Department of Homeland Screw-Up

[cjolley]

Good Point

...
How is it possible that with the fourth anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, the federal government doesn't have in hand the capability to prepare for and then manage a large urban disaster, natural or man-made? In terms of the challenge to government, there is little difference between a terrorist attack that wounds many people and renders a significant portion of a city uninhabitable, and the fallout this week from the failure of one of New Orleans' major levees. Indeed, a terrorist could have chosen a levee for his target. Or a dirty-bomb attack in New Orleans could have caused the same sort of forced evacuation we are seeing and the widespread sickness that is likely to follow. Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security demonstrated today that it could organize an impressive press conference in Washington, lining up every participating civilian or military service from the Coast Guard to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to promise its cooperation. But on the ground in Louisiana, where it counts, DHS is turning out to be the sum of its inefficient parts. The department looks like what its biggest critics predicted: a new level of bureaucracy grafted onto a collection of largely ineffectual under-agencies.

What has DHS been doing if not readying itself and its subcomponents for a likely disaster? The collapse of a New Orleans levee has long led a list of worst-case urban crisis scenarios...

...
And in the event of a WMD attack, when there would likely be no warning at all, what is DHS's contingency plan for moving into position the army or the marines to restore order and sustain life? In the wake of Katrina and the breached levee, the answer seems to be not much of one. In the wake of 9/11, that is worse than incomprehensible. It is unforgivable.

[VJ]

Even worse: the hurricane was predicted a couple of days in advance. Everybody know it was going to hit. To me it would seem that a couple of days are ample time to make rescue gear/personel available and ready; perhaps even to get it closer to New Orleans.
Time is a 'luxury' one doesn't have with some other nature disasters or attacks, yet they didn't seem to have used this 'luxury' in the Katrina-hurricane...


Jörg

[Gurm]

What has DHS been doing if not readying itself and its subcomponents for a likely disaster?

Arresting innocent civilians, holding them without due process, ruining their lives, and then releasing them without so much as an apology.

(And before you say I'm overreacting - it's already happened to one New York Lawyer!)

[cjolley]

Same song different dance

When the levee breaks

At a press conference a few months after 9/11, Condoleezza Rice said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted" that someone would try to use "a hijacked airplane as a missile." It turns out that she was wrong. Someone could have predicted it, and someone did: Long before 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration had considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon, and the agency specifically warned airports of the possibility in 2001.

Which brings us, somehow, to George W. Bush's appearance this morning on "Good Morning America." There, the president said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded."

We're not sure which "anybody" the president has in mind -- and we suppose maybe the president was being extraordinarily careful to distinguish between a "breach" of the levees as opposed to a more general overrunning of them -- but perhaps the White House might want to consult a few clips we found in about five minutes worth of Googling today:

The Associated Press, Aug. 31, 2005: "Even as Katrina approached, experts like Louisiana State University's Ivor van Heerden warned of a pending 'incredible environmental disaster.' He predicted the levees would be overwhelmed and much of the city would be turned into a giant, stagnant pool contaminated with debris, sewage and other hazardous materials."

The Houston Chronicle, Aug, 31, 2005: "Local officials said that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection -- including fortifying homes, building up levees and repairing barrier islands -- the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."

The Associated Press, Aug. 29, 2005: "Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep New Orleans dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm."

[Nowhere]

I've read somewhere that apparently some study from last year that pointed out to crumbling levies in New Orlean indicated somehow that the money for repairs have been redirected to homeland security and Iraq war by current administration...
I don't know if its true...don't have enough time to search and don't know where...

But this would be good example of "long term" vs. "short term" planning for the economy if it's true...

[cjolley]

Anatomy of an unnatural disaster
With FEMA gutted for Homeland Security and flood projects delayed for lack of funding, the New Orleans nightmare should surprise no one. By Michael Scherer

Sept. 1, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Eric Tolbert, a former top disaster response official in the Bush administration, knew a calamity like Hurricane Katrina would be coming, sooner or later. And he also knew that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he worked until February, was not ready to properly respond. There were too few full-time employees, not enough contracts in place to provide assistance, and a lack of money to do proper pre-planning. The added burden of the war on terror, he says, diverted funds away from FEMA's core mission.

"FEMA had to compete and had to help finance the creation of the Department of Homeland Security," Tolbert, who now works for PBS&J, a private contractor, said Thursday morning. "They were taking chunks of money out of the budget. We always referred to it as taxes."

