Rumsfeld Kept Rescue Choppers From New Orleans
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.
