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"Bungling Once... Bungling Twice....."

By Leigh Saavedra

12 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org


"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement... The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
(Al Naomi, project manager, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
From the June 18, 2004 (New Orleans) Times-Picayune

The primary image of 9-11 in its aftermath seemed tobe one of American unity, with George Bush standing tall atop a Manhattan mound of debris, his arm around a NYC firefighter. It looked impressive, showing the vulnerable, human side of the strongest nation in the history of the world. It showed a tireless, caring leader down to his shirtsleeves, right in there ready to pick up a shovel himself and go on with the search for any possible last survivor.

It was a photo, though, just a well-staged photo from which unfathomable political mileage was won. Madison Fifth Avenue couldn't have done better. And under the hysteria of patriotic fervor and often-blind nationalism, there were and are rumblings of mistakes, ineptitude, some before the attack on the Twin Towers, some afterwards, and more now than at any time in the past five years. Just ONE of these alleged mistakes is how the nation's emergency relief system was overhauled.

As a giant of a department that combined 22 separate federal agencies to protect the United States from terrorism, the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) was formed just nine weeks after 9-11. Those people who wanted government small enough to drown in a bathtub instead grew it, designing a giant, and one might have wondered if it would be like Leonardo di Vinci's wings for human flight, an interesting idea but too heavy to be viable.

Such caution, however, had no place during those weeks when Bush could have anything he wanted, whether it was a controversial UN ambassador's confirmation or extraordinary executive powers. It was political suicide to go against a man who claimed to speak directly to God at a time of heretofore unmatched crisis. As we now know, he and those for whom he speaks were given the keys to the city vaults. To have hesitated, we were told, would have been unpatriotic.

In the process of developing the new Homeland Security Department, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was demoted from a cabinet-level position to a subordinate of the new DHS, which was packed with huge chunks of government all united (somewhat) to focus on only one danger, terrorism.

While FEMA had once been considered an efficient branch of the country's protective apparatus, when it became subordinate to the DHS it lost power, talent, and resources. Probably worse, it was weakened enough so that the appointment of its leader called for no serious scrutiny, was instead wide open to political payback.

FEMA was always meant to be the agency ready to handle disasters such as Katrina. In the very words of FEMA's own website, the agency "is tasked with responding to, planning for, recovering from and mitigating against disasters." As billions of dollars were poured into purported preparation for terrorist attacks, however, we took the muscle from an agency qualified to handle a non-terrorist emergency. Further, there is no evidence that anyone, the young DHS or the weakened FEMA, can handle a TERRORIST emergency. What has ensued is muggy bureaucracy interlaced with cronyism and lack of oversight; in short, a huge bungled mess with its spokespeople scurrying to blame anyone lower on the totem pole, seemingly oblivious to the thousands of lives destroyed when even one of their branches is incompetent.

Earlier in 2001, before 9-11, George Bush had appointed Joe Albaugh as head of FEMA. Albaugh's qualifications for such a vital role did not far surpass his having been George Bush's former campaign manager, and his interest in the organization was described when he characterized it as an oversized entitlement program, and counseled states and cities to rely instead on faith-based organizations like the Salvation Army and the Mennonites Disaster Service.

Then after Albaugh came Mike ("Brownie") Brown, selected by Joe Albaugh. More bungling. Not only did Brown have no greater qualification than having been Albaugh's college roommate but it now appears that the resume he produced was padded.

If I apply for a job at a school, my teaching credentials will be checked. If I seek work as a fry cook, someone is either going to watch me flip a burger to see if I know how, or they are going to teach me. So we put in charge of disaster relief for our entire nation a man whose credentials were apparently of no importance?

The results of FEMA's paralysis are by now well known. Aid from the Red Cross was turned away; a nearby naval ship with a 600-bed hospital was ignored; experienced firefighters and supply-laden trucks from Wal-Mart were turned back. The skeptical need only go to the FEMA website to read the agency's post-Katrina statement asking "all fire and emergency services departments not to respond to counties and states affected by Hurricane Katrina without being requested and lawfully dispatched by state and local authorities..." The screeching-halt approach was being enforced while people were dying for lack of water and food.

No one appeared to be certain who had the authority to do what. It was as if they were all waiting for John Wayne to appear. The rudder was broken; the sails had been left in port; we had no captain, not even someone who remotely LOOKED like the captain.

