Subscribe"The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night....How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less 'situational awareness,' as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace."
"President Bush recently gave an hour-long exclusive interview to Fox TV anchor Brit Hume, who tossed him a series of softball questions.If he had only glanced at the cover of at least one newspaper on Tuesday morning -- the day following the hurricane's hitting the Gulf Coast!
Among them, Bush was asked how he gets his news. Answer: He relies on briefings by chief of staff Andrew Card and national security affairs adviser Condoleezza Rice.
He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, Bush said, and asks Card: 'What's in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving,' Bush said. 'I rarely read the stories,' he said." [Hearst Newspapers | October 15, 2003].
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.Godwin!
In 2004, George W. Bush and FEMA left little room for error. Not long after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.
Bush later made a handful of other Florida visits to review storm-related damage, but the story on the ground was not Bush’s hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA’s performance.
Charley hit on a Friday. With emergency supply trucks pre-positioned at depots for rapid, post-storm deployment, the agency was able to deliver seven truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies by Sunday. On Monday, hundreds of federal housing inspectors were on the ground, and FEMA already had opened its first one-stop disaster relief center.
"Amid a slew of stories this weekend about the embattled presidency and the blundering government response to the drowning of New Orleans, some journalists who are long-time observers of the White House are suddenly sharing scathing observations about President Bush that may be new to many of their readers.
Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?
Maybe not so much.
Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.
Maybe it's Bush's sinking poll numbers -- he is, after all, undeniably an unpopular president now. Maybe it's the way that the federal response to the flood has cut so deeply against Bush's most compelling claim to greatness: His resoluteness when it comes to protecting Americans.
But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere.
An emperor-has-no-clothes moment seems upon us." [The Washington Post | September 12, 2005]
The president says that he is not sure that global warming is a real threat. He says that he is not ready to do anything meaningful to prepare us for a threat that he's not certain is real. He tells us that he believes the science of global warming is in dispute. This is the same president who said last week, "Nobody could have predicted that the levees would break."Al Gore on Katrina and Global Warming
"As the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down yesterday, government documents surfaced showing that vital resources, such as buses and environmental health specialists, weren't deployed to the Gulf region for several days, even after federal officials seized control of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
...internal documents and emails from FEMA and other government agencies dating back to Aug. 31 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the extent to which the federal government bungled its response to the hurricane. The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events. Mr. Chertoff activated the National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina an 'Incident of National Significance.'
The plan, which was rolled out to much fanfare in January, essentially enables Washington to move federal assets to the disaster without waiting for requests from state officials. It then funnels help from all federal agencies through a single point of contact -- usually the secretary of homeland security -- a reform demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In one instance, federal environmental health specialists, who were charged with protecting both rescue workers and evacuees, weren't called in by the Department of Homeland Security until Sunday -- 12 days after the Occupational Safety & Health Administration announced it had teams from various agencies standing by ready to assist. Even now, with mounting evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort.
Homeland Security officials said that when Mr. Chertoff declared Katrina a nationally significant event, all provisions of the National Response Plan -- including ones for health and safety -- were activated. 'This is the first test of the NRP and we will have lessons learned,' said Valerie Smith, a department spokeswoman.
In addition, FEMA's official requests, known as tasking assignments and used by the agency to demand help from other government agencies, show that it first asked the Department of Transportation to look for buses to help evacuate the more than 20,000 people who had taken refuge at the Superdome in New Orleans at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31. At the time, it only asked for 455 buses and 300 ambulances for the enormous task. Almost 18 hours later, it canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, 'the DOT doesn't do ambulances.'
FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,355 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving on the first day.
Hours before FEMA realized that it needed buses, Jonathan L. Snare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, said he was prepared to offer the full resources of the agency to help protect the safety and health of workers responding to Katrina.
Health and safety experts play an important role by testing the environment at a disaster for toxins, disease and pathogens. They then advise rescue workers about needs for protective clothing for themselves as well as for the people they are trying to move from harm's way.
The National Response Plan gives OSHA responsibility to coordinate efforts to protect and monitor disaster workers and victims from environmental hazards.
But the part of the plan that authorizes OSHA's role as coordinator and allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn't activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.
Attempts by officials at NIH to reach FEMA officials and send them briefing materials by email failed as the agency's server failed.
'I noticed that every email to a FEMA person bounced back this week. They need a better internet provider during disasters!!' one frustrated Department of Health official wrote to colleagues last Thursday.
By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.
No reason has been offered by either FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security for the delay in activating OSHA's role.
Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis." [Wall Street Journal - requires subscription | September 13, 2005]
"The President told me the last time I spent time with him that he does not watch the evening newscasts...and prefers instead to watch ESPN or 'any baseball game' on television..."
"Bush was asked how he gets his news. Answer: He relies on briefings by chief of staff Andrew Card and national security affairs adviser Condoleezza Rice.
He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, Bush said, and asks Card: 'What's in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving,' Bush said. 'I rarely read the stories,' he said."
"The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One." [Newsweek]
« Older The Ashes. Five days have given England it's firs... | Photowhispering...... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
![](http://static.flickr.com/22/41265063_51d14bb455.jpg?v=0")
posted by wakko at 2:06 PM on September 12, 2005