It looks like Knight-Ridder newspapers is playing the “blame game” (i.e. “responsibility game”) by publishing a story that suggests Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff delayed the response to Hurricane Katrina…and therefore had a lot to do with early snail-paced federal response:
WASHINGTON – The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the “principal federal official” in charge of the storm.
As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina’s early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.
But Chertoff – not Brown – was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government’s blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.
We’re now in the initial stages of a more comprehensive public accounting that is traditional in our democracy where you’ll see more new info in the press and, eventually, via investigators (either through an independent commission or one that is more politically weighted and would therefore produce a document that would have less credibility).
The memo (WARNING: it is in adobe) is here. The KRN story has even more:
But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn’t shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
“As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.’ He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina,” Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.
On the day that Chertoff wrote the memo, Bush was in San Diego presiding over a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Chertoff’s Aug. 30 memo for the first time declared Katrina an “Incident of National Significance,” a key designation that triggers swift federal coordination. The following afternoon, Bush met with his Cabinet, then appeared before TV cameras in the White House Rose Garden to announce the government’s planned action.
That same day, Aug. 31, the Department of Defense, whose troops and equipment are crucial in such large disasters, activated its Task Force Katrina. But active-duty troops didn’t begin to arrive in large numbers along the Gulf Coast until Saturday.
White House and homeland security officials wouldn’t explain why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn’t immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.
THIS is the White House’s problem, in a nutshell.
It’s one thing to be overwhelmed and find that new bureaucratic machinery in place didn’t quite work and that there were tragic consquences. It’s quite another to try and wait the political storm out by refusing to comment, ignoring a court restraining order on banning press coverage of the recovery of bodies, waiting so long that a statement of Presidential acceptance of responsibility for federal job performance becomes a big news story, or delaying resignations that are needed to ensure better government performance, set high government administrative standards and put part of the bad political fallout behind it.
The refusal to comment on key questions raised by KRN will only mean others will follow this story and it’ll get much more play that the White House probably wants. MORE:
Chertoff’s hesitation and Bush’s creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster – caused by terrorists or Mother Nature – is too big for local officials to handle.
There were SOME responses to aspects of this story — and they helped:
Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, referred most inquiries about the memo and Chertoff’s actions to the Department of Homeland Security.
“There will be an after-action report” on the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Perino said. She added that “Chertoff had the authority to invoke the Incident of National Significance, and he did it on Tuesday.”
AND:
Perino said the creation of the White House task force didn’t add another bureaucratic layer or delay the response to the devastating hurricane. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I think it helped move things along.” When asked whether the delay in issuing the Incident of National Significance was to allow Bush time to return to Washington, Perino replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”
And:
Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t dispute that the National Response Plan put Chertoff in charge in federal response to a catastrophe. But he disputed that the bureaucracy got in the way of launching the federal response.
All that is fine. But the bottom line is we now find out that the unlamentedly-departed-from-federal-government Michael Brown is gone due to botch ups…but his boss botched up just as much and perhaps in some ways more.
Given the fact that Americans rely on Homeland Security and FEMA to be ready to help if there is a natural disaster or terrorist attack, it isn’t playing “the blame game” to want to make sure that officials who didn’t do their VITAL jobs are either (a)encouraged to move in a different direction (like away from the federal government) or at least (b)be given more stringent guidelines from higher-ups (like the President).
The public needs to know IMMEDIATELY that when we go to bed tonight we’re safer than we were before Hurricane Katrina struck apparently leaving some federal officials confused, vacationing, out of the info loop that most Americans were in by watching TV news, or strumming on guitars.
UPDATE: So now the unmentionable question becomes: was hapless ex-Fema chief Michael Brown set up? The Washington Post’s new Early Warning blog thinks so:
It’s so easy to blame Michael Brown, but he got his marching orders from someone else. Weapons of mass destruction, not waves of mass destruction, are the president’s priorities. Want to get on the White House Varsity team? Get with the program.
The same obsession that led the Bush administration to see weapons of mass destruction and terrorism in every tea leaf and go to war in Iraq now guides the entire federal government disaster response effort.
How do I prove the point? I’ve got the goods.
Read the details yourself…
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/3180462 –>
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/3180462 –>
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.