Evan Thomas: How Bush Blew It

Newsweek's Evan Thomas finally writes the story about the quality of Bush Administration decision making--with its immediate corollary that George W. Bush has no business being president--that he has known and been sitting on for four and a half years:

MSNBC - How Bush Blew It
: It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news?... The bad news on... Aug. 30... was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation.... The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss... the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed....

President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad. The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers... thought the president needed to see.... Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be--how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century--is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that... ranks as a national disgrace....

It is not clear what President Bush does read or watch.... Bush... equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him.... Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around.... When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.... On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news....

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented.... But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.... The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain.... A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster....

The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand." Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge.... Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."... There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

By the predawn hours [of Tuesday, eighteen hours after it had happened], most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time.... To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately.... Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."...

At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there.... On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation.... Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics....

By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it.... By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters—-but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area....

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—-FEMA—-was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration.... [Albaugh's] college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."...

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange....

---

Mike Allen is also late to the party with a story on Bush administration decision making that he too could have written... anytime in the past four and a half years:

TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine -- Living Too Much in the Bubble? : Longtime Bush watchers say they are not shocked that he missed his moment--one of his most trusted confidants calls him "a better third- and fourth-quarter player," who focuses and delivers when he sees the stakes. What surprised them was that he still appeared to be stutter-stepping in the second week of the crisis, struggling to make up for past lapses instead of taking control with a grand gesture.

Just as Katrina exposed the lurking problems of race and poverty, it also revealed the limitations of Bush's rigid, top-down approach to the presidency. "The extremely highly centralized control of the government--the engine of Bush's success--failed him this time," a key adviser said....

[H]e did not immediately show that he sensed its magnitude. On the Monday that Hurricane Katrina landed and the Crescent City began drowning, Bush was joshing with Senator John McCain on the tarmac of an Air Force base in Arizona, posing with a melting birthday cake. Like a scene out of a Michael Moore mockumentary, he was heading into a long-planned Medicare round table at a local country club, joking that he had "spiced up" his entourage by bringing the First Lady, then noting to the audience that he had phoned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff from Air Force One. "I said, 'Are you working with the Governor?'" Bush recounted. "He said, 'You bet we are.'" But the President was not talking about the killer storm. He was talking about immigration, and the Governor was Arizona's....

From tarmac to Cabinet room, the President's performance was uneven at the very least, and associates say that can be explained by several factors.... his elongated summer vacation... five weeks... pressure on White House officials to take only the most vital decisions to Bush and let the bureaucracy deal with everything else. Bush does not appear to tap sources deep inside his government for information, the way his father or Bill Clinton did, preferring to get reports through channels. A highly screened information chain is fine when everything is going well, but in a crisis it can hinder. Louisiana officials say it took hours for Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to reach Bush (although when she did, he talked to her soothingly, according to White House officials). "His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him 'everything is under control,' when in this case it was not," said a former aide. "The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things 'that rise to his level' bit them this time."

A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President's increasing isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong.... A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom."... His chief of staff, Andrew Card, has never been mistaken for James Baker.... Bush has filled a number of lesser spots around the government with political hacks and patronage candidates--most embarrassingly Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema), who was yanked from on-site supervision of Katrina on Friday.

"Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House," said a lobbyist who is tight with the Administration. "You can't have a Mike Brown at fema unless you can guarantee that there isn't going to be a catastrophe." The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad--4even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary. For example, a source tells TIME that four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way that left too rosy an impression of the progress made. "It bore no resemblance to what was actually happening," said someone familiar with the presentation....

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Comments

[alan]

The only real surprise here is why any of this is a surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest attention since year 2000.

In Molly Ivin's book "Shrub" she poses the question of why Bush would even want to be president. She wrote this back in 2000. He's not interested in policy. He's not interested in working hard.

Clearly, W sees the office of presidency mostly as a ceremonial post dedicated to the greater adoration of himself, and any serious work is all delegated to the little people whose purpose is not to service the nation, but to serve George W. Bush. And not bother him while he is getting on with his life.

