Trust and the Failure of Initiative

This follows up on a September 14 post, "The NRP Failure". We're beginning to come full circle:

The report reconstructs a chronology of events over a three-week span from Aug. 22 to Sept. 12. It focuses primarily on failures by Chertoff and the rest of the administration to execute a year-old National Response Plan and set up a related command structure, designed to marshal resources in the critical first 72 hours after a catastrophe.

That's from the Washington Post, who got an early peek at the impending report from US House Republicans, A Failure of Initiative.

The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.

The White House arguments for shifting blame for its Katrina response was only conceivable if the disaster was not a nationally significant problem. Yet it was. Inarguably.

The report portrays Chertoff, who took the helm of the department six months before the storm, as detached from events. It contends he switched on the government's emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all," delaying the flow of federal troops and materiel by as much as three days.

The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people.

Of course, we knew all of this in September, what's significant today is House Republicans' willingness to critique the White House. (Remember, this is the investigation Democrats refused to join.) This Knight Ridder piece from mid-September, 2005 outlines the inept conception of "federalism" that incapacitated the Federal Government. Chertoff waited 36 hours to declare an "Incident of National Significance." Now, from the Washington Post:

"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership," the report's preface states. "In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror."

In legislation, Congress had anticipated the bureaucracy's need for top-level, central guidance when state and local resources were overwhelmed by a catastrophic storm or event. But when it was game time it was bungled badly. How the White House then translated that into a need for more authority, when it couldn't competently exercise what it already had, compounds the absurdity. As I've stated before: More power doesn't produce better use of it. Most likely just the opposite.

In reply to the unreleased House report, Homeland Security asserts:

Chertoff spokesman Russ Knocke said, "every ounce of authority" and "100 percent of everything that could be pre-staged was pre-staged" by the federal government before landfall once the president signed emergency disaster declarations on Aug. 27. Brown had "all authority" to make decisions and requests, and his "willful insubordination . . . was a significant problem" for Chertoff, Knocke said.

Knight Ridder, 16 Sept. 2005:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.

Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.

Nor were naval assets pre-positioned, let's recall, and were only dispatched on August 31 from Virginia and Maryland. Yet that was part of disaster planning in the 1990s:

For example, in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under President Clinton.

In their reply to the unreleased House report, the White House asserts:

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush had full confidence in his homeland security team, both appointed and career. "The president was involved from beginning to end," implementing emergency powers before the storm and taking responsibility afterward, Duffy said.

"Full confidence"? How on earth is that cliche supposed to be reassuring, as it must be intended? Americans needed help, as Dan Froomkin put it at the time. And it wasn't there.