Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House - NYTimes

[applegrove]

Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House


By ERIC LIPTON - New York Times
Published: January 28, 2006

"Start.... SKIP

The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators' requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.

Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.

....Snip

The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."


...Snip


"There is a difference between having enough information to find institutional fault, which we have," he said, "and having information to assign individual blame, which in large part we don't."

END"

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html

[applegrove]

1. So we will never know why the WH aides were playing "give us a list"

with Blanco, for 4 more days.

That sounds par for the course.

Fog of something. ... not war.. but something.

[rodeodance]

2. great headline WP--thankx

[rodeodance]

3. the WH is doing its 'own internal investigation"--i hope the press continu

es to put up articles like this.

[applegrove]

4. You know - if I had one question I could ask those WH aides - the

ones in the bowels of the WH & Pentagon & around Bush.. what would it be?

#1 When did it occur to you that Katrina was a great political opportunity. What hour? As soon as the levees broke?

#2 Is there anything inside you that regrets anything? Cause I haven't seen it.

[Rose Siding]

5. No individual blame for "senior official in charge"?

And NO ONE at the WH knew to CALL him once MOST of a US city city had already been flooded?!

Maybe Rapuano (has he even been mentioned before?) can't be charged with anything, but it's stunning that he still has a job.

Can we PLEASE get a president who reads the paper and watches the news?

[applegrove]

6. All those WH staffers will have jobs for life. Just like Brownie.

[KoKo]

7. Those staffers he has around him are very young. They didn't recognize

the seriousness of the whole situation. Most of them probably had no awareness of hurricanes and what they can do. They were probably looking to knock off work, chug down a few and go home to video games.

I know this sounds harsh...but from what I keep seeing most White House aides are hired because they are young and in Bush's Repug World they are all "Young Repugs" and children of other Washington insiders. Nepotism rules in this WH and we know the Heritage Foundation sent kids just out of college the sons and daughters of folks like Michael Ledeen to Iraq to dispense money and even set up an Iraq Stock Market, fgs! 20 somethings! With little experience outside their private school and college cocoons.

These are the "aides" and staffers who were handling the Katrina information.. It's disgusting beyond words. No one was in charge just like on 9/11.

[applegrove]

9. Does that explain why the Pentagone too lost all institutional knowledge

of how mayhem results from lack of control on the ground in a crisis? Are they all "young pups" too? Why was Condi shopping so publicly? Why was Cheney so far out of town they knew he wasn't in the buncker for once - yet he was on the phone to pipelines and electricity companies right in those early days? Why were the young pups playing telephone tag "send me an itemized list" with Blanco? They wouldn't take her calls.

It isn't that the kids were in charge. It was that in charge were the sociopaths. There was no human among them on that day to say "uh - guys!". The first human who did get through to them - was the one who screamed at Rice is a shoe store in NY City. That must have told them something bad was happening. Because before that - they didn't pick up on it.

Oh and one more thing. Neocons like mayhem. They like social engineering by trauma. They choose that over minimizing trauma all the time. They choose it in Katrian, they choose it in Iraq, they likey! It is a tenant of neoconism. If people don't die or comit suicide or are euthenized - they'll learn something from it. That is the theory.

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. But it wasn't a war

It was their fucking job. And if the dipshit had the basic courtesy to come off his vacation and ridiculous California fundraisers when the storm was APPROACHING, maybe some lives could have been saved. What a bunch of shit.

[pop goes the weasel]

10. I wonder how many

Patrick Henry College graduates were among the staff at fault?

[hatrack]

11. How about "Fog Of Incompetence"?

And remember, this is the same president for whom visitors and briefers have to be specially prepared so as not to bear bad news:

"His close friends agree that Bush likes comfort and serenity; he does not like dissonance. He has long been mothered by strong women, including his mother and wife. A foreign diplomat who declined to be identified was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. "Don't upset him," she said."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10417159/site/newsweek/page/4/

Yeah, we certainly wouldn't want an unpleasant reality to "upset" the president of the United States, now would we Condi?

:puke:

[applegrove]

12. Fog of ASSHOLES!