Investigators Criticize Response to Hurricane - New York Times

Investigators Criticize Response to Hurricane - New York Times: Doug Mills/The New York Times

"No one from the federal government was clearly in charge of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Congressional investigators said Wednesday, and in the absence of clear leadership the general federal approach was 'to wait for affected states to request assistance.'

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans told the Senate today that the city was updating its evacuation plans. In a preliminary report, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, criticized Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, for waiting until Tuesday, the day after the storm hit, to designate Hurricane Katrina an 'incident of national significance,' a status that more clearly put his department in charge.
'Government entities did not act decisively or quickly enough to determine the catastrophic nature of the incident,' the report said. 'In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command.'

The findings were immediately criticized by the Department of Homeland Security. The department's press secretary, Russ Knocke, called them 'premature and unprofessional.'

Mr. Knocke acknowledged, as the department had before, 'that Katrina revealed problems in national response capabilities,' but he said President Bush's emergency declaration the weekend before the storm clearly put the department and its Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge."

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During my effort to migrate past posts from one blog to here I received a snide comment regarding a post entitled "Katrina Realities" that bemoaned the fact that anyone was still talking about the failures involved in our response to Katrina and Rita. Given this report, coming from the highest levels of government, we need to get on our representatives at the local, regional, state and national level to make civil defense ("homeland security") a much higher priority. After all, the Preamble of our Constitution makes it the duty of our leaders to "insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare". Methinks the argument for responding to disasters, terrorist attacks and/or invasion falls well within the category. Perhaps if we spent less time culling through thousands of phone calls and e-mails, searching the shoes of old ladies in wheel chairs, making nursing mothers sip from bottles of their own breast milk, eliminating finger nail files from luggage, and other silly, useless and ineffective measures, perhaps we could do a better job planning for civil defense, prevention and building a better (safer) infrastructure.

It is my contention that we spend far too much on foreign aid that produces ineffective results, support far too many fascist or authoritarian regimes, engage in far too many covert operations and not enough money on affordable housing, sensibly national health care, energy alternatives & conservation, monitoring/resolving government wastefulness, etc. Funny thing is that all of the latter would insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare of our nation.

Our leaders--from both sides of the aisle--need to read the Preamble more often. Everything that comes after the Preamble is subservient to it. The purpose of our government is succinctly laid out in that single sentence of fifty-two words.