When the Bush Administration took power in early 2001, outgoing Clinton Administration officials tried to communicate to the new folks the threat presented by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Bush Administration officials didn't listen because they decided anything which came from the Clinton Administration was automatically by definition bullshit. Then came the August 6 PDB. Then on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush, having already heard that one airplane had hit the World Trade Center, didn't connect the dots to the Clintonista warnings, but instead continued with his elementary school photo-op. After being told that a second plane had hit, and the country was definitely under attack, he sat for seven minutes and did nothing -- not even politely excuse himself, say he had important president-type things to do, and get himself out from using schoolchildren as human shields (which is what they would have been had the stories about Air Force One being under threat been true).
Fast forward to late August, 2005. George W. Bush is photographed in a meeting room in which a television set clearly shows Hurricane Katrina headed straight for the gulf coast. He does nothing. He continues his vacation, only cutting it short days later, after his continued apathy becomes a political liability.
Anyone see a pattern here?
Amazingly, a House report, due out Wednesday, does:
Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.
A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government, according to a senior investigation staffer who requested anonymity because the document is not final. Titled "A Failure of Initiative," it is one of three separate reviews by the House, Senate and White House that will in coming weeks dissect the response to the nation's costliest natural disaster.
The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
[snip]
The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people.
OK, let's be charitable for a minute. Let's just assume that Bush was never really told of the scope of the 9/11 disaster that day in the Florida schoolroom. Let's just assume that Bush was out of the loop as New Orleans sank under 20 feet of water. If that's the case, my question is this: WHY IS THE PRESIDENT KEPT OUT OF THE LOOP WHEN MAJOR DISASTERS OCCUR? Is he just the puppet figurehead of some shadow government? And if that's the case, don't we have a right to know and an obligation to ask?
At the same time, weaknesses identified by Sept. 11 investigators -- poor communications among first responders, a shortage of qualified emergency personnel and lack of training and funding -- doomed a response confronted by overwhelming demands for help.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership," the report's preface states. "In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror."
Chertoff spokesman Russ Knocke said, "every ounce of authority" and "100 percent of everything that could be pre-staged was pre-staged" by the federal government before landfall once the president signed emergency disaster declarations on Aug. 27. Brown had "all authority" to make decisions and requests, and his "willful insubordination . . . was a significant problem" for Chertoff, Knocke said.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush had full confidence in his homeland security team, both appointed and career. "The president was involved from beginning to end," implementing emergency powers before the storm and taking responsibility afterward, Duffy said.
Duffy objected to a leaked draft of an unpublished report, and said the White House is completing its own study. "The president is less interested in yesterday, and more interested with today and tomorrow," he said, "so that we can be better prepared for next time."
Uh....they had FOUR YEARS to be better prepared for next time -- and they still weren't prepared.
Instead, the White House is planning its own study, about which White House spokesman Trent Duffy says, "The president is less interested in yesterday, and more interested with today and tomorrow...so that we can be better prepared for next time."
This is not the first time this president has refused accountability by saying "Let's not look back....let's look forward." But perhaps if his administration had looked forward after 9/11, they would have been better prepared for another disaster.
So what's going on? Is Bush simply an ignorant puppet surrounded by incompetent cronies who really are running things? Or is he himself the incompetent? Either way, why on earth should we trust him with our safety, when he has now shown twice that he is completely unable to handle the task?
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