Fwd: White House Won't Release Its Katrina Papers

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White House Won't Release Its Katrina

Fri Feb 3, 2006 23:42

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Mondo Washington

Barricading the Storm

Why the White House Won't Release Its Katrina Papers

by James Ridgeway

 

January 31st, 2006 11:01 AM

 

Flying over the Superdome aboard Marine One, President George W. Bush

surveys the flooding of New Orleans

 

The reason for the government not turning over documents and making

available top officials to testify about the Hurricane Katrina debacle

before Congress is not just that the documents and testimony would reveal

incompetence in evacuating the stranded, bringing in relief supplies, and

cleaning up the mess. No, the paper trail is bound to demonstrate in detail

that the federal government knew a good 48 hours before the storm hit what

was bound to happen, but did virtually nothing to protect lives and

property.

 

There is no secret about any of this. The Washington Post last week said it

had obtained a copy of a 41-page report on the hurricane distributed by the

Department of Homeland Security before the storm hit. According to the Post,

an e-mail containing this report reached the White House Situation Room at

1:47 a.m. on August 29, hours before the full force of the storm raked the

Gulf Coast.

 

The paper also obtained a FEMA document prepared for discussion at a 9 a.m.

meeting on August 27, two days before Katrina. This report compared Katrina

to Hurricane Pam, the simulated storm federal officials used a year before

as an exercise to aid in planning for disaster. The briefing paper pointed

out that Katrina could end up being worse than the simulated Pam. It warned

that the storm surge from a Category 4 onslaught could " overtop " levees and

other flood protection systems, and predicted " incredible search and rescue

needs. " More than one million residents would be displaced, it said.

 

So while President Bush vacationed in Texas and top government officials

talked airily of federal versus state responsibilities, the operations

sections of the federal government must have known precisely what was about

to happen.

 

And, of course, it gets worse. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has been

building dams and levees all over the southern stretches of the Mississippi

River, routing and rerouting it for well over 100 years, somehow just didn't

know that water had been pooling up in yards adjacent to a flood wall for a

year before the storm. That pooling should have led to an investigation of

whether the levees were leaking. The residents had been complaining to the

New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, but nobody told the engineers from the

corps, which is responsible for the levee system, what was going on. Why

they didn't find out on their own has yet to be explained.

 

One might have predicted that Donald Rumsfeld, who as secretary of defense

oversees the Army Corps of Engineers and is instrumental in ordering both

regular troops and federalized National Guard troops into a rescue effort,

won't cooperate. The first question anyone would ask him is how come the

army corps didn't act years before the storm. The second is whether the Iraq

war has so depleted the Guard that it can't fulfill its duties at home.

 

The one federal agency that seems to have known what was going on was the

Coast Guard, which rescued thousands of people during and after the storm.

Another was the Weather Bureau, which predicted hour by hour the movement of

the storm before, during, and after it made landfall. It is worth noting

that right-wing Republicans would love to privatize the Weather Bureau, and

during the Reagan years, the right wanted to privatize the perpetually

underfunded Coast Guard by handing it over to a big defense contractor like

Raytheon. Yet when push came to shove, it was the one federal agency that

worked.

 

Since the rest of the federal government could not, or would not, operate

during and after Hurricane Katrina, the job naturally fell to the oft-named

list of cronies.

 

Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old haunt, has contributed $29,822

to Bush's presidential campaigns, according to the Center for Public

Integrity. The political action committee for its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown

& Root contributed $120,784 to " various Republican causes " in 2002 and 96

percent of its $168,277 campaign contributions in 2000.

 

The payoff? Rumsfeld's Department of Defense has awarded Kellogg, Brown &

Root more than $136 million in various Katrina-related contracts, according

to the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense.

 

Another big contributor, the Fluor Corporation, gave $9,900 to President

Bush's campaigns. In 2004, 83 percent of Fluor's $356,290 campaign

contributions went to Republican candidates, according to Taxpayers for

Common Sense. Fluor has received more than $200 million in Gulf Coast

contracts since October 2005.

 

The long and the short of it is that Katrina, like Iraq, has been a cash cow

for Bush's entrepreneur buddies. Congress has approved $62.3 billion for

Katrina relief efforts so far. And that's only the beginning.