Month: September 2005

When the going gets tough

The incompetent write memos.

KR Washington Bureau | 09/13/2005 | Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows:

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.
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.

I’m not sure which applies — plan your work then work your plan, or failure to plan is planning to fail — but it doesn’t seem like much has been learned since 9/11, when everything changed.

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grading performance

In the wake of the loss of New Orleans at the hands of the least competent kleptocracy this country has yet seen, there has been a lot of talk about what this reveals about the leadership that brought us to this point.

The mantra for years has been that the government should be run like a business, with goals and accountability (we’ll set restoring honor and integrity to the office to one side).

In the business world, leaders are known for the decisions they make.

The incumbent has demonstrated no leadership qualities. Consider the choices he made when he learned from the Governor of LA. just how bad things were.

There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

Did he ask his staff, his DHS secretary, for a briefing on his plans? Did he request a status report to be made available the following morning? No, he went to bed. If this has been a terror attack, would he have been any less blasé, any less incurious? He went on to become the target of a thousand PhotoShoppings as he played his guitar: I think we have to assume he didn’t ask for, nor did he receive, any further information.

UPDATE: TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine — Living Too Much in the Bubble?:

The day after Katrina’s landfall, Bush awoke in San Diego and just after 5 a.m. local time talked to an aide about the seriousness of the storm, then convened an emergency conference call of his top staff. He was scheduled to spend a few more nights at the ranch, but an aide said he blurted out, “We’re going back.” Bush also said he wanted Cabinet members recalled from vacations. At a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a participant, Bush said he knew he had “a big problem to solve.”

So he did have more information, but yet he continued on with a planned luncheon stop.

If we take a business-like approach to this, how do we reward someone who, through callous disregard or complete ignorance, allowed the world’s fourth business seaport to be disrupted, allowed more than 100,000 people to be flooded out of their homes, and saddled the state and the nation with the costs of rebuilding one of the country’s most visited cities?

100 years ago, this kind of performance would get you escorted into a small room with a revolver on the table, and the expectation that you would do the Right Thing. A simple resignation, preceded by a clean slate by firing the entire cabinet, would suffice.
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from terrorist mastermind to advertising icon

Insult
This is just what I want to see on the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks: a cartoon Osama, complete with Kalashnikov, selling video games.

On a related note, I saw some of SLEEPWALKING APOCALYPSE: 9/11, a bit of in-your-face political theater at Green Lake today. Nothing like people made up to look like they just fell off the embalmer’s table to make you think solemn thoughts.

Subtle as a bag of hammers, you might say.

There was one interesting element of it: there was a large red-draped shape (anthropomorphic and/or cross-shaped) that passers-by were invited to tag with small red cards saying what they were afraid of. Some of the sentiments were disappointingly predictable — Bush, the government — but others were more throughtful. One read “ignorance” while others said “being apathetic”, “becoming irrelevant.”

Now playing: Porrohman by Big Country from the album “The Crossing”
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4 years hence

A newly-minted American recalls why he chose to his new home:

Today, I am an American:

On Friday, I took the oath and became an American citizen. I can’t claim to be escaping an authoritarian regime or hopeless poverty. Indeed, the security guard at the INS saw my passport and said “What you doing here? Why you want to be American? Free medical care, free welfare. I want to be Canadian.” So why did I make the leap? There are plenty of pragmatic reasons. I have a home here, a job, a life. The United States has been good to me.

But the deciding factor in my choice was emotional. Four years ago when I awoke to the devastation, I felt that my country had been attacked. And if that is how you feel then what more needs to be said?

While a native expresses his frustration at how little has been done in the name of steadfast resolve:

9.11.05: They Have Forgotten, And They Do Not Care:

Four years later, we are no safer, our murdered remain unavenged, and our reputation and ability to lead remains devastated. The spinmeisters and propagandists will try to say otherwise, but those are the facts.

My guess is that Professor Tabarrok was actually feeling the outrage of an attack on freedom of thought, of speech, of religion, as well as the all-too-human revulsion at a cowardly attack on civilians.
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“Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor.”

Better hope there are no real natural disasters between now and the end of the current trainwreck administration: this is the guy who will oversee the relief and recovery effort.

The Seattle Times: Local FEMA chief had little disaster experience:

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a “diploma mill.”

Pennington, 38, says he worked for his degree and he is qualified for the FEMA job.

And then read this.
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further reading

Harpers.org:

This essay on the relationship between disasters, authority, and our understanding of human nature went to press as Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The excerpt below is followed by a postscript, available only on the Web, that specifically addresses
the disaster in New Orleans.

This looks worth a close read. The notion that a disaster exposes the weakness of authority which begets an increase in authority’s efforts to assert itself bears some examination.
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