The statement that "George W. Bush doesn't care about black people" is understandable but off the mark. George W. Bush does not care about anybody but his insider circle of ideological mentors and think-alikes, and his big corporate and personal campaign contributors. I doubt he cares much for sycophants like Chirtoff and "Brownie" the moment they are no longer useful to him, but he professes "loyalty" to them mostly to avoid having them tell what they know.

Disgusted? Yes. Surprised. Not hardly.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Unfortunately, the constitution doesn't seem to provide for impeachment for gross incompetence.

[Matt Hardwick]

The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday.

I think I know why he had already decided to return to Washington, and it wasn't because of Hurricane Katrina.

It was because of Cindy Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan and all the MSM and especially annoying blogosphere attention she was causing was ruining his chance to relax in peace, but he couldn't return earlier because this would be similar to our current position in Iraq: retreating would be a signal to the terrorists (read: aid-and-comfort-giving Anti-Warriors) that they had "won". This Hurricane -- which Bush, like everybody else, thought was going to be a run-of-the-mill thingy -- was the perfect excuse.

Or so he thought. Out of the frying pan, into the fire...

[Matt Hardwick]

BTW: The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday.

shoud of course read

"The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday."

[Matt Hardwick]

...And "shoud of course read" should of course read "should of course read".

Aaaagghh!!!...;-)

[howard]

the prof has hit the key point: the media obviously knows much more about the dysfunctionality of the bush white house than it has been willing to report.

it's not hard to imagine why....

[bellumregio]

David Rubenstein founder of the Carlyle Group comments about Bush’s tenure on the Carlyle board to the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association on April 23, 2003.

"We put [Bush] on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

Rubenstein continued: "He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board. And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things."

[ChristianPinko]

George W. Bush is not the problem. American conservatism is the problem. Not just Bush, but American conservatives in general, equate disagreement with disloyalty. And criticism of America is equated with a desire to see America utterly destroyed. Just look at the savage attacks on Cindy Sheehan, Joe Wilson, the Dixie Chicks, or anybody else who dares try to get in conservatives' way.

It isn't true that Bush doesn't care about policy. He cares very much about invading Iraq, lowering taxes, and smashing women's sexual freedoms. It's just that everything else is regarded as a distraction from these core goals: for him, Katrina is a problem mostly because it could be a useful campaign issue for Democrats in 2006, which could threaten his precious tax cuts. And that, unlike the destruction of a major American city, would be a disaster.

[robert waldmann]

Very good article (finally).

Still there is some Posse Comitatus nonsense "the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority." There has been no such declaration and the military has acted. I have a too long post on the degeneration of this excuse.

Also when talking about phone lines, note buried in the huge WAPO story on what went wrong a very interesting little fact. The national Guard had only one satellite phone on the Mississippi coast, because all of the others were in Iraq.

What Louisiana communications equipment was in Iraq and how many people died because it was over there ?

[Auros]

Evan Thomas loses any claim to deserving praise when he writes: "The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina—like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11—was a failure of imagination." No, it was a willful MANIPULATION of intelligence. CIA analysts who told the upper echelons the truth were censured; the Office of Special Plans picked and chose til they had a "case" for war. Furthermore, the lack of plans for the aftermath was a failure of imagination -- they could not IMAGINE that Iraq would not spontaneously blossom into pro-Western democracy. This particular failure -- a failure to imagine the OBVIOUS -- is so extreme as to be delusional, and may qualify as even worse than the failure to imagine a levee break in New Orleans.

[robert waldmann]

Hmm more posse comitatus hooey " But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement." So the law that ended reconstruction was passed in 1868. Grandpa Norman would be shocked at his grandson's ignorance of US history.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Well, it is clear from their strenuous efforts on damage control, that the White House fears precisely what is happening here and in David Ignatius' column, reviewed in another post: that the Katrina story enables more and more people to emotionally and rhetorically identify the Administration's fumbling, plus link it to the fumbling of the Iraqi occupation. With the recent bitter end of talks on the Iraqi constitution, we may be about to hear more echoes, from the front pages.

