Guess who was clearly told about Katrina’s dangers — numerous times?

March 1, 2006

I’ll have more on this in the morning, but in the meantime, the White House is going to have a very tough time spinning this one.

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Maybe Brownie’s more recent defense has merit.

A top hurricane expert voiced “grave concerns” about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren’t enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

“I’m concerned about … their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,” Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility — and Bush was worried too.

Devastating.

Bush’s job is to tell soothing lies, which is as useful during a flood as it is during a war.

“I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm” -Bush

What purpose does lying like that serve?

  • I saw the tape of Keith Obermann’s Countdown. The most frightening thing was that Michael Brown (I believe that was him at FEMA) was saying the most important things, like whether the roof of the superdome would survive a category five storm.

    brrrrrr!

  • I like the part about Bush not asking any questions at the meeting. Just like he didn’t ask questions about the 8/6/01 memo “Bin Laden Determined to strike in US”

  • … and Bush was worried too.

    Reading the story and thinking about what happened afterward, I don’t get the sense that Bush was worried. He didn’t ask a single question during the briefings? That hardly seems concerned at all. He didn’t cancel his month-long vacation. Consider the photo ops he did days after the storm: he fake strummed a guitar with a country singer and ate birthday cake with John McCain. That doesn’t sound like he’s even interested.

    And the sad thing is Brown comes out of this looking like the mature, responsible adult of the group. Not that this excuses his incompetence, but still …

  • I just saw the story on CNN, without having seen the ‘blog take, and, by the time Dana Bash was finished “explaining” it, I had the impression that the Republicans were saying that the video showed an engaged Bush, who had been deceived into thinking that his underlings had everything they needed.

  • This just made me sick.

    But that bastard is going to get away with it.
    Just watch the MSM wrap this guy in their
    protective shroud.

  • I think george likes being president, dressing up like a soldier taking tax payer funded vacations “fighting” a war, etc.
    He just doesn’t like the work involved. The man is a true Potemkin President

  • It just proves that George W. Bush doesn’t care about the real problems of Americans and that his malfeasance on his job goes unchecked by the Republican-held Congress. It should be grounds for impeachment but the heretofore built-in system of checks and balances are ignored and subverted by the Republican majority in Congress who think party loyalty is more important than acting in the best interests of the country and its citizens.

  • The only checks the Republican majority in Congress cares about are made out to “CASH” and the only balances they care about are their bank accounts.

    The fact is the 2006 Republican worships money. They give lip service to everything that my father respected about the Republican party – smaller government, lower taxes, overturning Roe v. Wade – but in reality they are all about increasing corporate profits, dismantling all regulatory bodies, and maintaining Roe v. Wade.

    Roe v. Wade is the RNC’s biggest money-maker. Any time they want to raise a few bucks all they have to do is start wailing that “Democrats want to kill babies” and the checks roll in. They’d be insane to overturn it. Without the abortion issue, what would be their rallying cry ? “Exxon’s profits were only 10 billion dollars last quarter” ? When push comes to shove on abortion, Alito is gonna play Renquist’s role and Roberts will be surprisingly centrist on the issue. The court will tilt a bit more to the right on this issue, but not overwhelmingly so.

  • It turns out that Brownie WAS doing a heck of a job, when it compared to our commander in chief .
    Everything is relative.

    and the hits just keep on coming. Bush is asking us to once again trust him with the Dubai deal, Iraq, and NSA spying… at the same time he is shown knowing stuff on tape that he later is on tape denying .

    I’m beginning to think that Bush has a strand of Richard Nixon in him..
    in that he is bringing about his own self destruction with such methodical determination that it has to be a deep subconscious impulse to self destruct.
    That’s the trouble with not dealing straight on with his history of drugs and alcohol abuse….it comes around the backdoor and bites you in the butt.

  • How does Bush get away with this stuff? AP had a story today on a poll revealing that of those surveyed, people knew considerably more about “The Simpsons” than the Bill of Rights — by a 4 to 1 margin. That’s how he gets away with it.

    I found it particularly interesting that a number of people thought that the First Amendment guaratees the right to own pets.

    This country is just one big episode of “Lassie.”

  • That’s it. There’s video. Game over.

    Written reports and leaked e-mails can be belittled, disputed, forgotten. Experts can be discredited by pairing them with fake “experts”. But video footage has an impact. Bob and Jane in Dayton watch video.

    Sure, the video doesn’t seem to show anyone (at least that I notice) saying “breach of the levees” – the hurricane expert guy talked about “topping the levees”. But now the WH has to explain that difference. The burden is on them.

    I’ve been tenaciously pessimistic for a while now, figuring some combination of warmongering, swiftboating and Rove flimflammery would save the collective Republican ass in ’06 and ’08. But now I’m beginning to think the message will get through. There’s video.

  • Question from Australia.
    How can Clinton be impeached for dangling his Dingle. But Bush Is’nt For Bankrupting morally and fiscally the USA. Also being a bigger liar than Tom Pepper.

  • I think Bush’s own levees have been broke. 34 will become 24 soon enough, even freepers are jumping ship. The stink of this presidency will only get worse as they rewrite the definition of lameduck.

  • I find it “amusing” that part of the spin campaign is to release the transcripts/emails they withheld from the Davis committee that were Brown’t comments on how Bush was engaged.

    They use him as a scapegoat (even if he was deserving of being dumped), he comes across in parts as more on the ball than earlier thought, and yet they use his words to counter the video.

    On in Bush’s reality.

  • Wilder – Red State is ignoring it…. so not a surprise

    Why do many Republicans remind me of tots playing peek-a-boo?

  • As these stories mount (the spying, the worse-than-we-ever-imagined lying about Iraq, the idiocy around the ports deal, now this), I find myself unable to be outraged anymore. Despair is more like it. How can we have come to this? How can the people who begged to lead have possibly been such a toxic blend of evil and incompetent?

    I haven’t checked out the spin yet, but I have a sick feeling in my stomach that none of this will stick to Dubya either.

    “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” has an awful parallel to their claims they had no idea that al Qaeda would strike using planes. And yet, so many people still believe that these utter incompetents should be trusted with the stewardship of our nation.

    Can this Republic be saved? Is it even worth the effort?

  • What strikes me, just at this moment, is that Cheney wants this unitary president with such extreme powers, but both Administrations promoting this doctrine have proved to be such failures.

    Nixon lost the war in Vietnam. He imposed wage and price controls. Seems he was suffering a lot of problems.

    Bush is losing the war in Iraq (his own conservative base is positioning itself to cut and run), employment has barely kept up with population growth and he is running a HUGE deficit.

    Clinton, on the other hand, working within the constraints of a Constituion that put the legislative branch in Article I, reduced the deficit, got us into wars we could win (Kosovo), and increased the economy steadily for eight years.

    Maybe a limited presidency is a better idea?

  • I’m with BC in comment #17. As the inimitable Ed Stephens reminds us, we are a nation of TV addicts. Vast swaths of americans only believe what they see (can you imagine a poll asking if phasers–ala star trek–exist? you know a sizeable percentage would say “absolutely”). Now they can see that Bush was told there would be severe damage.

    they can spin and spin and it will help some. But not enough. I hope.

  • “the White House is going to have a very tough time spinning this one.”

    This White House could spin Armaggeddon into a an ACLU plot. Karl Rove will attribute the tapes to Dan Rather.

    • Comments are closed.