This is really Bob’s turf, but he’s on a tight book deadline so I’ll fill in. For those of you joining us late, the saga of Upsidedownland started when I put up this post, linking to Chris Floyd’s observation that George Bush had assumed responsibility for “all disaster relief efforts” in the State of Louisiana two days before Katrina hit land, which seemed to settle the blame game which was being fought so vigorously. In the interests of completeness — because I am always thinking of you, the reader — I dug up the White House link. And shortly thereafter, several alert readers noticed something very peculiar:
Conspicuous by their absence are Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Plaquemines, Jefferson and basically every coastal parish, and the next parishes closest to the coast. So then, let me understand this: Team Bush saw by 26 August that Katrina would be sufficiently dangerous to warrant a preemptive disaster declaration for what looks like about 65-70% of the land area of Lousiana, and he declares it for the _landlocked_ parishes?
Bob photoshopped a handy graphic confirming this, and I sat back and waited for someone to point out the Perfectly Obvious Explanation which we’d all somehow missed.
Except it never really came. And now, in the latest twist in this odd story, Mike Brown is blaming the whole thing on Gov. Blanco:
BUYER: So I’d like to know why did the president’s federal emergency assistance declaration of August 27th not include the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines?
BROWN: …[I]f a governor does not request a particular county or a particular parish, that’s not included in the request.
BUYER: All right.
Orleans Parish is New Orleans. I was listening to my colleague, Mr. Jefferson’s, questions about when they talked about, you know, they asked for this assistance for three days and then president responded the very next day, not the day that it was made — the request — but the governor of Louisiana actually excluded New Orleans from the president’s federal emergency assistance declaration?
BROWN: Again, Congressman, we looked at the request.The governors make the request by…
BUYER: Let me ask this. Since you went through the exercise in Pam, was that not shocking to you that the governor would excluded New Orleans from the declaration?
BROWN: Yes.
BUYER: When that request came in excluding these three parishes, did you question it?
BROWN: We questioned it. But I made the decision that we were going to go ahead and move assets in regardless because we have the ability to add those parishes…
The one small problem here appears to be the same problem we so often face when dealing with our conservative friends: what Mike Brown said does not seem to be the least little bit true. Here’s the request. As you can see, it specifically mentions “all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area.”
There was a lot of chatter on the right wing blogs in the days following Katrina, about how the Louisiana National Guard wasn’t actually stretched too thin at all and how the troops and equipment in Iraq wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be questionable at best:
In interviews, Guard commanders and state and local officials in Louisiana said the Guard performed well under the circumstances. But they say it was crippled in the early days by a severe shortage of troops that they blame in part on the deployment to Iraq of 3,200 Louisiana guardsmen. While the Pentagon disputes that Iraq was a factor, those on the ground say the war has clearly strained a force intended to be the nation’s bulwark against natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
Reinforcements from other states’ National Guard units, slowed by the logistics and red tape involved in summoning troops from civilian jobs and moving them thousands of miles, did not arrive in large numbers until the fourth day after the hurricane passed. The coordinating task was so daunting that Louisiana officials turned to the Pentagon to help organize the appeal for help.
* * *
The senior commander of National Guard troops at the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, said the Iraq deployment did not slow the hurricane response. He said that Louisiana Guard troops were “in the water and on the streets throughout the affected areas rescuing people within four hours of Katrina’s passing,” and that out-of-state troops arrived as soon as they could be mustered.
But state Guard commanders disagreed. “We would have used them if we’d had them,” said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana Guard. “We’ve always known in the event of a catastrophic storm in New Orleans that we’d use our resources up pretty fast.”
There is little disagreement that Guard equipment sent to Iraq, particularly hundreds of high-water trucks, fuel trucks and satellite phones, could have helped speed the response. The chairmen of the Senate National Guard caucus, Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a Sept. 13 letter to Mr. Bush that the Guard nationally had only 34 percent of its equipment available for use in the United States.
…it makes perfect sense that such a disproportionate percentage of the top bloggers on the right/conservatarian axis are trained as lawyers — i.e., trained to make the facts fit the argument, rather than the inverse, and when the facts fail to cooperate, to raise doubt where none should plausibly exist.
Watching right wing bloggers (including the “I’m-not-really-a-right-winger-I-only-play-one-on-the-internet” crowd) attempting to impugn the motives of anti-war protesters, undercount their numbers and discredit them generally is a bit like watching some pathetic reunion show of has-been child actors trying to reclaim a shred of their lost glory, if only for a moment. Sometimes you really just have to admit that the time for those catchphrases everyone once seemed to find so endearing has long since passed.
If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.
At Wilson’s Web site, you can see an Arab man’s face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man’s head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.
The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, “What every Iraqi should look like.” The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption “bad day for this dude.” One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection “DIE HAJI DIE.” The soldiers take pride, even joy, in displaying the dead.
