were still a few hundred people killed, you couldn't criticize them. If they had met every day after the August 6 APB and 9/11 still happened, you could at least be reassured that the effort was there to prevent it.

Some things are out of your control. This administration, though, consistently fails at the things that it can control.

[Imalittleteapot]

1. Your words have been on all of our minds.

Great post.

[deutsey]

2. Now explain why they keep getting away with crap like this

:evilfrown:

[nyhuskyfan]

3. I would, but my wrists are tired from typing angrily...

Plus, I have no idea.

The most damning sentence in the entire 9/11 commission report almost never gets discussed. I believe it was on p. 262-263. I am paraphrasing here, but it mentioned the August 6 PDB and then says that there is no tangible record of any communication between the president and any of his staff members regarding the contents of the memo before 9/11.

That's right. No communication. No periodic updates. No exchange of ideas. No reports of suspicious activitiy (i.e. Moussaoui). Nothing.

Maybe Bush should have stayed longer at the Boy Scouts convention this summer. He might have remembered that "Be Prepared" slogan and actually done something this time.

[deutsey]

5. Sickening

:evilfrown:

[nyhuskyfan]

6. I wish I had the exact line...

When I read the 9/11 report, I thought that one sentence was damning, and nobody in the media ever discussed it. Just a couple left-leaning blogs.

[nyhuskyfan]

4. An addendum...

That blatant lack of preparedness is also clearly evident in the Iraq War as well. They prepared for the best case scenario (flowers and chocolates) and got stuck with their pants down and no exit strategy when the scenario didn't play out that way.