Last summer, for instance, Tolbert said FEMA staged a "tabletop exercise" in Baton Rouge, La., to gauge how well it would respond if a Category 3 hurricane hit New Orleans. Officials learned a lot from the role-play, says Tolbert, and then returned to their offices to create a new plan to respond to an actual disaster in the region. "Unfortunately, we were not able to finish the plan," Tolbert said. The funding for it ran out.

FEMA is not the only agency that found itself bled of required funding by White House decisions after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Shortly after the attacks, the Army Corps of Engineers found itself facing deep cuts in funding for the largest flood control and drainage program in the New Orleans area. In the first full budget year after the attacks, the Bush administration funded the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, at only 20 percent of the Corps' request of $100 million. In fiscal year 2004, the White House funding came in at 17 percent of the request.

For each of these years, Congress, with the support of the Louisiana delegation, appropriated more money, but funding still came in far below the requirements. Work was delayed. Contractors worked without pay. Whole projects were put off. Local project managers complained that New Orleans was competing with the war in Iraq for funding. "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle Homeland Security and the war in Iraq," Walter Maestri, the emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune in 2004. Of the $500 million requested for levees, pumping stations and new drainage canals between 2001 and 2005, only $249 million passed out of Congress. As recently as March, the Corps warned in a briefing memo that the funding shortfalls "will significantly increase the cost of the project, delay project completion and delay project benefits."

"If the Army Corps capabilities for the SELA program had been fully funded, there is no question that Jefferson Parish and New Orleans would be in a much better position to remove the water on the streets once the pumps start working," says Hunter Johnston, a lobbyist for Johnston and Associates who worked to secure the money.

It is too early to tell, however, whether the additional funding would have prevented the levee breaches and overruns that have flooded New Orleans. Scientists, journalists and public officials have been warning for decades that New Orleans could not withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. Even SELA, which was started in the mid-1990s after flooding caused billions in damage, was designed to protect against smaller storms, though planners said it would reduce damages of "larger events."

"If you had engineered everything in America for a Category 5 hurricane, you could not have built anything," said Jimmy Hayes, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana, who now lobbies for federal funding. "There is never enough money."

According to Michael Zumstein, a Corps official working to drain New Orleans, both of the major levee breaches in New Orleans were caused by more water than the Corps' current plans, even if funded, could handle. "It's just the law of physics, that's all," he said, noting that the system was designed to withhold a slow-moving Category 2 or a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it hit land Monday morning. He said an unexpected break at the 17th Street Canal occurred 700 feet south of a bridge where the Corps recently completed a troubled construction project.

Flooding also occurred on the east side of New Orleans, in the St. Bernard Parish, an area that environmentalists have long warned would be susceptible to flooding because of a poorly designed canal built in the 1960s that joins the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1998, local politicians have been demanding that the so-called Mississippi River Gulf Outlet be closed, in part because it was allowing saltwater to destroy marshland, increasing the danger of a storm surge. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have been slow to respond to those demands, and earlier this week, the storm surge topped levees, flooding the parish, said Zumstein.

The same concerns have been voiced to justify more spending to restore Louisiana's coastline, which has been sinking into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of one football field every half hour. "Something needed to be done to protect the Louisiana coast for an eventuality not unlike this," says Chris Paolino, a spokesman for Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-La. "For the most part, it has been an unheeded cry by Louisiana." As recently as June, the Bush administration told the Senate that it opposed a provision in the energy bill that gave Gulf states about $1 billion to shore up their coastal protections, including possible levee and pump work. Despite the objections, Congress kept the provision in the final bill, but the money won't begin to arrive in states like Louisiana and Mississippi until 2008.

The scale of such funding is almost laughable now, considering the scope of the devastation in southern Louisiana and Mississippi. Politicians and lobbyists are just beginning to turn their attention to the massive cleanup and reconstruction bill, which will likely take years and cost tens of billions of dollars. But observers like Tolbert hope that the nation's leaders learn some lessons from the experience.

The blame, he says, lies not with the local and federal officials who warned for decades of the coming disaster. It lies with those elected officials who refused to sign the checks. "The country deserves better than that," he says.

[djroberts]

it was all George Bush's fault and the Will of Allah that New Orleans was destroyed

[cjolley]

it was all George Bush's fault and the Will of Allah that New Orleans was destroyed

Sorry guess I spoke out of turn.
Or, maybe not...

Remain silent!
As they've done after every crisis, right-wingers are insisting that to question the Bush administration is unpatriotic. But no one should be afraid to hold our incompetent leaders to account. By Joe Conason

Sept. 2, 2005 | For the third time since George W. Bush became president, Americans are paying a catastrophic price for bad government. As the costs are tallied once more in death and dollars, we are being told that the wise and patriotic thing to do is shut up -- as if good citizens are obliged to remain silent about unwise and incompetent leadership.

