Katrina and the War in Iraq.  (01/16/07)

I want to keep this brief and to the point: several days ago Senator Joseph Lieberman, George Bush's only Democratic supporter, even if he now calls himself an Independent, as Chairman of the Senate committee for Homeland Security, announced that he would schedule no hearings whatsoever into the federal government's response to the Katrina disaster.  He decides because FEMA is part of Homeland Security and it would be his responsibility as Chairman of that committee to investigate what happened in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast on 8/29/05 and afterwards.  To suggest that nothing wrong occurred in the aftermath of Katrina by not bothering to inquire is an insult to every American who has any stake in good and proper governance.  That the worst natural (15%) and man-made (85%) disaster in the history of this country does not deserve government oversight is a claim so outrageous that anyone making it, as Lieberman has done (apparently), should be arrested, impeached, imprisoned, and denied all future claim to citizenship.  That sounds like hyperbole.  It sounds like exaggeration.  It sounds over the top. 

To understand why I say that a basic premise must be kept firmly in mind from the beginning.  George W. Bush's impulse to invade Iraq, while I certainly do not claim the ability to read his mind, was, and still is, firmly based on a single desire--to be perceived as America's greatest President.  Nothing except that desire motivates Bush.  The question then becomes: what does Katrina, and Lieberman's refusal to investigate Bush's response to it, have to do with the war in Iraq?  In the first eight months of Bush's first term his administration managed to accomplish virtually nothing of any significance.  It looked like he was on a path to creating one of the most undistinguished Presidential careers in American history.  Also true, of course, was the fact that many people, slightly more than half the voting public, did not believe he should have become President in the first place.  The Supreme Court, in fact, ruled Florida's electoral votes into his column after the vote-count in that state became so conflicted that no settlement of victory could be fashioned without judicial interference.  What changed Bush's Presidency from mediocre to remarkable (not necessarily in a good sense) was September 11, 2001.  The terrorist attacks on that day turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for the Bush administration.

The attack was a curse in the short term because it raised serious questions about how attentive Bush had been to the threat of terrorism, which was a holdover concern from events that occurred during Clinton's administration.  While suspicion still lingers over how well or how badly Bush handled that threat in the months leading up to the actual attacks, the issue has become so conflicted with spin and stonewall, with denial and accusation that no one can form more than a biased opinion of the truth.  In the longer term the attacks presented challenges to Bush's management style and talents as commander-in-chief that far exceed his ability to deal successfully with any of them.  Things started out well enough in Afghanistan.  In short order the Taliban and al Qaeda were routed from Kabul and driven into the mountains of Tora Bora, where US special forces under the command of the CIA had an opportunity to capture or kill Mullah Omar (Taliban) and Osama bin Laden (al Qaeda).  That effort failed, however, because Donald Rumsfeld (Bush's Secretary of Defense) refused to supply the necessary troops to seal off escape routes into Pakistan as the final attack began.  He did this because he was jealous of the fact that Bush had chosen the CIA over the DoD to lead the assault into Afghanistan and Rumsfeld wanted to embarrass George Tenant who was director of CIA.  This is on Bush's head because he picked both Rumsfeld and Tenant as subordinates in his "war on terror" and ultimately failed to keep either one focused on actions that benefited the American people as opposed to ones that only enhanced the status of their own personal interests.

The attacks were a blessing to Bush's aspirations to be a great President because they supplied a potentially meaningful direction to his stagnant leadership on purely domestic issues.  With a real foreign policy challenge in front of him Bush was able to take actions that would enhance his standing as a significant player on the world's political stage.  As time passed Bush began to use 9/11 as a political tool to exaggerate his competence and suitability as commander-in-chief, since the threat was real enough and there was no strong evidence initially that his policies were failing to achieve the announced goals of making the nation safer.  With a populace and a media virtually frozen by fear of terrorist attacks, which his administration constantly held before the country, Bush was able to secure reelection in 2004 in spite of the fact that his decision to invade Iraq pre-emptively, and with adequate evidence that his reasons for doing so (weapons of mass destruction, a non-existent connection between Iraq and 9/11, etc.) was impossible to support with any real facts and evidence.  Bush's war in Iraq was caught up in his desire to be considered a great President because he mistakenly believed that it would end very quickly with total victory, even before the election in November, 2004, which proved to be as foolish a hope as any that has ever fueled anyone's political ambition.

