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Friday, February 10, 2006

The Bush Administration New Orleans Land Grab
Posted by Jill | 6:41 AM

So which is it? Is it:


  1. Complete and utter incompetence
  2. A callous disregard for mostly minority human life right here in the US
  3. A flagrant land grab, the goal being to remove as many minority Democrats as possible from Louisiana


Them's the choices, folks. Because here is what the Administration whose followers are aghast at the outrage shown at Coretta Scott King's funeral is responsible for:

Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.


"Flawed"? Think about the people stranded on their roofs for days. Think about the bodies that are still being found amidst the sludge and the filth in the Ninth Ward. Think about the people who are going to be evicted from hotels and have no money, no homes, and no place to go. Think about the disapora of people, scattered throughout the fifty states, who know that they can never go back to the homes that have been in their families for generations. Think about people like Eric Rice, who has devoted the last five months to rescuing the thousands of pets left behind.

Now think about a president who, even AFTER being informed that New Orleans was flooded, went before the cameras and said "No one anticipated the breach of the levees."

Every day, another lie told by George W. Bush is revealed. This Administration has been built on lies -- lies about war, lies about terrorism, lies about the worst natural disaster in this country in the last 100 years.

In the 1990's, we had the luxury of obsessing about a president who lied about a tawdry extramarital affair. Back then, the same people who are lining up in constant and loyal defense of this travesty of a president were finding whatever microphone and camera they could find and shrieking about the rule of law and the need for a president to be truthful, because otherwise what would we tell the children?

Now, we have a botched war without end, rumblings of an expanded war into Iran and Syria, a major American city in ruins, a national security apparatus that is doing NOTHING to keep this country safe and EVERYTHING to intimidate Americans into paranoia about being under constant surveillance. And a president who lies with impunity.

So where is the outrage now? Why isn't Chris Matthews screaming about this the way he screamed about Bill Clinton's sex life? Why are lies about consensual sex more important to Americans than lies that affect people's lies?

Is it because there are SO MANY LIES that we can't keep track of them anymore? Are we so suffering from lie-fatigue that we lack the strength anymore to hold these criminals in the U.S. government to account?
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