Honest political debate over how and why we lost the great city of New Orleans, according to the latest dictates from the right, means "an excess of recrimination," "finger-pointing" and "villain hunting." Such a "vulgar" exercise risks overshadowing our normal national unity and generosity in confronting disaster with "divisiveness" and "partisanship." We are piously advised instead to do good and find common ground, to "be humble, compassionate and helpful." Thus speak the sages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.

In short, we must simply write checks to the Red Cross and choke off any critical impulse.

Following such worthless advice would require us all to keep quiet even while the president of the United States again speaks falsely about matters of the utmost importance to the nation.

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America."

That statement was wholly untrue, as Sidney Blumenthal noted on Wednesday in Salon -- and as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the former chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency all tried to warn in recent years. Cutbacks in funding for flood control and emergency preparedness by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress over the past several years probably made a terrible event much worse.

The president's defenders can tolerate no discussion of those realities, however, because they have no plausible answers. Instead they urge us all to keep quiet or be accused of undermining America.

Does this all sound strangely familiar, like a nightmarish flashback?

A repetitive pattern is emerging whenever a terrible event occurs that is due at least partly to governmental incompetence. The president and other high officials offer deceptive utterances to excuse themselves. And reinforcing their self-serving statements is a chorus of admonishments from the right against any dissent or criticism.

After 9/11, the White House falsely claimed that there had been no warnings and that the Bush administration had been preparing for an attack by al-Qaida since its earliest days in office. Anyone who said otherwise -- or who merely wanted to investigate the underlying weaknesses that had enabled the attackers -- was a "partisan" seeking to "undermine the war on terror."

There was also, we should recall, much chatter back in those dark times about the wonderful unity and generosity of the nation. That is true now and was true then, as far as it went. Unfortunately, the "united we stand" spirit didn't survive the moment when, several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush advisor Karl Rove boasted to his fellow Republicans about his plan to use the war on terror to win the 2002 midterm elections.

The pattern continued with the invasion of Iraq, which has become a disastrous misadventure owing to the poor planning, inept management and mendacious propaganda of the White House. To examine the errors and lies that have landed our troops in quicksand and drained away hundreds of billions of dollars is to provide aid and comfort to America's enemies -- or so we have been warned, especially since the president's popularity ratings have been in free fall.

And now we are told that only bad people dare to criticize their bad government.

So we are not to mention the downgrading of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a Cabinet-level agency to a neglected sideline of the Department of Homeland Security. We must not say that FEMA was turned away from its mission when the president replaced its superb director, James Lee Witt, with political cronies who knew nothing about disaster planning. We cannot talk about the consistent underfunding of the Army Corps of Engineers, whose efforts to rebuild the Louisiana levees practically halted because of budget cuts last year. Above all, we must never, ever ask whether global warming might be making the annual perils of tropical weather systems much, much worse.

None of this is to say that the hurricane is "Bush's fault," which would obviously be unfair. But as with 9/11 and Iraq, the president and his administration deserve to be held accountable for poor judgment, damaging decisions and false statements.

Neither bullying bluster nor banal pieties can deter candid debate about federal emergency planning and funding, the underlying causes of harsher hurricanes over the past few decades, and the crippling domestic costs of an expensive, unnecessary foreign war. The right's capacity to intimidate has been much diminished by the proven lies and failures of this administration.

We are likely to face still more fearsome challenges, from natural disasters and human enemies, in the months and years to come. The governing style and habitual dishonesty of the Bush Republicans represent a severe danger to our future well-being. Nobody should be afraid to say so.

[djroberts]

IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT
THE INTRICACIES

By: William Kaliher

http://www.etherzone.com/2005/kali083105.shtml

Note to Readers: Entry 10 of Kaliher’s best-selling cookbook offers the following advice: Yankees, don’t sugar your grits.

Global warming, dirty drinking water,9-11 and other leftist fears can all satisfactorily be laid at the feet of President Bush, with of course, evil Republican help. Cindy Sheehan is but a chocolate drop on the Silver Bell conveyer belt of Bush-inspired Republican evil. Yet, even committed liberals have not fully understood how bad Bush's policies really are. In this article, I don’t cover Dick Cheney personally shooting holes in the ozone. I don’t whine about Condoleezza Rice raiding nursing homes to steal old people’s food from the pantries. I don’t concentrate on Dick Rumsfeld causing Hollywood stars to soil their clothes. Instead, I expose the Bush evil and how it hits the little man, how the President’s diabolical plans can directly affect you and me.

