The Maestro at Work
Sep 5th, 2005 at 1:13 am by Susie
Via Laura Rozen at War and Piece, from the Times:
The New York Times reveals that it is Karl Rove orchestrating efforts to falsely blame Louisiana state and local officials for the primarily federal failure to more swiftly and effectively respond to the flooding in New Orleans:
In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
“The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. “The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”
That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.
In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.
Laura notes:
No accountability, long vacations, dereliction of duty. See the top-of-the-fold Washington Post correction –necessitated by the paper’s conveying of an anonymous White House source’s blatant lie — as described in the post below for details. Is there no amount of destruction of human life that would chasten the Bush administration from ducking accountability?
Check out this document that Larry Johnson has found, a National (disaster) Response Plan that the administration promulgated last December which seems to say explicitly that in the event of a catastrophic disaster the federal government need not wait for any explicit request for the local authorities in the affected regions.
In a related story, Duncan says how very odd that Newsweek and the Washington Post had the same bald-faced lie in both of their stories - that the Louisiana governor delayed declaring a state of emergency.
First the Post, and now Newsweek. Will our press come clean on which sources in the administration are lying to the press as a part of an orchestrated CYA operation - priority one, apparently, as people continue to die - or, will they continue to value access over truth.
There are two stories here. One is the competing narrative of who is actually to blame for what has gone wrong. That can be established by a careful analysis of the actual facts. The second is the competing lies in pursuit of the first.
I remember when nothing offended the press more than lying about sex. Apparently such lies are much less important than lying about who is responsibile for the miserable failure we’re now witnessing.
For shame, Washington Post. For shame, Newsweek. There’s little reason to trust anything which appears in their pages anymore, especially those “facts” attributed to “administration officials.” They’re allowed to lie, and keep lying.
I don’t know if that’s the way to look at it. I prefer to think they have so much respect for the truth, they use it only on special occasions.
Disgusting….as per usual. When will enough Americans be disgusted enough?
Never as long as the White House puppet masters control the American media. It’s no wonder I have been watching the BBC and ZDF to find out what is really happening in this country.
too bad judy’s still in jail or it could have been 3 papers
Now I know why Jeb made the annoucement the day before Katrina hit south Florida that he was declaring a state of emergency. He knew what the NPR says and made sure that Florida was covered. I wonder what would have happened if the strike in South Florida was worse. It would have to be one heck of a respone from the Feds to have to cover both areas. I also wonder who would have gotten the first response, Florida of the northern Gulf coast?
I think it’s supposed to be “bald-faced lie”, rather than “bold-faced lie.”
Think of Rove’s and Cheney’s faces, not type faces.
Note please the following link:
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/leftbehind_1.html
That was the official New Orleans evac plan before the hurricane. Long before. Said evacuation plan was supposed to be passed out on DVDs to local black churches. The message was — we can’t help evacuate you.
That’s a failure of state and local officials, not the feds. Also, it’s more complicated than most people would like to acknowledge. Monday, it looked like NO wasn’t going to flood — at least not this extent — the breaches did not occur until Tuesday, so priority (and resources) were initially shifted elsewhere.
If you want to blame someone, blame the locals — not the Feds. Simply put, FEMA prepositioned resources before Katrina — and sent them — to Mississippi and Alabama. After, Biloxi and Gulfport were utterly and truly devasted. Some towns over there simply washed away.
NO didn’t happen until Tuesday, and it takes time to shift resources again. Finally, the sheer magnitude — no one in the history of America evacuated a major city *after* a natural disaster. Not even 100,000 people. At least, not without days of warning and such, which usually happens in, say, Florida, with Andrew or Charleston with Hugo. People get out of the way of hurricanes fairly easily in large numbers (generally). But the problem here is, the locals didn’t plan to evacuate them anyway.
Further compounding the problem, the hurricane came and went, and then the levees broke. It’s one thing to try to evacuate 100k people who are elderly, infirm, have no transport, etc., in good weather with all the resources of a normal city. It’s another to make that attempt after a devastating hurricane. Finally, it’s another level of problem entirely to try to evacuate them after a devastating hurricane has gone over and shut down most major highways, while an entire city is filling up with water. There’s simply no comparison in modern history to this, except perhaps the Galvaston tragedy in 1900.
This storm was *big* — bigger than Andrew, and nailed a lot more territory, not to mention devastating transportation infrastructure generally.
The logistics of such an evacuation before Katrina were possible. Not easy, but doable — however, that was a local/state responsibility, not a federal one. Federal jursidiction could not be invoked prior to the disaster, and calling up the National Guard is a state rather than federal act.