With blame being passed around as fast as a hot potato in a children's game, the "credit" for putting an unqualified man in charge of facing disasters is given to Joe Albaugh. Albaugh may have been behind it, probably was, but it was George Bush who nominated Brown for first Under Secretary of "Emergency Preparedness and Response" for the DHS in January 2003. There is NOT a thick wall between George Bush and the man to whom he would later pat on the back and say, "Brownie, you're doing heck of a job" in New Orleans on the same day when stranded, desperate people were drowning.

But enough papers have been written about the criminally feeble performance we saw from FEMA when Katrina struck. And AFTER Katrina struck. And when the levees broke. And AFTER the levees broke. The best defense FEMA apologists have come up with seems to indicate that the mayor of New Orleans should have stuck a finger in the dike and waited for Washington to determine just who was responsible for these thousands of people who, for various reasons, had not left or could not leave New Orleans.

Backing up, almost five years of domestic bungling, up until people started drowning on the streets of New Orleans, was overshadowed by the endless errors and lies involved in the attempt to conquer the mideast via Iraq. Until Katrina diverted attention from Baghdad, the truth was eking out blood-from-turnips style, but coming nevertheless. By the time Katrina was born we knew we'd been lied to about weapons of mass destruction, but the blame never had been settled. The last-resort conclusion was that whoever had caused the White House to believe we were in danger from mushroom clouds and silos of nerve gas in Fallujah, it wasn't anyone who spent any TIME in the White House. The administsration had received wrong information. The white gloves of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the PNAC crowd were impeccable, soiled by not a speck of dust.

And by the time people began sorting through the accused on that front, we were so caught up in "liberating" Iraq (never mind that we'd already bought Saddam's capture and killed his sons, and 14-year old grandson) that surely it would be a greater blunder to tuck tail and leave Iraq to Iraqis than to try to finish "them" off, no one being absolutely certain to whom "them" refers.

Besides, we needed to turn a corner. We were suddenly in a situation where blunders were being noted, internationally, from the time Al Gore's written suggestions to secure cockpit doors was ignored to the growing number of jobs lost despite large tax cuts to the wealthy. This was an administration that never had quite understood that trickle-down doesn't work, that if you try it twice and it doesn't work, it probably won't work a third time either. But never mind, because in the attempts to keep trying, that upper five percent rocked! But in the total picture, it was beginning to look as if the strongest nation in world history couldn't find competent hall monitors.

Thus entered Katrina. There aren't many who seriously believe that man can yet truly control weather even with the possibility that storms are exacerbated by global warming, a science George Bush doesn't put much stock in, but it was only a matter of hours before people began to realize that it wasn't Katrina herself who was the real killer. It was those pesky levees that the Times-Picayune of New Orleans had warned us about over and over. Then it turned out that the Army Corps of Engineers had been issuing the same warnings. But it would take money to repair the dikes. And more money to save the wetlands, nature's sponge for excess water, which had sunk primarily as a result of heavy drilling that had made the oil people, the Bush/Cheney/Condi people, very rich. The Army Corps
of Engineers estimated that 14 billion over ten years would protect the city and coastline.

But the money wasn't there. It was over in the mideast along with a third of Louisiana's National Guard. More bungling. Our own defenses were down in more than one way. And to compensate, we had to crawl through red tape that had New Orleans sealed off too tightly for independent truckloads of food and water to reach the survivors.

Bush apologists were quick to blame Governor Blanco and New Orleans' mayor, Ray Nagin. Both the Washington Post and Newsweek lamented that Blanco had not declared a state of emergency, which would have allowed Washington to come charging in like the cavalry. Except that even the REPORTING was bungled. The governor HAD declared a state of emergency on August 26. (The Post has issued a retraction.) Loud and clear was the plea; and on Saturday, August 27, Bush himself, whether or not he was aware of it, declared a state of emergency. Both declarations opened all doors for any leader at the national level who wanted to stop thumbing through legal documents or strumming guitars or speaking at fundraisers to march forward and set wheels in immediate motion.

And yet, three days passed before the U.S. military started to move ships and helicopters to the region. By then the levees were breached and eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded.

Those at the top finally spoke out, telling us this was no time to point fingers. But this time the roar of the crowd didn't subside noticeably. After standing by Michael Brown ("Brownie") as is his wont, Bush caved and removed Brown from his on-site responsibilities. It appeared for a nano-second to be a good old-fashioned case of the slacker getting axed. But no, all it has meant as of this writing is that Mike Brown has been removed from the stench, heat and decay of New Orleans back to D.C. Someone will cover for him on the scene, but Michael Brown is still the Head of FEMA.

