{"id":5309,"date":"2005-09-20T14:13:31","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T18:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5309"},"modified":"2005-09-20T14:13:31","modified_gmt":"2005-09-20T18:13:31","slug":"the-way-to-win-the-blame-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-way-to-win-the-blame-game\/","title":{"rendered":"The way to win the ‘blame game’"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been ample discussion of late about the distance between Bush administration officials and minimum professional qualifications<\/a>. The criticisms, launched in earnest after the Mike-Brown-at-FEMA fiasco, have highlighted the fact that the president has no qualms about tapping inexperienced officials for key government posts despite a complete lack of prerequisite skills.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, I suppose it should come as no surprise that the president has tapped<\/a> a trusted national security adviser to investigate the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.<\/p>\n

President Bush has named Frances Fragos Townsend, his domestic security adviser, to lead an internal White House inquiry into the administration’s performance in handling Hurricane Katrina, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush’s spokesman, said Monday.<\/p>\n

Mr. McClellan said Ms. Townsend’s job would be “to follow through on the president’s commitment to determine what went wrong, what went right and lessons learned.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What do you want to bet that she’ll conclude they all performed beautifully?<\/p>\n

On the qualifications front, it’s not that Townsend is a Brown-like incompetent, but she is a rather odd choice. As someone close to the president, for example, Townsend is not prepared to offer an objective, outsider’s perspective to the administration’s response to the disaster. Moreover, Townsend has enjoyed success as former federal prosecutor and intelligence expert, but that doesn’t have anything to do with scrutinizing officials’ response to a natural disaster.<\/p>\n

No relevant experience and close to the president — sounds perfect for the job.
\n
\nBy the way, if Townsend’s name sounds familiar to you, there’s a reason<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A deputy national security adviser to President Bush toured Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison [in November 2003] to review procedures for intelligence sharing among officials there and elsewhere in Iraq, prompting a senior prison official to conclude the White House wanted more and better information from interrogations, according to government officials and the official’s sworn testimony.<\/p>\n

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army Reservist who ran the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, told Army investigators early this year that the visit by Fran Townsend — then Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser — was among the pressures he felt to intensify intelligence-gathering efforts in the prison.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Just to be clear, there’s no reason to connect Townsend to the torture policies in place at Abu Ghraib; I only mention this for context.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been ample discussion of late about the distance between Bush administration officials and minimum professional qualifications. The criticisms, launched in earnest after the Mike-Brown-at-FEMA fiasco, have highlighted the fact that the president has no qualms about tapping inexperienced officials for key government posts despite a complete lack of prerequisite skills. With this in mind, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}