However, after Katrina passed over, attempting such an evacuation on Monday or Tuesday was simply not possible. There were not enough non-fixed-wing air assets (e.g. helicopters) between the military and civilian sectors in the entire southeast to do this. There certainly was not enough bases and fuel nearby to set up forward staging areas in less than about 2 days. After all, Keesler AFB is still practically underwater. Ditto the NASes down there, and the military had to move all their birds from the Gulf, Texas, Arkansas, Missisippi, and Alabama to avoid destruction of their assets. Ditto commercial carriers. To stage an evac after Katrina came through would simply not be possible.
To do an evacuation under those circumstances, at least a 72-hour window was necessary. Sure enough, on Friday - Saturday the federal response got there. And it worked.
People that criticize the disaster response — understand that had the evacuation occurred prior to Katrina’s landfall (on, say Saturday), it could have happened. After that, it simply was not in any way possible.
Forward operating bases to replace existing devastated infrastructure had to be created, fuel had to be trucked in, roads and bridges had to be inspected and/or repaired (possibly some bridging units in the area (military) would have helped, but pontoon bridges have difficult times with 30 ton trucks). Again, all takes at least 72 hours.
The locals can be fairly criticized on several fronts. One, they did not tell all residents to stock a 5-day supply of food, medicine, and the like. Two, they did not set up an evacuation plan prior to Katrina. Third, they did not utilize available local assets (e.g. all those school buses in that infamous picture on Junkyard blog) before the disaster, and they did not disperse their assets to higher ground so that their survival would be assured in the event of flooding. A school bus with blown out windows will still run. A flooded one will not.
State level: NG was not mobilized fast enough.
However, again … it was not clear until Tuesday the extent of levee damage and the flooding. Resources were initially shifted to AL/Miss where the damage was initially worse and more severe.
The NOPD can simply not be excused. At least 200 officers walked off the job and at least 2 shot themselves. Current National Guard estimates are that up to 1/2 of the NOPD walked off their jobs. They were already underpaid and understaffed … and they problems with police recruits having criminal backgrounds (to Nagin’s credit, he was working on this issue). However, local reports again have the police doing much of the looting themselves.
The locals screwed up beyond belief by not stocking the Superdome and other shelters of ‘last resort’ with food and blankets ahead of time, and putting the generators above ground level.
Hosptials failed to put their generators above the flood water levels (e.g. third floor). Again, local failure to require it through building codes and the like.
One can argue about levees and funding until one is blue in the face, but the fact remains that levee maintenance was a local task, and all levees had boards. Frankly, upgrading the levee system to withstand a Cat. 5 hurricane was estimated to cost 2.5-5 billion dollars and take 15 years. Therefore, a failure on all levels — local, stae, and federal, can be blamed for this. However — no administration — Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, or Bush II, tried to fix this problem. Bush II can be properly be accused of failing to adequately fund new design studies for improved levees — but this would not have made a difference in the Katrina disaster. Bush II also cut funding to restore barrier islands and marshlands, but those work by containing the storm surge. The levee failures were not caused by surge but rather by water levels *and saturation of the ground*.
In the end, is there blame to go around? Yes. But please note that the response time of the Feds was still faster than in Hugo and Andrew, the only comparable situations in the last decade or two. Also, it was at least as fast as any respponse to Florida in the last year. Also note, Florida learned over two decades and nearly $40 billion in property damage that hurricanes were to be feared. New Orleans didn’t get hit very badly by Georges or any other major storm in the last few years, and the locals took to ignoring the messages.
Finally, the behavior of the local denizens of NO is not to be excused. They should have been teaming together to help their neighbors (note difference to say Kobe earthquake in Japan — federal response there took two weeks to get organized, the citizens helped each other). Instead, looting and all kinds of mayhem took place, and the city descended into anarchy.
Blame deserves to be circulated, all right. But people need to stop using the President as the gold standard of all relief.
The whole system of relief in the US is set up in escalating tiers — the locals go first, when they get overwhelmed, they call the state. The state then proceeds to call on multi-state compacts for National Guard and the like, and then if it’s still overwhelming, call the federal government to come in. It’s not designed for proactive federal disaster management. Indeed, unless Bush II were to declare martial law and suspend habeas corpus, federalizing the Guard and taking over the disaster management would be quite problematic legally.
And despite all the protestations on both sides of the Aisle about how badly the disaster was managed, I believe a declaration of martial law would be far worse.
[...] Karl Rove (who somehow still has a job) is instead trying to play pin the blame on the Democrats. Apparently, the fact the President is so out of touch he doesn’t even know where to direct people to get aid isn’t the issue. The fact a Democrat is both the mayor of New Orleans and Gov. of La., however, is. From the New York Times: In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats. [...]