If Hurricane Ophelia should develop into a Class 5 hurricane and strike the Carolinas, the people hit will have to count on Brownie.

Were it not for the suffering and deaths, the near-absurd theatrics involved in finding scapegoats would be slapstick. There are not/cannot be a great wealth of people holding FEMA blameless. But it stops there, almost as if giving Mike Brown a bit of time off before he had even clocked in was acknowledging that maybe FEMA just hadn't been quite up to the job, so now that was taken care of and there was no need for an investigation... Yes, it happened that way. The first demands for a probe into just what went wrong were resisted by Bush, just as he had resisted the 9-11 commission. Finally, he announced that he himself would head a commission to look into and see "what went right and what went wrong."

It will not take any commission very long to come up with what went right; the list is short. As for what went wrong, with the White House heading the investigation, we can be pretty certain that the highest the blame will ever reach MIGHT be Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff, who is arguing as this is being written that no one predicted a disaster like Katrina.

While I would not want to be so impolite as to suggest that Mr. Chertoff is lying in old-fashioned CYA style, I WOULD suggest that Mr. Rove or a representative apprise him of a history of warnings and cries for help. In fact, officials, scientists, and journalists have warned of just such a scenario for years. In National Geographic's June, 2004 issue, a what-if story is written up, giving us a nightmare surprisingly close to what happened when Katrina struck. It was this awareness that caused one official from the Army Corps to say that it was not a matter of "if" but of "when." Within a period of two years, the Times-Picayune warned us of what was to come nine different times.

Mr. Chertoff is in like company in his refusal to accept any blame, though he surely knew that in heading a department as large as Homeland Security, he was assuming responsibility for the agencies, such as FEMA, that make it up. Then again, chiefs and kings and heads of households are understood to be accountable for the actions of those they supervise. Or so we thought until recently, when this administration put new elements into the old teflon that worked so well for Ronald Reagan. NOTHING that happens under these people is ever the fault of those at the top. There is always an excuse, and no one in the higher echelons is ever called to account.

I think of Harry Truman of "the-buck-stops-here" fame. But Harry was from another era, and in that day the boomerang buck hadn't been discovered. As if by magic, those on the lower level pass the buck, even knowing that it will make a u-turn and come back at them, unless they can find someone on an even lower run who will catch it. These are the people, I suspect, who first advised their kids to tell their teachers that the dog ate their homework.

The seriousness of the growing lack of accountability is its subtle acceptance of continued bungling. A friend wrote to me a few days ago, "We lost two major buildings under Bush's first term. Now we've lost a major port and city under his second." I wondered then if we should make a list, should count in three million lost jobs, nineteen hundred American soldiers, uncounted thousands of Iraqis, millions of square miles contaminated, possibly destroyed, by depleted uranium, complete loss of global respect, thousands of deaths at home due to a lack of adequate health care.

For now we have all this to sort, not just for history but for tomorrow morning. A group of people have been given free pass for five years to steal and kill and lay waste to whatever they wanted. They have been able to stick a black hat on regulation and join their corporate friends in the thumbs-down to our environment. They have been able to begin wars based on lies, to cut social programs for segments of our society with the greatest need, all the while continually cutting taxes, as if the country could afford to conquer the world and have world-class highways on the income from the post office. Half the country has been in denial, either through stubbornness or ignorance or the illusion of self-interest. It is up to the other half of us to convince them that ignorance kills. It is up to the other half of us to shake them awake and make them understand that while bodies are being taken from New Orleans to a large warehouse in San Gabriel to be processed, the Republican National Committee was sending out letters urging their constituency to demand a repeal of the so-called "death" tax, which is a method of seeing that multimillionaires have to pay taxes on estates that only two percent of the population will inherit. It is up to the other half of us to make them wonder why that two percent should not pay on the top slice of their inheritance when the defense programs designed to protect us from natural disasters cannot get their promised funding.

And meantime if tectonic plates beneath the San Andreas fault should shift heavily, if the big one should decide its time has come, if California should erupt into the greatest natural disaster in the history of our nation, it is laid out for the moment who will be in charge to save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives.

Michael Brown. He's still in charge. At George Bush's pleasure.
__________

Leigh Saavedra wrote poetry, fiction, and political essays for many years under the name "Lisa Walsh Thomas." Under Thomas, Leigh has published two books, the latter, "The Girl with Yellow Flowers in her Hair," being available at http://www.whatIdidinthewar.com. She welcomes comments at [email protected]




 

 

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