Brown Ignored Disaster Plan, New Report Says

[spindrifter]

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006

Michael D. Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, deliberately ignored a new national disaster plan and circumvented his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in trying to manage the federal response to Hurricane Katrina directly with the White House, according to a new House report.

By disregarding the National Response Plan, finished in 2004, Brown deprived "the nation of an opportunity to determine whether the NRP worked," the House investigation concludes in an addendum to its Feb. 15 report, "A Failure of Initiative," scheduled for release today.

<snip>

Virtually everyone in the White House who had anything of operational significance to do with" Katrina has been "put off limits," he wrote. "This has left us unable to obtain any real sense of what the White House did or didn't do."

Lieberman said a Congressional Research Service review found 75 cases in which top presidential aides -- including chiefs of staff, White House counsels and National Security advisers -- testified to legislative investigators since 1926.

<snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502320.html

Interesting continuation of the hatchet job on Brown, plus new info. re executive privilege issue.

[Kagemusha]

1. As I said last time this article came up

I don't think Brown is a saint. Yes, this is a hatchet job. But both sides are hatcheting each other - their criticisms of one another likely have oodles of truth to them. So they're all incompetents.