WTF?

The New York Times has an article describing the debate and confusion in Washington in the process of responding to Katrina. Sadly, the article raises questions, rather than answering them. One passage in particular caught my eye:

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

What? Is it really conceiveable that there would be such a plan and it wouldn't envision the possibility that local first responders might be taken out too? How many police and fire-fighters were lost on 9/11? They didn't plan for that? Really?

But wait. What's the source? "Senior domestic security officials," unnamed. Hmm. Who might that be? I guess the most senior would be, maybe, DHS Secretary Chertoff. Another might be Michael Brown, still head of FEMA, though the manager did just bring in a reliever from the bullpen. If guys like that are the source, we can expect they're lying.

Why? Well, in some bizarre formulation, it might aid their whole "it's the Governor's fault, not ours" meme. It does sort of imply that "failure", of the sort they are tacitly accusing the Louisiana officials of, was so unthinkable that they hadn't even planned for it. Those bad, bad local officials, they are worse than anyone could have expected. (Of course, they seem to have missed the whole "anyone who didn't plan for such a possiblity has the brains of a squirrel!" criticism.)

Another bewildering passage from the article comes later:

Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.

The administration that consistently argues that the President has absolute power in wartime, which believes it has the power to detain American citizens on American soil and hold them without charges or trial indefinitely, was kept from rushing to the aid of drowning citizens because of a legal issue? Some legal beagle was aware of the Insurrection Act, but not aware of the post-9/11 legislation giving the feds broad powers to respond to terrorist attacks and disasters?

Again, I smell a rat. They'd like us to focus on how unhelpful the Governor of Louisiana was, or was expected to be ("would have resisted" implies that they didn't actually try her.) In reality, the Governor's request for assistance came early and was pretty broad. I believe the phrasing was "I need everything you have got." This passage carries the implication is that Washington could do nothing unless the Army was in control of the mission. If they thought that, then they are again guilty of arrogance, and a lack of creativity. I'm guessing soldiers could have been doing quite a lot without having to do any law-enforcement at all.

Of course, one can't help but think that, if half the Louisiana National Guard and their equipment wasn't in Iraq, the need for regular Army might not even have arisen. But we'll skip that for now. We'll also skip discussion of the idea that the need for so many armed troops for "law-and-order" missions of the sort the Pentagon apparently had qualms about might have been lessened, had people started receiving food, water, medicine, and the appearence of functioning authority in the first 48 hours.

So, rather than answering our curiousity, this article just piques it. As has become too often true for the once-proud Grey Lady, it's next to impossible to read this and interpret just what actually happened, and who said what when. What is clear is that there was a collossal failure to respond, and there may, or may not, have been actual debates over ridiculous legalisms involved, as people more concerned with covering their asses rather than saving lives, did their best to duck their responsibilites to their fellow human beings in the Gulf region.

But we knew that already.