And if we throw in counterterrorism policy before 9/11, the Administration could hit a damning, insurmountable "trifecta" of incompetence. That story may now resurge, for the final deluge: Inspector General Helgerson's report to Congress recommends punitive sanctions for George Tenet, so Tenet could bail-out of his deal with the White House. His 20-page response to the charges has been classified, but apparently he is telling a story much like Richard Clarke’s -- have a look at The Moonie Times op-ed on the Thursday before the hurricane hit: “Potential Bush-CIA Crisis,” http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050831-091719-1217r.htm

If the public is reminded that all the intelligence really did go into the White House, but nothing came back out, all hell will break loose.

[sm]

Maybe. The public has shown a great desire to be deceived, to be assured that things are fine, just like the attitude ascribed to Bush.

[save_the_rustbelt]

"George W. Bush is not the problem. American conservatism is the problem. Not just Bush, but American conservatives in general, equate disagreement with disloyalty."

Don't ever confuse George Bush with a conservative.

If Bush were tried on the charge of being a conservative there would not be enough evidence to convict him.

Bush is a corporate whore, representing the interests his daddy's rich friends.

[Charles]

Evan Thomas continues to spread misinformation.

1. Gov. Blanco sent National Guard into New Orleans on 8/29, well ahead of the collapse of order. However, she only had a grand total of 6,500 to work with. If she had put every d--n one of them into the lowermost part of the lower delta, there would have been two per square mile. Meanwhile, the American people were being told there were 300,000 troops ready to roll.

2. The people of New Orleans were penned in and not permitted to leave. We know that the Gretna police had the bridge blocked and fired on people attempting to walk out of New Orleans. But there is reason to think that the Guard also kept people confined at the Superdome and the Convention Center. I doubt Governor Blanco ordered that. I know that once General Honore took charge on 8/31, it became his responsibility.

All relevant cites at MercuryRising (the URL listed above). Comments specifically about Gen. Honore at phoenixwoman.blogspot.com/2005/09/was-gen-honores-command-of-nola.html

[Charles]

Robert Waldmann, you're somewhat off the mark regarding Posse Comitatus. I think the crisis may have been precipitated over Bush trying to use the disaster to expand his powers.

A good discussion of Posse Comitatus is online at law.wustl.edu/WULQ/75-2/752-10.html Briefly, the Army and Air Force are banned from involvement in civilian law enforcement. The National Guard is not limited by PCA. The military may provide equipment and supplies, technical assistance and training. They may be used for law enforcement to preserve the functioning of federal government, when civil order has collapsed, or to put down rebellion. They were used in the 1992 LA riots, and was roundly and properly criticized at the time as an arrogant use of presidential power.

New Orleans did not qualify for any exception. Despite lurid tales of looters, murderers, and rapists, it hasn't been established to any certainty that crime in NOLA during the flood was worse than crime normally is in that drug-wracked community. People in a disaster zone taking food, diapers and drinking water, often with the tacit approval of police, are not criminals in any meaningful sense of the word.

The crisis did not emerge by inaction. It emerged because food and supplies were blocked from entering the city and because survivors were prevented from leaving. There is more evidence supporting the proposition that the crisis was deliberately created than evidence that it was the result of negligence.

By creating a crisis, Bush increased his power greatly. For example, he may have "cleansed" Louisiana of enough Democrats to re-take the statehouse and Mary Landrieu's seat. But he also built on his father's precedent, of a president using troops for law enforcement when civil order may be reeling but has not really collapsed.

I think Posse Comitatus is at the heart of this story.

[jml]

I don't understand the fuss and uncertainty over legal niceties of deploying the active military after it became clear they were the only ones who could provide timely assistance. I saw this link to a NY Times editorial about the 1906 SF quake, and I thought I would post it here. In the SF earthquake, back in what I assume the Republicans would say were the good old days, when men were men, and there was no bureaucracy, no big government, blah blah blah, etc. etc., the solution was simple. The available active duty military near SF placed itself at the service of the local authorities, and details were hashed out later.

