Sunday, September 04, 2005

Team Bush spins the crisis

New York Daily News - Home - Team Bush spins the crisis: "The Pentagon also will send another 10,000 members of the National
Guard to Louisiana and Mississippi, and total troop strength will rise
to about 40,000."

WASHINGTON - The White House worked furiously yesterday to try to convince skeptics it had a grip on unrest in New Orleans and make the case that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was finally pressing forward with a monumental recovery effort.



Still, with critics fuming, Team Bush tried to emphasize some benchmarks, highlighting that the Coast Guard has saved 9,500 victims, evacuated another 25,000 people, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered 6.7 million liters of water and 1.9 million field rations. Amtrak also will soon run four trains a day out of New Orleans.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to blame the feds' slow response on the disastrous breaches in levees a day after Katrina hit, even though various officials now claim they'd warned about the weaknesses in the levees for years.

...

Congressional hearings into the response to Katrina are a certainty this fall, as the list of critics - both Republicans and Democrats - who say the feds were a no-show for days want to know what went wrong.

"If a country knows they're going to be attacked whether by Mother Nature or by terrorists, they must be prepared and it's obvious that the federal government was not prepared," Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens) said.

Posted by crimnos @ 10:58 PM