|
NYTimes: I Got Fired because of Blanco
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Q5echo |
OHH this is priceless. i couldn't help but steal this from somewhere else.
| quote: | Mike Brown Part 1: I Lost My Job Because Kathleen Blanco Is An Idiot
Michael Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has spilled his guts to the New York Times.
What did he say, you ask?
Well, the short version basically comes down to: my biggest mistake was not immediately realizing how incredibly incompetent the locals were in Louisiana, especially Blanco.
Here's the longer version, which is filled with intriguing little tidbits that paint a particularly unflattering portrait of Kathleen Blanco (my emphasis):
"By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help.
"Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.
"Mike, you want me to call the mayor?" the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Mr. Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.
When he arrived in Baton Rouge on Sunday evening, Mr. Brown said, he was concerned about the lack of coordinated response from Governor Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard.
"What do you need? Help me help you," Mr. Brown said he asked them. "The response was like, 'Let us find out,' and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing."
The most responsive person he could find, Mr. Brown said, was Governor Blanco's husband, Raymond. "He would try to go find stuff out for me," Mr. Brown said.
Governor Blanco's communications director, Mr. Mann, said that she was frustrated that Mr. Brown and others at FEMA wanted itemized requests before acting. "It was like walking into an emergency room bleeding profusely and being expected to instruct the doctors how to treat you," he said.
On Monday night, Mr. Brown said, he reported his growing worries to Mr. Chertoff and the White House. He said he did not ask for federal active-duty troops to be deployed because he assumed his superiors in Washington were doing all they could. Instead, he said, he repeated a dozen times, "I cannot get a unified command established."
The next morning, Mr. Brown said, he and Governor Blanco decided to take a helicopter into New Orleans to see the mayor and assess the situation. But before the helicopter took off, his field coordinating officer, or F.C.O., called from the city on a satellite phone. "It is getting out of control down here; the levee has broken," the staff member told him, he said.
The crowd in the Superdome, the city's shelter of last resort, was already larger than expected. But Mr. Brown said he was relieved to see that the mayor had a detailed list of priorities, starting with help to evacuate the Superdome.
Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done.
"I am just screaming at my F.C.O., 'Where are the helicopters?' " he recalled. " 'Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?' "
FEMA, he said, had no helicopters and only a few communications trucks. The agency typically depends on state resources, a system he said worked well in the other Gulf Coast states and in Florida last year.
Meanwhile, "unbeknownst to me," Mr. Brown said, at some point on Monday or Tuesday the hotels started directing their remaining guests to the convention center - something neither FEMA nor local officials had planned.
At the same time, the Superdome was degenerating into "gunfire and anarchy," and on Tuesday the FEMA staff and medical team in New Orleans called to say they were leaving for their own safety.
That night, Mr. Brown said, he called Mr. Chertoff and the White House again in desperation. "Guys, this is bigger than what we can handle," he told them, he said. "This is bigger than what FEMA can do. I am asking for help."
"Maybe I should have screamed 12 hours earlier," Mr. Brown said in the interview. "But that is hindsight. We were still trying to make things work."
By Wednesday morning, Mr. Brown said, he learned that General Honoré was on his way. While the general did not have responsibility for the entire relief effort and the Guard, his commanding manner helped mobilize the state's efforts.
"Honoré shows up and he and I have a phone conversation," Mr. Brown said. "He gets the message, and, boom, it starts happening." |
this will all come out again when he testifies. GOD! i can't F**kin wait. |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
OHH this is priceless. i couldn't help but steal this from somewhere else.
this will all come out again when he testifies. GOD! i can't F**kin wait. |
Is there any word on why FEMA cut their lines of communication? Among other things, I've been wondering what the motivation was behind that. :conf: |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
"I am just screaming at my F.C.O., 'Where are the helicopters?' " he recalled. " 'Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?' "
FEMA, he said, had no helicopters and only a few communications trucks. The agency typically depends on state resources, a system he said worked well in the other Gulf Coast states and in Florida last year. |
| quote: | By the time the scope of the impending tragedy became known, however, FEMA rescue operations were already well underway.
"We were one of two helicopters with night vision goggles," Snow's caller explained. "They wanted to start evacuating Tulane Hospital, which is right next to Charity [Hospital]."
Shortly thereafter, however, the mission ground to a halt. "We were being shot at by various snipers around the city," chopper pilot Randy said. "So the military, Eagles Nest 1, basically called all helicopters out about 10 o'clock that night."
Within hours, however, reinforcements had arrived.
"They sent in the Blackhawks first to survey all the rooftops with a gunship. Then they started flying all their C-130's in . . . the Chinooks went in and the Blackhawks went in to evacuate."