Odd that a supposedly can-do, anti-bureaucratic supposedly conservative administration claims it was caught up in bureaucratic tangles for days while people died. I couldn't believe it when I first read that Rumsfeld had problems with allowing the active duty go and serve where they were needed. I thought it was a lefty smear against an easy target. But this is the second or third time I have read it. If this is true, Rumsfeld seems to think that people serving in the active military have only one legitimate purpose: to kill. And if they do anything else, they will be ruined somehow, even if they could be very helpful doing something else atemporarily in a very lethal emergency. There is something wrong with Rumsfeld, he seems to think that active duty soldiers' only legitimate function is to wage war, (to obliterate and kill) and they can never do anyhing else at all. When has that been true in US history? It certainly did not seem to be true in 1906. If he thinks that way, he is mentally sick and dangerous.

Why all the fuss over active duty military, and odd thinking that there had to be a civilian insurrection (insurrection?) for them to serve in a domestic emergency? But it is OK for armed private security contractors with ambiguous legal status and serving under ambiguous authority to run around with automatic weapons (these mercenaries are guarding the Gulf Cost right now). I think this administration is crazy. They live in some fascist fantasy world, the logic of which I cannot understand. If there is some constitutional or legal angle I am missing, I wish some one would explain it to me.

Anyway, read how the federal government responded in 1906. Did you hear them whining around, and doing nothing and then lying about it afterwards? Did they sit back and do nothing for days, and then complain that specific requests where not made for 256,782 brown blankets, or that the local request for beans didn't specify pinto versus white or pink?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08winchester.html

[Charles]

The only thing Protein Wisdom has ever succeeded in demolishing is itself.

This is a sample of its wit: "We know that Bush watches ESPN. We know that the Iraq War is a failure. We know that President surrounds himself with yes men. And all these things—when coupled with his “failure of imagination” to shred the Constitution and drop active duty troops into New Orleans over the objections of a sitting governor (and to do so on Tuesday, as the levees were breaking—in effect, anticipating what the local government was unable both to anticipate and prepare for)—highlight Bush’s failure."

Example. Did the levees break on Tuesday?

Um. Well, actually, no.

They broke on Monday, mid-morning. www.nola.com/weblogs/print.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/print074994.html

The reason that right-wingers exist is because they live in a perfect vacuum of fantasy. Reality is their Boojum, you see.

[John Emerson]

Someone should go through the Jeff Goldstein hack job in detail.

I don't think that he actually admires Bush that much, my bet is that he just hates liberals and people who seem like liberals.

[jml]

The Washington University article references above specifically discusses use of military in natural disasters. According to this article, providing material and manpower for disaster rescue and relief, and to RESTORE ORDER, does not violate the Posse Commitatus act because none of those functions is close enough, legally, to the function of ordinary law enforcement. I guess that makes sense. In a disaster, you may be simply forcing people to go here or there, do to this or that, or to prevent violence, and these acts may have little to do with what is on the laws books, but is required in order to ensure public saftey, allow quick evacuation, or allow emergency workers to do their jobs. And the article specifically mentions use of military following 1906 quake as being permissable under Posse Comitatus act. In 1906, army, navy and cutter fleet in California presented itself to local authorities and served under them, following their direction in managing disaster.

So, is this article wrong? If not, the administration is blowing smoke on the legal difficulties with using miliatary as well. Or should we just say they are lying again, and leave it at that?

Anyone know more about this legal issue?

law.wustl.edu/WULQ/75-2/752-10.html

D. Allowable Domestic Uses of the Military
There are many other uses of the military which seem to implicate the PCA, but are not within its scope because law is not being enforced. Since the passage of the PCA, the military has been used several times for domestic purposes that do not conform to its traditional role. The PCA proscribes use of the army in civilian law enforcement, but it has not prevented military assistance in what have been deemed national emergencies, such as strike replacements and disaster relief. However, these emergencies differ in character from other exceptions to the PCA by their very nature as emergencies and by the duration of the military involvement.

Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both used the military to replace striking federal employees. In 1970, President Nixon sent 30,000 federal troops to replace striking postal workers in New York,[138] and in 1981, President Reagan replaced striking air traffic controllers. [139] The military has also been used to replace striking coal miners.[140]

Disaster relief, another common use of the military, does not seem to violate the PCA because it is not a mission executing the laws. In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Army led the effort to put out fires and restore order. More recently, Hurricane Hugo in Florida resulted in a large military presence during the relief effort.[141] However, the military also found itself providing election facilities in Florida--a situation too similar to that which precipitated the passage of the PCA in 1876.[142]

[knut wicksell]

I think the Posse Comitatus thing is critically revealing. In my paranoid moments I lean towards Charles' view that the Bush administration had plans to declare martial law in New Orleans and possibly the adjoining parishes as a kind of test run for a more ambitious project down the line. There are certainly people in that administration who think it would be a good idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are working papers on the subject hidden under some rock at the Pentagon. On that scenario, Governor Blanco looked at what was happening, asked for time, consulted with some lawyers, and got Witt down to Baton Rouge to run the recovery operation.

A less apocalyptic interpretation is that the Republican Feds wanted simply to keep their hands on the loot that will be passed off as reconstruction money, just as they did in Iraq and no doubt with similar results. Governor Blanco had an equally strong incentive not to let that pass.

The final hypothesis is perhaps the most compelling. The Bush administration is peopled by paranoid incompetents, who see every problem as one of military self-defense or law and order. My guess is that their first instinct -- assumning they knew who was affected -- was to ask, how are we going to keep those poor black people out of good neighborhoods? And it simply ran down hill from there -- the need to bring in troops, the problem, as they saw it, of replacing the Governor as the source of authority in this field, by the President. Then dither, dither, dither.

None of these possibilities excludes any of the others, of course.

[Charles]

Knut, the Bush Administration is so sociopathic, I try to avoid speculating about motives. A friend and I went down the list of how Bushco benefits from the destruction of New Orleans, and it's stunning. They have driven a few hundred thousand Democrats over a swing state, possibly handing them a governorship and a Senate seat. Big contracts for their contributors. High oil prices for their contributors. The American people suffused with fear and dependent on Our Dear Leader. On and on. With so many motives to pick from, why choose any single one?

John Emerson, I have demolished one paragraph of Protein Wisdom over at MercRising (see my URL). Title of the post: Reality is their Boojum. People are welcome to add debunkings.

[Charles]

jml, the key is this "Disaster relief, another common use of the military, does not seem to violate the PCA because it is not a mission executing the laws."

In New Orleans, now it is. Indeed, it is Blackwater mercenaries executing the law.

[Susan]

The frightening thing here is that the press always knew that Bush was an idiot, but because he gave them nicknames and shared phony bonhomie with them, compared to the more austere Gore, they reported favorably on him and in some cases (the egregious Cokie Roberts) seem to have lost their minds in the process. It's a little late for Evan Thomas to come to grips with the fact that we have a moron in the White House.

[jml]

Charles,
That is true. I wanted to get the posse comitatus issuse straight as a matter of law with people in the reality based community who typically post at this blog, without getting into the private security outrage, or to try to understand the fantasies or plots or motives of those in charge. The Bush folks seem to be always one or two steps ahead of everyone in bizarre and troubling actions. But their spin is so blatantly false, ridiculous and immoral this time, that it may sink them politically. That is my hope.

[theorajones]

Ya know, when I was in college, I had a boyfriend who had a really well-kept apartment. It took me a year to realize that neat is not the same thing as mature (gimmie a break, I was young).

I think the press are still impressed that the Bush people show up on time, run great meetings, and wear suits.

But punctual is not the same thing as competent.

I find it incomprehensible that the media have still failed to recognize that this White House has no policy or administrative competence at all. The skills required to run a good campaign or PR shop are not actually the same skills required to run a country. Duh.

[Charles]

Yes, jml. I understand. What I was pointing to is the fact that the military *are* executing the laws in New Orleans and that this is therefore a situation where the highest standards of Posse Comitatus (PCA) need to be respected.

