Hurricane Katrina
And
The
Meaning Of 9/11
By Patrick Martin
13 September 2005
World
Socialist Web
September
11, 2005 marked the fourth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack
in US history, with nearly 3,000 innocent people killed as a consequence
of the hijacking of the four jetliners that destroyed the twin towers
of the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. It also marked two
weeks since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, causing the worst
natural disaster in US history and revealing the unpreparedness of the
US government at all levels, federal state and local, for a tragedy
that was widely forecast and predicted.
According to the
official mythology, September 11 changed everything. The
policies, methods and structure of the US government had to be radically
revised in the light of the terrorist attacks, to prosecute what the
Bush administration called its global war on terrorism.
Nowhere was this
mandate more evident than in the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, a colossus whose principal task was ostensibly to coordinate
federal efforts to prevent new terrorist attacks and intensive preparations
to deal with the anticipated consequences of such catastrophes. The
creation of the DHS was the principal initiative of congressional Democrats
in response to the 9/11 attacks, later embraced by the Bush administration
as well.
One of the 22 separate
agencies which were combined in the formation of the DHS was the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which for two decades had had the
main federal responsibility for dealing with natural disasters such
as hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
The performance
of FEMA in Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans
is a now-familiar litany of incompetence, indifference and virtual sabotage
of preparations before the event and rescue and relief afterwards. FEMA
Director Michael Brown was removed from direct supervision of the Gulf
Coast operations Friday, sent back to Washington and replaced by a Coast
Guard admiral, Thad V. Allen.
Brown is no more
than a scapegoat for policies which effectively gutted the functioning
of FEMA as a disaster-relief agency. The agency became a dumping ground
for political hacks whose principal job qualification was previous service
in the Bush election campaigns of 2000 and 2004.
Five of the top
eight FEMA officials had little or no professional experience in managing
emergency services or disaster relief. Their prior occupations include
lieutenant governor of Nebraska, lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce,
television reporter, software marketing manager and director of judging
for the Arabian Horse Association (Browns position before joining
FEMA). Three of the five top officials for operations in natural disasters
and nine of ten regional directors were working in an acting capacityi.e.,
temporary appointments.
More than a year
before the hurricane struck New Orleans, the union representing FEMA
employees sent a letter to members of Congress warning that emergency
managers at FEMA have been supplanted on the job by politically connected
contractors and by novice employees with little background or knowledge
of disaster management. The letter, cited by the Los Angeles Times September
9, added: As ... professionalism diminishes, FEMA is gradually
losing its ability to function and to help disaster victims.
As one current (but
for obvious reasons, unidentified) FEMA official told the Washington
Post, in an extensive study of the failed response to Katrina published
September 4, Its such an irony I hate to say it, but we
have less capability today than we did on September 11.
Democratic and Republican
congressional leaders have begun to point to the contrast between the
years of promises of preparedness for new terrorist attacks and the
reality of New Orleans. Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican
who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, posed two questions
in announcing public hearings on the Katrina disaster response: If
our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy, how would the
federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack
that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much
death and destruction as possible?... How is it possible that almost
four years to the day after the attacks on our country, with billions
of dollars spent to improve our preparedness, that a major area of our
nation was so ill prepared to respond to a catastrophe?
There is, however,
a more fundamental issue which neither the US media nor the political
establishment is prepared to address, let alone answer. The Bush administrations
performance in the Hurricane Katrina disaster cannot be dismissed as
the result of shifting the focus of FEMA from natural disasters to terrorism.
Many of the tasks which FEMA was called on to perform after Hurricane
Katrina would have been similar in the wake of a nuclear, chemical or
biological attack. Scientists have compared the sheer physical force
of the hurricane to the detonation of several atomic bombs over the
Gulf Coastalthough obviously without the radiation and burning.
But the same needs for relief supplies, evacuation and emergency services
would exist.
It is clear that,
for all the political rhetoric about the war on terror,
the Bush administrations primary concern was not that the events
of September 11, 2001 could be repeated within the borders of the United
States. Instead, it seized on the killing of nearly 3,000 people as
an all-purpose political pretext for initiatives which had no demonstrable
connection to the events of 9/11the war in Iraq, the passage of
the USA Patriot Act, and an enormous buildup in the powers of the police/military
apparatus over the lives of American citizens.
With the war in
Iraq increasingly unpopular, the US economy stagnating, and his extreme-right
political agenda deeply unpopular, Bush based his reelection campaign
on an effort to scare the American people with the prospect of new terrorist
attacks. Outside the main political base of the Republican Party in
the Christian fundamentalist right, Bush appealed for votes almost exclusively
on the basis of fear. But in terms of the actual preparations to relieve
mass suffering if those fears were realized, the administration did
little or nothing.
The most sinister
interpretation of this inaction is that the Bush administration had
good reason to believe that 9/11 was not likely to happen again. This
would square with the mass of evidence suggesting the US government
was aware of the preparations by Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack and
even facilitated them by protecting many of the key hijack organizers
from arrest.
Such is the clear
implication of the recent revelations about Able Danger, a Pentagon
data-mining project that reportedly identified four of the future hijackers,
including Mohammed Atta, in 2000. The Pentagon unit was barred from
supplying information about the four to the FBI, more than a year before
the 9/11 attacks, and its identification of the future hijackers as
Al Qaeda operatives working in the US was suppressed by the 9/11 commission,
which made no mention of Able Danger in its report last year.
It is clear that
the US government conceives of response to a mass casualty event not
from the standpoint of humanitarian aid or saving lives, but as a threat
to its own authority. Its principal concern in post-attack planning
is how to preserve what is referred to in official terminology as continuity
of governmentmaintaining the chain of military command,
up to an including the commander-in-chief in the White House.
The government response
to Hurricane Katrina has, in fact, demonstrated that the focus of so-called
anti-terrorist preparations since 9/11 has been the working out and
rehearsal of plans to impose martial law and military rule. That is
why when the massive dimensions of the hurricanes impact became
clear, the federal government had no serious plans in place to effectively
respond, and turned to the only option that had been preparedthe
military option.
One conclusion being
drawn from Katrina is that longstanding restrictions on the use of the
military within the United States should be scrapped. The Los Angeles
Times reported Sunday that the Bush administration was studying
whether to expand the presidents powers to deploy the US military
in natural disasters.
White House counselor
Dan Bartlett told the Times in an interview that the administration
was reviewing whether federal troops could be given police powers. A
top congressional Republican, Armed Services Committee Chairman John
Warner, has conducted closed-door meetings with Bush aides and military
officials to discuss changes in the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids
the use of troops in domestic policing.
The events surrounding
the Hurricane Katrina disaster have placed in sharp relief the calculated
exploitation of the 9/11 bombings by the Bush administration, with the
collaboration of the Democratic Party and the media, to vastly undermine
democratic rights at home while pursuing a policy of unbridled militarism
and war abroad. This is being carried out in the interests not of the
American people, but rather of a financial aristocracy that controls
all levers of political power and is embarked on a policy of global
hegemony.
Four years after
the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the American working class
must make a sober assessment of the vast changes that have been effected,
and recognize that its basic rights are under threat as never before.
The chasm between the wealthy few and the broad masses of the people
has never been greater, and the international trajectory of the American
ruling elite is leading toward ever more bloody military conflagrations.
It is necessary
to draw the requisite conclusions: The working class must take its fate
and that of humankind into its own hands, by establishing its political
independence and embarking on a struggle for political power, to end
the scourges of war, poverty and repression by reorganizing society
on socialist foundations.