This could become a public-relations catastrophe. The Bush administration claims such sympathy for American war dead that officials have banned the media from photographing flag-draped coffins being carried off cargo planes. Government officials and American media officials have repeatedly denounced the al-Jazeera network for airing grisly footage of Iraqi war casualties and American prisoners of war. The legal fight over whether to release the remaining photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib has dragged on for months, with no less a figure than Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers arguing that the release of such images will inflame the Muslim world and drive untold numbers to join al-Qaeda. But none of these can compare to the prospect of American troops casually bartering pictures of suffering and death for porn.
Story. The Nation has more. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this sort of thing — I posted a link to a very similar story last January.
There’s the image of Our Troops, every last one of whom are Noble and Good. And there’s the reality of our troops, many of whom are kids who didn’t know much about life outside of Bumfuck, Wherever, before they were suddenly thrown into a world in which the normal rules of moral conduct are not remotely applicable. Americans would prefer to think about the former, but every now and again, we get our faces rubbed in the latter.
The 101st Fighting Keyboarders newest battle: pounding pork. (Not to worry — the link is work safe. As long as you work somewhere where they don’t care if you’re screwing around reading cartoons instead of working.)
Incidentally, apologies for light posting. Blame it on a confluence of life, deadlines, business…and a need to occasionally get away from the damn computer.
I saw just enough of Fox yesterday to get a whiff of the latest talking points: The evacuation from Hurricane Rita is going much smoother than the New Orleans evacuation, proving, of course, that it is local response that matters. News Hounds has the whole story.
Watching this, a post Lindsay wrote yesterday was running through my head. She reports that, once again, the poor are being left behind. People with cars are leaving. Slowly, but they’re leaving. But in Houston, public housing residents are being offered leaflets on how to get through the storm in lieu of help getting out.
Wilma Skinner would like to scream at the officials of this city. If only they would pick up their phones.
“I done called for a shelter, I done called for help. There ain’t none. No one answers,” she said, standing in blistering heat outside a check-cashing store that had just run out of its main commodity. “Everyone just says, ‘Get out, get out.’ I’ve got no way of getting out. And now I’ve got no money.”
With Hurricane Rita breathing down Houston’s neck, those with cars were stuck in gridlock trying to get out. Those like Skinner — poor, and with a broken-down car — were simply stuck and fuming at being abandoned, they say.
“All the banks are closed, and I just got off work,” said Thomas Visor, holding his sweaty paycheck as he, too, tried to get inside the store, where more than 100 people, all of them black or Hispanic, fretted in line. “This is crazy. How are you supposed to evacuate a hurricane if you don’t have money? Answer me that?”
Some of those who did have money, and did try to get out, didn’t get very far.
Judie Anderson of La Porte, Texas, covered just 45 miles in 12 hours. She had been on the road since 10 p.m. Wednesday, headed toward Oklahoma, which by Thursday was still very far away.
“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They say, ‘We’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina.’ Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”
It looks like all this administration learned from Katrina is to get on top of the spin cycle before the storm hits.
In 2004, the United States funded 57 percent of global food aid deliveries, but for the amount of money American taxpayers spent, we could have gotten a lot more food to hungry people. Unlike most other major donors, we give almost all our aid in the form of food produced in the United States. Shipping food thousands of miles is expensive (and takes so long that the food sometimes arrives after it’s needed, which doesn’t accomplish much other than undercutting local food producers). The wasted money mainly benefits US agribusiness and shipping companies, and NGOs that sell food aid in developing countries in order to generate funds for other aid work, according to a recent report
by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Amazingly, the Bush administration has been in the vicinity of the only moral position on this issue — untying food aid. Bush has asked that USAID be allowed to spend up to a quarter of its budget on emergency food aid in the affected region. That doesn’t go nearly far enough. Although, under rare circumstances, shipping food into an area may be necessary, there’s no reason tie any food aid to American commercial interests. But at least they’re headed in the right direction — unlike the Senate, which followed the House’s lead and yesterday refused to even consider the possibility of helping anyone other than agribusiness.
You’d think it would be hard to top George Bush on bowing to commercial interests and lack of concern for the poor, but the Senate managed it.
Mr. Bush said he had been “thinking a lot” about the comparisons between the response to the attacks in New York and Washington, and the storm devastation. “We look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break,” he said. Turning the subject to terrorists, he said: “They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people.”
Ahem, I’m going to take a deep breath and try to ignore the fact that reading the last paragraph just gave me a stomach ache. Now lemme try to address this without resorting to profanity….okay, here we go…
Mr. President, how would things be different if the flooding in New Orleans had been caused by a van full explosives parked next to one of the more than 300 miles of unguarded levees?[1] We don’t expect you to stop hurricanes from happening, but we do expect you to do everything you can to stop terrorists. Now I suppose you could point to the fact that there haven’t been any major terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11[2], but preventing disasters from happening is only part of the job. Besides, to change the subject back from terrorism to Katrina, you screwed up there too.
Moving beyond that, the causes of the disaster are mostly irrelevant when it comes to emergency management[3], which is why the moment the flooding began, the government should have jumped into the full-scale disaster scenario that you were supposed to be preparing over the last four years. Hell, with a terrorist attack you’ve at least got the element of surprise card to play in this little blame game. In this case, you had a week to prepare and still screwed up.
