by Christopher Cooper and Robert Block (ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8130-5) pretty much explains why it was all George Bush's fault.
I just finished reading it and it points out for instance that:
1) The Federal Gov't had numerous warnings regarding the disaster that would occur if the levies failed in N.O. including Hurricanes Betsy, Georges, and Ivan.
2) The Federal Gov't ran a disaster drill involving a fictitious "Hurricane Pam" that predicted thousands of deaths if the levies failed and which pointed out numerous shortcomings in FEMA and DHS.
3) The Federal Gov't glossed over many deficiencies during the Pam drill by magically promising supplies that they couldn't actually deliver, thereby lulling the State agencies in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into believing that they would not have to worry.
4) Substantial portions of LA, AL, and MS National Guard units were stationed in Iraq rather than being available for duty in the affected storm region.
5)The Pentagon has forced National Guard units to abandon substantial amounts of equipment to regular Army troops in Iraq when they rotate back to the states, thus leaving them short on equipment.
6) The Federal Gov't restructuring of FEMA to place it under DHS removed it from direct contact with the President - greatly inhibiting it's ability to be effective because it could no longer communicate directly with him and use his clout to get things done. Now requests had to go up and down the chain of command and much got filtered out.
7) James Lee Witt was replaced with no-nothing political cronies of George W. Bush who had no practical experience with natural disasters and viewed them in an entirely different manner than Witt, who looked upon it as a duty to be there fast and in force during the Clinton administraiton.
8) Once FEMA was folded into DHS, its mission of natural disasters was treated as unimportant and much money and clout was taken from this role to be dispersed into much less likely "terrorism" based scenarios when any common sense analysis says that hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and earthquakes are the real mass disaster threats that Americans face - not all these obscure harebrained notions you hear about on FoxNews like poison pen guns, etc.
9) As FEMA's money and clout was stolen by DHS, many of its key people quit in disgust and joined state agencies and private firms around the country -causing FEMA to lose much of its experience and expertise.
10) The President and the Administration's natural tendency is to disregard the media and to treat them as irrelevant - choosing to use their own intelligence sources and wild imaginations instead of media reports, man on the ground reports, or common sense.
Thus they didn't believe the levies had broken at first and refused to face the magnitude of the disaster - classic denial.
It's a pattern we saw with the August PDB before 9/11 and on 9/11 itself, and then in Iraq and finally in Katrina.
11) The wild stories about rapes, murder and lawlessness were not investigated for their validity and caused FEMA to pull it's staff out of the Superdome when they were desperately needed.
12) It took several days to establish a unified command even within the Federal effort in N.O. due to bureaucratic infighting and incompetence in the Federal agencies.
13) The only Federal agencies really on the ball were the Coast Guard and the National Weather Service.
14) Ultimately, the President received an ample and extremely vivid warning about the nature and extent of the catastrophe that was about to befall N.O. from Max Mayfield, who heads the National Hurricane Center but stood by in "deer in the headlights" paralysis because he failed to understand that there are poor people in this country who have no car, have no money, and have no way out if he didn't help.
When I watched Bush speak from Jackson Square about all he was going to do to "fix things" two weeks after the storm, I was reminded of Haley Osmont telling Bruce Willis his secret in the Sixth Sense "I see dead people"... well in George Bush's case - after the fact - he suddenly "saw black people..they were everywhere" - unfortunately, Bush couldn't manage to see them BEFORE the storm.
15) Finally, having read this book, and also reading Brinkley's "The Great Deluge",having seen numerous Katrina documentaries on TV including Spike Lee's "When the Levies Broke - A Requiem in Four Parts" along with various documentaries on TV regarding Bush's incompetent response to 9/11 I'm reminded of the quote from another Bruce Willis movie, Armageddon, when General Kinsey says:
"We spend two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year on defense, and here we are, the fate of the planet is in the hands of a bunch of retards I wouldn't trust with a potato gun!"
http://www.wavlist.com/movies/085/http://www.wavlist.com/movies/085/agd-retards.wav (look for this at the bottom of the page - you can't just use it from here.. it gives error 500's.)
Doug D.
Orlando, FL
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