Project Katrina

GQ has a devasting and power article this month about former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. While the bulk of the article focuses on Iraq, his lack of management skills, turf battles, and biblical quotes on the cover of military reports he sent to the White House, there are several small sections towards the end about Hurricane Katrina that left me speechless.

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

:No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.”

You read that correctly. The military had hundreds of rescue choppers, many with airlift equipment, within range of New Orleans. But because Rumsfeld was engaged in a turf war, so it would take days before he finally sent in both the needed active duty troops (not just the Louisiana Guard) and released the much needed air support.

Even a shit all stupid George Bush began understanding something was wrong, and in the end turned on Rumsfeld:

Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

Just when I think I can’t read anything that will stun me about Hurricane Katrina, well I am proven wrong. Ad to think, this man ran the Department of Defense for years. It boggles the mind.

Politifact is a site run by the St. Petersburg Times. They have complied a detailed checklist of  all Barack Obama’s statements on the needs of New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana and his promises to help meet those needs, measured against what he’s actually proposed and/or done.

If the 16 promises about Katrina Obama has 15 “No Action” and one “Compromise.”

The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes to me that New Orleans is now enjoying its second strat White House that just doesn’t give a shit about fixing what the Federal government broke in the first place.

The Times-Picayune recently reported the story of Earnest Hammond:

A spry 70, Hammond likes to stay busy. So he putters in his sprawling garden. Pulls mildewed drywall out of his 7th Ward house. Smashes thousands of aluminum cans he has collected, hoping they will provide the rehab money the Road Home program hasn’t.

But he worries that FEMA might tow away his trailer at any time. Technically, it is no longer his: Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered him, by letter, to leave his “FEMA-furnished manufactured-housing unit” by this past Friday.

Like Hammond, those remaining in trailers across the region are mostly people who lived on their own before Hurricane Katrina: Eighty percent were homeowners, and most of them told FEMA in a survey this year they want to return to their storm-damaged homes.

But last week, as the deadline approached, FEMA issued conflicting messages. Some caseworkers told occupants their possessions would be put on the street if they were not out by Friday. Others told elected officials and legal advocates that FEMA would work with trailer occupants on a case-by-case basis and remove only trailers that are vacant or housing unauthorized occupants.

But officials at the top levels of FEMA in Washington, D.C., would offer no assurances. Instead, they said their hands were tied. Friday marked the end of the Temporary Housing Program for Katrina victims, including about 2,000 families in trailers and 54 more in local hotels.