I'm not persuaded that the extent of violence amounted to the "rebellion" standard usually applied to PCA. See the discussion of 10 USC 332 at www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode10/usc_sec_10_00000332----000-.html

There were wild rumors of lawlessness in NOLA, only a few of which have been substantiated. Those may have been fanned by Bushco to justify the claim of a "rebellion." As I have pointed out, the Sept. 2nd issue of Army Times indicated that troops thought they were engaged in "combat operations" to suppress "the insurgency."

Who told them so?

[howard]

Lee, to pick up on your point, george tenet fired a shot across the bow the other day. Through a columnist in, iirc, newsday, tenet let it be known that if he is in any way disciplined as a result of the still-secret study of cia actions before the war, his tell-all book will actually be a tell-all book.

i would say the absolute last thing the bush administration needs right now is george tenet saying that george bush missed the warning signs on 9/11; the dots would be just too obvious.

now, odds are that the bushies will quietly deep six any notion of further sanctions on george tenet, and his tell-all book will remain frustratingly vague, but that's only the odds, not definitive.

[jml]

Charles: friend of mine says General Honore, now in charge of area, said in interview today that violence was not out of hand, just normal disorder to be expected in US following dissaster -that is, the insurrection, near-insurrection, or even black-people-out-of-control stores are bunk. I can't find link of interview. I can find stories that say Honore is called the "Ragin Cajun" general, and that he supposedly was born in the middle of a hurricane.

I heard live radio news reports from NO when it was supposed to be out of control. None of the reporters seemed afraid or were reporting city wide, or much of any violence, Harry Connick Jr. had delivered supplies and was making a tour. One of the reporters said on air he was going to try to find Connick and to get an interview. If that was the reporter's idea of a good story, I find it hard to believe the violence was that bad, or the looting was that much worse than in FL hurricanes.

[christo]

Good comments on this important post today. I'm going to copy this and putting it into the permament file as this will be on the test. I'll need to bone up on some of this to rebut my self-labeled conservative friends and others who aren't friends.

I too thought that the reports of anarchy in the U. S. A. were exaggerated. Put those vague reports into context with sports hooliganism. I come from the supposedly civilized Boston area and after the Red Sox or was it the Patriots won the last championship there were gangs of youths vandalizing cars, tipping them over, setting them on fire, smashing store fronts, and one young idiot died. This was in Boston but I'm vague on when it happened. I am dimly aware of similar soccer riots occuring after the college basketball final four. So are we supposed to call out the fighting men of the 101 at the end of any hot sport event with orders to shoot on sight? This is to try to put the reports of black on civilization reports in context. I am sure that some horrible things were done, but it was also a pressure cooker environment.

[nate]

The link below takes you to a blog posting at the Peoria Pundit (not my blog). This posting may be entertaining to Prof DeLong and others-

http://tinyurl.com/d453d

[christo]

Paul Krugman in today's piece "All the President's Friends" references a foreign newspaper. As our press increasingly practices self-censorship, I expect more pointers to foreign publications for a fair and balanced treatment. The Chinese character for woman is a picture of a person with their ankles and wrists bound for delivery to the man's house. As our formerly vigorous press turns into girly-men, they are turning themselves into this position.

'Yesterday The Independent, the British newspaper, published an interview about the environmental aftermath of Katrina with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst in the agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, whom one suspects is planning to join the exodus. "The budget has been cut," he said, "and inept political hacks have been put in key positions."'

[trevelyan]

"The Chinese character for woman is a picture of a person with their ankles and wrists bound for delivery to the man's house."

No it isn't. 女 is woman, 人 is person, 男 is man. There are no ankles or wrists involved in any of the characters, although its possible to speculate that the character depicting the female is depicting pregnancy.

There tends to be a lot of disinformation about the Chinese language, so its wise to take things you hear with a grain of salt. :)

[The Fool]

I thought the most revelaing part was when Mike Allen relayed this:

"The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job."