Bush's insulation from meaningful oversight, both by the press and by Congress, came to a crashing halt on August 29, 2005, with the arrival of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  This part of the story I know too well.  I was a resident of that city for sixteen years and was fortunate enough to be on the evacuation route in northeastern Texas when Katrina made landfall.  I have not been able to return.  I have been screwed over by FEMA in more ways than could possibly exist, which is not a unique experience, since each of the 250,000 people displaced by that catastrophe have suffered, in greater or lesser degree, the same fate.  Bush's initial indifference to the disaster in New Orleans (he only reluctantly cut a few days from his four week Summer vacation and flew to San Diego for a Republican fund raising party before he made a fly-over in Air Force One along the Gulf Coast) was followed by 16 months (so far) of ignoring the promises he made to "rebuild" the city from Jackson Square five or six days after the hurricane destroyed the city.  Little of that "commitment" has been met.  If you look, you can find yet another story published somewhere nearly every day about how the Bush administration has failed to send the aid Congress appropriated for disaster relief.  The digital images that flooded America from the Superdome, Convention Center, and numerous Freeway overpasses in the week following the flooding from breached levees, which should not have failed under the pressures created by Katrina had the Army Corps of Engineers done their work properly to begin with, opened floodgates of a different kind.  (For a full account of this issue click here.)  The administration's incompetency in dealing with the aftermath of Katrina was so massively apparent that people began to question how well, or if at all, the same group of appointees had been doing their work in every other area of governance--especially with regard to the war in Iraq.  We now pretty well know the answer to that question--Iraq, as Bush has managed it, is an unqualified disaster.

So back to the original question: why has Lieberman decided to forego an investigation of Katrina and its aftermath.  The simple answer is that documentary evidence exist, even if it is highly classified, that far more than 1300 people died in New Orleans as a result of Katrina's landfall.  The number is probably closer to 10,000.  Why did the Bush administration suppress the number of casualties in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama?  The Bush administration then and now has only one priority--keeping 9/11 in front of the American people as the only disaster that has occurred during Bush's watch, a disaster proven time and again already to be the fault of anyone at all except George W. Bush, where Katrina's aftermath, and the devastation it caused, and continues to cause, cannot be blamed on anyone except George W. Bush and his indifference to human suffering.  In terms of human losses, Katrina tops 9/11 by 10,000 to 3000.  In terms of material loss--20 or so buildings were destroyed in New York on 9/11--in the Gulf south 270,000 structures were destroyed by Katrina--in New Orleans alone 134,000 homes were gutted by the storm.  The difference between the two is that Bush can use the terror generated by 9/11 to wage a pre-emptive war of choice against Iraq, which serves some hidden purpose of his own but any mention of Katrina generates nothing but disdain and loathing for the way he handled the disaster.  If the true scope of the disaster in New Orleans were known, if it were to come to light, say in a Senate hearing investigating the administration's deplorable actions after the hurricane--Bush would be more than a lame-duck President on the way to sending more troops to Iraq; he would likely be in prison.

A fair question, of course, is how did the Bush administration manage to conceal 8700 deaths?  It was not as difficult as it might seem.  For nearly four weeks after the last evacuees left the city there was no one there except the people who were recovering bodies.  Each crew was manned by small numbers of people--3 or 4 in each one.  Crews were spread out over the entire city.  There were several collection points that were prevented by faulty communications from talking to each other.  There were at least three separate lists of casualties that were never compared nor combined.  There was much made in the media about how the recovery teams spray-painted search results on the outside of houses.  In October I drove through sections of three separate neighborhoods of the city and did not see a single house that bore those symbols.  Wealthy neighborhoods had them on every house.  Poor neighborhoods had none at all.  One of the collection points was the main building on the campus of the community college where I was teaching when Katrina made landfall.  That particular building did not flood for some reason where neatly every other building on campus did.  The National Guard commandeered the building and used it during the recovery period.

On October 20, 2005, I went to New Orleans to see for myself the extent of the devastation.  My first stop was the campus of the community college.  I attempted to visit my office in the main building to recover my personal property.  The first person I encountered was a campus security guard who I knew from being on the faculty for several years.  He agreed without hesitation to escort me into the building to my office.  Before we had taken ten steps toward the nearest door, two other armed individuals ran up and demanded to know what we were doing.  The security guard explained who I was and where my office was located.  The other security guards, or whatever they were, told me that if I did not leave the campus immediately I would be arrested.  I left.  As we drove toward Orleans Avenue on City Park Drive, I saw two 18-wheelers parked along the street at the entrance of a driveway that led back to an enclosed courtyard behind the main building with their refrigeration units running.  There was a third truck already backed into place behind the building.  A friend of mine whose house was not flooded and who had remained in the city told me that the 18-wheelers had been coming and going from the community college at a rate of several every day for two months.  The trucks were driven out of the city on a regular basis.  Also true is the fact that the main building has a fully equipped morgue on the second floor because the college offers an Associate's Degree in funeral services.  One person I know of, but someone I do not know, claims he saw body bags being loaded into the trailers on several occasions.  He also claims he followed one of the trucks into Tennessee, which is not where the official morgue for Katrina victims was located.