Asked about allegations that the federal response was "sluggish," the chopper pilot told Snow: "I think they're wrong. They had C-130s on the tarmac [in New Orleans] Wednesday morning, which came in sometime during the evening on Tuesday."
"They had the Chinooks on the tarmac Wednesday morning. They had the Blackhawks Wednesday morning. Everything was there."
If there was any delay at all, the FEMA pilot said, it was because operations planners needed time to coordinate the mission.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/.../6/110013.shtml |
:conf: :conf: :conf:
How freaking difficult is it to get a truthful story? Sheesh! |
|
|
| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trancer-X
Is there any word on why FEMA cut their lines of communication? Among other things, I've been wondering what the motivation was behind that. :conf: |
to kill as many people as they could politically get away with. |
|
|
| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trancer-X
How freaking difficult is it to get a truthful story? Sheesh! |
it's the way you're going about getting your info.
timing is everything. |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
it's the way you're going about getting your info.
timing is everything. |
Do you mean get the facts before Bush's spin doctors have their way with them? |
|
|
| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
OHH this is priceless. i couldn't help but steal this from somewhere else.
this will all come out again when he testifies. GOD! i can't F**kin wait. |
Yea me neither! Especially since this incompetant twit of a "martyr" you're backing is so ing stupid that he's screwing up the blame game:
| quote: |
Ex-FEMA chief points fingers at others
Brown says he told his boss, Chertoff, help was needed
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK AND SCOTT SHANE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON -- Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card.
Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort, and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.
"I am having a horrible time," Brown said he told Chertoff and a White House official -- either Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin -- in a status report that evening.
"I can't get a unified command established."
By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort. He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces met the need for more federal help.
In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director Monday under intense criticism, Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.
"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," Brown said.
He focused much of his criticism on Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes.
But his account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Chertoff, Card and Hagin, suggested that Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.
A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Brown but did not believe they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.
"There's a general recollection of him saying, 'They're going to need more help,' " said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of internal White House discussions.
Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Chertoff acted aggressively enough in building up the response.
New Orleans convulsed in looting and violence after the hurricane, and troops did not arrive in force to restore order until five days later.
The account also suggests that responsibility for the failure may go well beyond Brown, who has been widely pilloried as an inexperienced manager who previously worked overseeing horse show judges.
Brown, 50, was removed by Chertoff last week from directing the relief effort.
A lawyer and Republican activist who joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001, Brown said he had been hobbled by limitations on the power of the agency to command needed resources. With only 2,600 employees nationwide, he said, FEMA must rely on state workers, the National Guard, private contractors and other federal agencies to supply manpower and equipment.
He said his biggest mistake was in waiting until the end of the day Aug. 30 to explicitly ask the White House to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.
Of his resignation, Brown said: "I said I was leaving because I don't want to be a distraction. I want to focus on what happened here and the issues that this raises."
A spokesman for Blanco denied Brown's description of disarray in Louisiana's emergency response operation.
"That is just totally inaccurate," said Bob Mann, her communications director in Baton Rouge. "Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him."
In Washington, Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, said there was no delay in the federal response. "We pushed absolutely everything we could -- every employee, every asset, every effort, to save and sustain lives," he said.
Brown said that in one much-publicized gaffe -- his repeated statement on live television the night of Sept. 1, that he had just learned that day of thousands of people at the New Orleans Convention Center without food or water -- "I just absolutely misspoke."
In fact, he said, he had learned about the evacuees there from the first media reports more than 24 hours earlier, he said, but they conflicted with information from local authorities, and he had no staff on the site until Thursday.
FEMA officials say a complicating factor was the attempt of members of Congress to direct help to their districts. Some asked for FEMA to station personnel in their district offices, a request the short-handed agency rejected.
Brown and Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., clashed over where to send the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort. Brown wanted to send the Comfort to Louisiana to meet medical needs; Lott demanded that the ship come to his state, and he prevailed.
Lott acknowledged the conflict with Brown.
