Let me pause, here, to remind or enlighten you: the ‘Posse Comitatus’ Act constrains any Administration from use of the Army and Air Force to execute the laws, save in cases of insurrection (there are certain exceptions for the Navy and the Coast Guard). When there is not a police presence to support and the governor, for reasons of turf, won’t mobilize the Guard, it stymies the DoD and the White House. Guess what has happened in this very instance….
READ IT ALL AT
Herodotean Laughter: Snickering Along With Clio
So. Let us look. Let us look at what has happened.
There was a disaster
plan for New Orleans. It required mandatory evacuations. It required the use of
designated shelters – of which the Superdome was not one. It was the
responsibility of Blanco, Nagin, and Ebberts to execute.
They
didn’t.
In fact, the mandatory evacuation order – too little and far too
late – was issued by Blanco only after she was begged by the President to order
it. No wonder she’s trying to shift blame.
Nagin and Ebbert did not
execute. Nor did they provide for those without the ability to evacuate on their
own: they left between 400 and 500 city and metro buses standing empty in
parking lots, that could have materially assisted the evacuation of those
without access to private transportation. Of course, we now have reason to
suspect that the NO school system may not have known it had buses, or drivers,
or how to reach them. Those buses, now ruined, are still sitting in rows, like
planes at Pearl Harbor and Manila on 7 and 8 DEC 1941: sitting, ruined, and
leaking toxic sludge into the floodwaters. No wonder they’re trying to shift
blame.
New Orleans had a scare last year – Hurricane Ivan – that provided
these same officials with a dry run. They made the exact same mistakes. Like the
city’s founding French Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten
nothing. No wonder they’re trying to shift blame.
Let’s be clear here. In
the first place, New Orleans received neither a direct hit from Katrina nor did
it catch the ‘dirty quarter’ of the storm. Mississippi did. Do you see these
problems where Haley Barbour is showing leadership? No.
What happened,
instead, was the Pontchartrain levee failed. The newest and strongest and most
recently upgraded one. Which is to standard: a standard set under LBJ, in 1965,
and not changed since by any Congress or any Administration. The levees are
engineered for a Cat 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Cat 4.
Everyone knew that
was the danger. George W. Bush could have started the Corps in on upgrading the
levees the day he first took office and they wouldn’t be done. In fact, the
idea to study the possibility of doing so was adopted in 1999,
under Clinton, and set to result in a completed study and the possible start of
work only in 2006.
That is why the plans have
always been to evacuate, on a mandatory basis, 72 hours prior to landfall.
Blanco and Nagin didn’t. Only pressure from GWB got them to order an evac at
all. No wonder they’re trying to shift blame.
Prior to the disaster, the
Bush White House – which, we know now, was also having to deal with the imminent
death of the Chief Justice of the United States, in addition to all the other
business of government – tried to federalize and streamline the emergency
management and the evac. Blanco resisted, in a turf war. No
wonder she’s trying to shift blame.
hattip: IRIS ENG