It's all Bush's fault, even the death of Fillipee PeeDee Rickenbaker. He was a normal, Democrat kind of guy: two short stretches in prison for petty larceny and the occasional crack use. He'd mellowed out. Four years ago, Fillipee was enjoying life on welfare. The only stress in life was going out to vote Democrat every two years. Even that wasn’t too bad as he was often able to score a little extra money, cigarettes or wine for his vote. Beyond that sacred duty, there was little to do between welfare payments but drink beer and chase cheap women. Life was good for Fillipee. Then Bush had to cut taxes.

With the tax cut, more and better paying jobs appeared. It soon became apparent to Fillipee he could no longer afford even cheap women. Before he knew it, even the girly men were denying him their somewhat jaded company. A diet of beer and no women was something Fillipee PeeDee Rickenbaker could not abide. Hornyness drove him from his couch in front of the all-day porn channel and onto the job market.

Once off his ass Fillipee rapidly advanced in the working world. Before he knew it, he bought a coat, tie and even socks to increase his capitalistic effectiveness. As he moved among women free of destructive bacterial and viral infections, he felt life was better--little realizing he'd fallen for G.W.'s most seductive and insidious plan.

Washing daily with soap and water, the ability to afford beer served in a glass were new and enjoyable to Fillipee. He realized he could actually increase his success rate with these infection-free women if he had transportation. And what was holding this emerging businessman back? Nothing! Absolutely nothing and Fillipee went to Honest Mr. Wang's Used car lot.

After an hour of haggling, Fillipee pulled out of Wang's lot driving his very own two-year-old SUV. As he sped past his old neighborhood, he thought about voting Republican during the next election. It never occurred to Fillipee that what he thought was his good fortune was only part of the vile and nefarious Bush Republican plan to finish him off.




Fillipee never considered that somewhere in the background, were elite liberals worrying about him. These liberals had such good intentions for the world that had any of them considered the possibility God existed, they’d be certain he'd actually be trying to accomplish what they were doing. That's right, save people by keeping them on their couches drinking beer and enjoying cheap women. These blessed, noble, caring, ultra-leftist men and woman had been working for years, blocking oil exploration on land and in the sea. They'd worked day and night to stop all nuclear facilities and prevent the construction of new oil refineries. They’d done all they could to keep gas prices high to prevent people from driving and perhaps endangering themselves.

Fillipee knew none of this as he pulled in and filled up his SUV. Damn, he thought $2.52 a gallon. If it gets to $2.70 I'll have to only drive my new, used SUV to get to work. However, despite all the effort by America's beloved liberals, Fillipee was making enough money to drive.

Had he been watching the socialist news programs instead of Latisha’s super-haunches on porn television, he'd have realized the danger of owning an SUV--but he hadn't. Instead when he reached Tenth Street cruising along at 85 mph, he was completely unprepared for the SUV’s Republican inspired abilities. The large gas guzzling vehicle swerved onto the sidewalk, mowing down two ugly guys in drag, then fish-tailed and swerved, throwing Fillipee about until he was buck-naked.

While Fillipee thought: Holy Moly where’s my pants and the brakes, the SUV picked up speed and headed north before screeching to a halt in front of United Auto Workers, 109. A hundred and fifteen men and women had just left the hall as the force of the SUV’s sudden stop hurled Fillipee toward the windshield where he presented a pressed ham to the stunned rank-and-file.

Before they could stop oohing and ahing at the pale moon before them the crazed SUV made a rapid cop-around and sped south. Fillipee, highly embarrassed, righted himself and tried to gain control of the unwieldy auto. Sadly his attempts were futile. The SUV crashed into the river, drowning poor, old Fillipee PeeDee Rickenbaker.

Yes, my brother liberals, we must work harder to keep oil prices skyrocketing. Had we closed down one more refinery or somehow stopped the last pipeline, we could have added another fifteen cents to the price of gasoline and Fillipee PeeDee Rickenbaker would be alive today. It’s not just oil Bush is using for his evil. It’s everything possible. We brothers, sisters and significant others of the left must confront him at every turn. We must slow the economy more and make gas prices even higher. Just think how many Fillipee PeeDee Rickenbaker’s there are who we can get safely back on the couch in front of the porn channel.

Related cartoon:
THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

[The PIT]

What are you lot on.


Help the poeple then sort out the blame. I can do **** all over here but if you need a donateion no problem.

[Victorian]

IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT
THE INTRICACIES

By: William Kaliher

http://www.etherzone.com/2005/kali083105.shtml

Note to Readers: Entry 10 of Kaliher’s best-selling cookbook offers the following advice: Yankees, don’t sugar your grits.

...snip...

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Well, that was certainly a crock of.....