"There was some effort to take it right on to Louisiana, and I resisted aggressively," Lott said. "Everything is not going to Louisiana," he said. "We've got needs, too. The Comfort was destined for Pascagoula, Miss., and that is where it is."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/natio...779_fema15.html
|
Hehe so you have the white house clashing with Brown because the dumb can't even point the finger in the right direction properly. Yes, I can't WAIT until your hero testifies. Furthermore, if the whole SNAFU wasn't his fault, why did he and the white house lack the principles to stand for what they believe in? That they were blameless? That's really ing retarded for Brown to resign and bush to accept responsibility for the mess when they were unaccountable. Or does something finally get in the way of pricniple, dear god no. |
|
|
| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trancer-X
Do you mean get the facts before Bush's spin doctors have their way with them? |
yes, thats what i mean. |
|
|
| Q5echo |
Occ, you letting these two s at the NYT spin you. now don't get me wrong. look back. when have i ever defended Brown or FEMA for that matter, enough for you to assume he's my hero.
| quote: | | WASHINGTON -- Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card. |
look at the time. it's hours after the storm passed. he just realized that most of the towns around the Mississipi coast have been wiped off the map. New orleans on the other hand, is relatively unhurt. he and most others had focused a lot of there attention and assets on Louisiana, so yeah he's freaked. the authors don't lead you that way though.
| quote: | | Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort, and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation. |
"I am having a horrible time," Brown said he told Chertoff and a White House official -- either Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin -- in a status report that evening.
"I can't get a unified command established."
By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort. He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces met the need for more federal help.[/QUOTE]
now this would have taken place on or right before the 2nd. a 2 1/2 days after the levee broke in Louisiana. Honore' was on the ground at this time. i can't help but think about the author's intentions for the vagueness.
| quote: | In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director Monday under intense criticism, Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.
"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," Brown said.
He focused much of his criticism on Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes. |
big deal. duh.
| quote: | | But his account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Chertoff, Card and Hagin, suggested that Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly. |
"all week" well technically
A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Brown but did not believe they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.
"There's a general recollection of him saying, 'They're going to need more help,' " said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of internal White House discussions.
Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Chertoff acted aggressively enough in building up the response.
New Orleans convulsed in looting and violence after the hurricane, and troops did not arrive in force to restore order until five days later.
The account also suggests that responsibility for the failure may go well beyond Brown, who has been widely pilloried as an inexperienced manager who previously worked overseeing horse show judges.
Brown, 50, was removed by Chertoff last week from directing the relief effort.
A lawyer and Republican activist who joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001, Brown said he had been hobbled by limitations on the power of the agency to command needed resources. With only 2,600 employees nationwide, he said, FEMA must rely on state workers, the National Guard, private contractors and other federal agencies to supply manpower and equipment.
He said his biggest mistake was in waiting until the end of the day Aug. 30 to explicitly ask the White House to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.
Of his resignation, Brown said: "I said I was leaving because I don't want to be a distraction. I want to focus on what happened here and the issues that this raises."
A spokesman for Blanco denied Brown's description of disarray in Louisiana's emergency response operation.
"That is just totally inaccurate," said Bob Mann, her communications director in Baton Rouge. "Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him."
In Washington, Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, said there was no delay in the federal response. "We pushed absolutely everything we could -- every employee, every asset, every effort, to save and sustain lives," he said.
Brown said that in one much-publicized gaffe -- his repeated statement on live television the night of Sept. 1, that he had just learned that day of thousands of people at the New Orleans Convention Center without food or water -- "I just absolutely misspoke."
In fact, he said, he had learned about the evacuees there from the first media reports more than 24 hours earlier, he said, but they conflicted with information from local authorities, and he had no staff on the site until Thursday.
FEMA officials say a complicating factor was the attempt of members of Congress to direct help to their districts. Some asked for FEMA to station personnel in their district offices, a request the short-handed agency rejected.
Brown and Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., clashed over where to send the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort. Brown wanted to send the Comfort to Louisiana to meet medical needs; Lott demanded that the ship come to his state, and he prevailed.
Lott acknowledged the conflict with Brown.
"There was some effort to take it right on to Louisiana, and I resisted aggressively," Lott said. "Everything is not going to Louisiana," he said. "We've got needs, too. The Comfort was destined for Pascagoula, Miss., and that is where it is."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/natio...779_fema15.html |
|
|
| dcougar99 |
The media curtain has begun to fall on New Orleans but the questions continue. In hindsight we can see the whole fiasco for what it really was, a showcase for the suffering that some would like every American city to undergo.
The bottom line on Katrina is that whether you believe it was all incompetence or part incompetence and part malevolence, the lasting pretext is the same.
When a disaster takes place, you have no rights and the federal government can arrest you if you don’t follow their every order.
Mandatory evacuation and gun confiscation are the order of the day in the new federalized Amerika.
The local government officials initially lambasted the federal government but then showed fealty to them and praised their efforts, a confidence trick that led many Americans to believe that the fault was incompetence at the local level and that federal government takeover was the solution.
Source |
|
|
| Yoepus |
I could care less about this shome or that shome.
Congress and Bush need to award General Honoré a big freakin medal, because he is really the only (leadership) hero in all this mess. |
|
|
|
|