This is the mark of the worst kind of ignorant blowhard. Bush's aide is undoubtedly 10 times more knowledgable than Bush on whatever subject they were discussing, but know-nothing Bush explodes at this guy for telling him he was wrong as if he had committed the grave offense of lese-presidente.

[Jose Padilla]

"Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice." That's 135,000 meals, 335,000 liters of water and 8,500 pounds of ice per truck. I don't think so. The President must have been lying.

[Rose Anne]

Would this administration use the military to keep power if other means failed? Perhaps local and state responders to Katrina were allowed to twist in the wind in order to justify the now widely proposed solution: to have the feds (i.e. the miliatary) take charge the moment a disaster is declared.

So, later on, could the military take over in California because we have West Nile virus here? This may be the game plan, if one looks at the whole board. The National Guard, hollowed out by the Iraq war, and other local responders, could be all that stands between us and a full blown military junta.

We need to watch carefully, line by line, the proposals put forth by Bush et al for post Katrina procedual changes in disaster relief.

[Charles]

Thanks for that information, jml. I'll try to track down the interview.

Trevelyan, thank you for explaining a comment that made absolutely no sense. Where do these urban legends come from? Is there a factory, or do they grow on shrubs?

[christo]

Charles, Trevelyan:

For a complete literary reading of those three characters, yes, yes, yes, Trevelyan is correct, "woman", "person", "man" in the order that T wrote them in the post. With an attempt to understand what the early pictogram Chinese character was trying to picture, it could be a bound woman being delivered to her husbands house. It could also be a pregnant woman. "Person" does look like a stick figure walking on two legs. "Man" is a picture of a field, the square with the cross inside, above energy, supposedly meaning man is the guy that works the fields, a complicated idea to express "male." I was using this tentative etymology about someone being bound to make a point about our press. If my post isn't clear, it isn't good. I think Trevelyan is being excessively literary without a look back to where these characters came from. I heard this idea from my pal Mike who has a masters in Chinese Lit from Chengchi University Taipei and then went on to start a Dr. at Northwestern. Origins of Chinese characters is fascinating. I was first exposed to it through my painting professor I Hsiung Ju from Hunan who came to the U. S. to get a college education after WWII through a U. S. Aid program. No urban myth, educated speculation.

[Josh Children]

Apparently 9/11 didn't change everything after all. Evan Thomas, the celebrated Newsweek editor / pundit who has built an impressive literary career on thorough research and analysis has managed to squander his legitimacy in the blogosphere by editorializing not only the ostensibly absent politicking in oliver stone's WORLD TRADE CENTER, but also by crafting such a red-flag-toting, how-do-you-do fluff piece as his 'How American Myths Are Made' in the latest issue of Newsweek.

My understanding of the film solely from other reviews i have read -- though admittedly having not seen the film first-hand -- is that Stone does manage to introduce questionable occurrences from the official story into the narrative of the film, which for such a mainstream movie released by a major Hollywood studio under the very same administration that was in office during the event is a victory in and of itself.

However, the problem with Thomas' condescending tone throughout his piece - while barely mentioning alternative points of view for no more than one graf, and even then with ridicule - speaks to the sad state of affairs mainstream American journalism finds itself in. While I certainly wouldnt expect Newsweek to be a mouthpiece for the 9/11 truth movement, I was clearly mistaken to believe they would still endeavor to uphold some semblance of investigatory virtue, or at the very least devote more than a few lines to an ever-growing movement largely comprised of the very working-class people Thomas was so quick to sanctify. It is this sort of pedantic theology that colors much of our mainstream media today, and ironically, has aided in creating the very kinds of mythology Thomas so vehemently defends in his piece.

Whatever side of the political aisle one resides, it has become painfully apparent that there are several problems with the official story of 9/11, and if Thomas were truly concerned with preserving the American tradition of pursuing truth and victory in the face of adversity, he would be supporting the questioning of the events of our 'day of infamy', if only in the name of disposing of useless mythology.

His editorial, unfortunately for his readers, was a missed opportunity. Shame on Newsweek.