More echoes of Bush Administration response to 9/11: "No one could have anticipated..."

“I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon. [No one predicted] that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,"
-- Rice, CBS News, 5/17/02

Condoleeza Rice testimony before the 9/11 Commission, May 13, 2004:

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

George W. Bush, on Good Morning America today:

"I want people to know that there is help coming. 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 - and now we're having to deal with it, and we will."

They don't anticipate anything, do they? Not even when the evidence is right in front of them.

We've already seen the FACTS of the Bush Administration's gutting of Army Corps of Engineers projects to shore up the Levees in New Orleans. Perhaps no one in the Administration could have predicted that a hurricane of the magnitude of Katrina might strike the Gulf coast at Louisiana, breaking the levees and causing the entire Delta to flood. But if they couldn't, it's because they're incompetent, idiots, or both. Because plenty of people HAVE predicted just that.

Here's National Geographic in October 2004:

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"

SCIENTISTS have known for a long time that the Delta was in peril. But of course, the Bush Administration don't need no es-teenking science -- not when it might affect corporate profits, or tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, or when it might offend the Christofascist Zombie Brigade.

What we see in New Orleans and in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi is what happens when the warnings of scientsists are ignored because of greed, or misplaced religious faith. The Bush Administration's contempt for science, its disregarding of everything it doesn't want to believe, its carelessness, and its placing of its political agenda above all else, have now resulted in not one but TWO American tragedies.

Anyone who can't see this is either willfully blind, or else is so emotionally fragile that admitting they were wrong might make them fall apart into dust.