So go ahead and link Katrina to 9/11. It just makes you look like a bigger failure.
1 : We can assume that if it were the work of one of our homegrown right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, the “war against these people” talk would morph into talk about “bad apples” and all that, but that’s something for another post…
2 : A rhetorical trick which also would have worked well on 9/10/01.
3 : That’s why FEMA was folded into the Department of Homeland Security in the first place.
Operation “blame NOLA on environmentalists” is starting to bear some fruit. That is, if you believe the right-wing blogosphere, who’s all too eager to hype this bit from a recent NY Times article on the levy breaks :
A surge from Lake Pontchartrain was the catastrophic situation that the corps had been guarding against since Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago. Initially, the corps wanted to build a giant barrier to keep water from the Gulf of Mexico from reaching Lake Pontchartrain and flooding the canals.
That project was delayed by lawsuits from environmental groups that contended the corps had failed to study ecological effects. By the late 1970’s, the corps abandoned that approach and began raising levees along the lake and the Mississippi and adding flood walls on the canals.
Is the Times burying the lede here? Well, only if you ignore this…
As a result of federal budget constraints, the walls were never tested for their ability to withstand the cascades of lake water that rushed up to, or over, their tops as storm waves pulsed through the canals on Aug. 29, corps and local officials say.
Hurricane Katrina was the first serious test of the flood walls, said Stevan Spencer, chief engineer for the Orleans Levee District, and it “just overwhelmed the system.”
…this…
Other questions surround the walls’ design, known as an “I-wall” for its slim cross section that fits easily into densely developed areas.
The corps manual for flood control construction suggests a different design for walls higher than seven feet - walls shaped like an inverted T, with the horizontal section buried in the dirt for extra stability.
But that option was never considered, corps engineers said, because “T walls” were more expensive, required a broad base of dense soil for support and were not necessarily stronger.
…and this from the same article.
The corps and local levee authorities also never tested whether the chosen I-wall design could survive if water flowed over the top and cascaded onto dirt embankments below.
Corps officials said they were proscribed from considering stronger wall designs for the canals both by the tight quarters and by federal law, which requires that they seek and study only the level of flood control authorized by Congress.
“Our hands are tied as to looking at higher-level events,” Mr. Naomi said.
All of which point to the same conclusion : The feds were unwilling to shell out enough money. I think we can all agree that testing the strength of the existing levees, making sure the levees are build to spec, and researching alternative solutions are all essential parts of a proper construction effort, but these steps are all expensive. When the flow of cash dries up the way it has since Bush took office, people start cutting corners, skipping crucial steps, and having to decide whether to do a half-assed job on the entire project or a thorough job on a project whose goals have been seriously scaled back. We won’t know the truth behind those questions until this tragedy is fully investigated, but we already know the result of those decisions :
This man isn’t dead because of thirty-year-old lawsuits. He’s dead because the federal government had “more important” things to be spending money on, like cutting taxes for wealthy people, no-bid contracts to political donors, and corporate giveaways. Only a fool would pretend otherwise.
If you’re joining us late: unlike the later post-storm declaration of the 29th, the pre-Katrina announcement named Louisiana’s inland parishes — and only the inland parishes — as hurricane Katrina emergencies.
I have yet to find any rational, well-sourced explanation for this, especially in light of the normal corresponding declarations for directly-affected parts in neighboring states (specifically, eleven coastal counties in Mississippi and six coastal counties in Alabama). Likewise, as Rita passed through the Florida Keys, only four coastal counties were declared.
So today, half in jest but still pondering the strange Louisiana declaration, I asked on my own site if Bush would declare soon distant parts of inland Texas a federal hurricane emergency.
This was obviously completely facetious.
I am stunned to tell you the answer is yes. He just did.
All 254 counties of Texas, including areas as far inland and dry as Wichita, Kansas or the southern tip of Illinois, are included.
How does this make any sense?
Granted, if you’re in the White House’s shoes, choosing either only inland or only coastal regions would point out some obvious huge flaws in logic. So you could argue this was the least-bad, most-ass-covering position. But this also implies that you a) read blogs and b) have any interest in appearing logical. I can’t say there’s much evidence for either.
But things are even more puzzling now. Can anyone really argue that there’s a greater need for a hurricane emergency declaration 600 miles inland than there was on the Louisiana shore itself?
I don’t know what effect, if any, getting Louisiana completely freaking upside-down had on the ground. I there was none. That would be counterintuitive, however, meaning that these announcements of federal emergency aren’t exactly, um, like federal emergencies or anything.
Click on the links and see for yourself. This is truly weird.
I’ll be following this on my own site in the coming days. When I get time in a day or two, I plan on posting a few more maps to help make this all easier to see for yourself.
PS — please, please don’t send emails pointing out declarations made from after Katrina hit as if these explain everything. Closed barn doors are off-topic in determining the location of fleeing horses. Kindly read the entire posts and check your dates, please. And please provide links to actual sources.
