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Now!
I saw you on the CBS television
evening news the other day using a new phrase--"situational
information". You were referring to the conditions just
before and during the Katrina hurricane-Levee disaster in New
Orleans. The "situational information" was not what
it should have been, you declared. This was your way of saying
that you did not receive prompt information about the risk the
giant hurricane posed for the breaching of the city's levees.
Now it appears that you were
given advance warning. This was the thrust of the CBS television
news report by Bob Orr. Anchor Russ Mitchell introduced the segment
with these words: "In the days following hurricane Katrina,
President Bush insisted that no one in his administration anticipated
the failure of the levees protecting New Orleans. But newly released
videotape shows that as the huge storm approached the Gulf Coast,
the president and his top advisors WERE warned it posed just
such a threat to the low-lying city." (emphasis in the original).
These advisors included National
Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield and FEMA Director Michael
Brown, who told top administration officials, including Homeland
Secretary Michael Chertoff, of the '"looming danger,"
"a day before landfall".
These tapes caused the Wall
Street Journal's article on March 2 to have this headline: "Tape
of Pre-Katrina Briefing Shows Bush Was Warned of Dangers."
Sounds like you received quite explicit "situational intelligence"
which you still decline to acknowledge getting. Maybe the White
House has a problem with "situational credibility".
Since that day when Hurricane
Katrina struck the city of New Orleans and surrounding coastal
areas, tens of thousands of displaced people--the survivors--have
felt abandoned by the federal government. Scores of newspaper,
television and radio eyewitness reports record this abandonment
in places like Ward 9 in New Orleans and Pearlington, Mississippi.
The level of failure under your presidential watch is massive,
ringed with private corporate contracting graft, corruption and
waste.
Prime Ministers in parliamentary
nations would have fallen by now.
Recall your dramatic, nationally-televised choreographed assurance,
standing near the French Quarter, that the federal government
would take the lead in rebuilding New Orleans for its desperate
residents and the return of those who fled. Get that videotape
out and watch it, over six months of little action later. Maybe
it will teach you something about the price that a destroyed
area of America and its people are paying because you are expensively
preoccupied being the Mayor of Baghdad.
Your regime's debacle after
Katrina continues to leave tens of thousands of people without
their homes. They are either in some motels temporarily, with
some friends or relatives or simply just homeless.
Yet next to the little-used
municipal airport in Hope, Arkansas--Bill Clinton's home town--ten
thousand or more FEMA mobile homes/trailers are sitting immobile
week after week. The trailers were delivered to that staging
area by the manufacturer, awaiting shipment to the needy, displaced
families down south around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast communities.
These families wait day after day, week after week.
You always tell reporters that the federal government's response
could have been better. What about your response from late August
to now? You are supposed to lead the federal government, so start
leading directly by example.
Why not call up your friend
Bill Clinton, with whom you and your father often have been seen
together at social, ceremonial and charitable occasions? The
telephone conversation can go like this:
GWB-"Hey Bill, how about
you and me hopping on Air Force One pronto and heading down to
your old stomping grounds around Hope. Let's show we can break
up that bureaucratic log jam and leave Hope with 10,000 fewer
trailers. I'm the President, you were the President. You were
the Governor of Arkansas. Hometown boy comes home to do good.
What a great photo opportunity for bipartisanship?"
WJC-"Not a bad idea, George.
But the bureaucracy starts in Washington, D.C. so there will
have to be some bureaucracy-busting advance work done to make
the visit a success. Then there is the matter of getting floodplain
rules waived and all the other state and local rules which Washington
has not confronted for months."
GWB-"Hmmm, Bill, you've
been doing your homework."
WJC-"Not really, George,
just reading the newspapers."
GWB-"Ok, ok, I get the
snide remark. But I've been running a war for freedom."
WJC-"Didn't mean it that
way, George. Sure, let's go down and get those trailers on the
road. Where do you want to meet upin Hope?"
GWB-"Very funny, Bill,
like you are summoning me. We meet at theWhite House, get on
the Presidential helicopter and head for Andrews Air Force base.
You know the protocols".
WJC-"What do you think
our chances of success will be?"
GWB-"Well, heh, heh, Bill,
what's that phrase-'Hope Springs Eternal.'"
Finally
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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