By Beauty Damned

Excuses From the Government: Priceless

This transcript of a "Defense Department Operational Update," with regard to Hurricane Katrina, is a blast.

Between Secretary Rumsfeld and General Meyers, I don't know who sounds like more of a liar/asshole. Some highlights? But of course.

One thing Rumsfeld had to say that was useful was this:

In this disaster and a disaster of this magnitude, the would-be first responders at the state and local level were themselves victims in very large numbers. They were, their families were, their homes were victims of this storm. Since the federal system -- the way it's arranged under our constitution provides that the state and local officials are the first responders, and you have a disaster of this magnitude that creates a situation where the first responders are in large measure incapable of functioning given the seriousness of it, we had a situation that was distinctly different than in past events of this type.

This is why it was the President's responsibility to step in immediately and make things happen. And why didn't he? Why did it take so long to get a response?

According to an article in the Washington Post today ("National Guard Delay Likely to Be Examined"):

Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn't get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state's National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn't come from Washington until late Thursday.

I know, I know, now is not the time to criticize, it is the time to help. Indeed, it is time to help. But it is also high time that Bush is held responsible for his actions and that of his administration. And not in the way that Bush decides, as in, Bush heads up an investigation which amounts to nothing solved and no one is held accountable for the lapse in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Much like his investigation into 9/11. How convenient. In the land of Bush, no one ever has to be responsible for anything, nor honestly answer questions with regard to their actions, or as in this case, inactions. If I didn't know better, I would think Bush and his people wanted the residents of New Orleans to die. (Seems almost as if Babs Bush thought that would have been a better fate than their former lives anyway: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.". Yes, I'm sure homelessness, the loss of loved ones and being crammed in with thousands of other storm victims really agrees with them, Babs.)

Anyway, back to Rummy:

Americans have endured other times of great tragedy, and San Francisco and Chicago and other great cities have faced destruction from fire, from earthquakes and natural disasters. Those cities survived and thrived in eras when this country was not nearly as wealthy and capable as we are today.

And after those events, how long did it take to collect the dead? Were the bodies left in the streets for days to rot? Were people left without assistance? Were the states that housed those cities incapable of providing help to people who were desperate, sick, living a nightmare, teetering on the brink of death? I don't know of a time when people in America have been left so stranded or in such dire straits. Perhaps there have been times, but I don't know of them. How capable are we really, Rummy, if people are left to fight and die on their own in a time of great need? What is the point of being an American, if your country will not be there to aid you when the world is falling down because your leaders are too busy attending to their own devious affairs?

General Meyers pipes in to tell us:

It's important to understand that state, local and federal assets, including those of the Department of Defense, from across the country were preparing and mobilizing to respond even before the full gravity of the effects of the storm became known.

So where were they when the storm hit and the levees broke? The transcript only gets better:

Q: And Mr. Chairman, you say that planning was already going on when the storm was on its way. I guess I want to ask, even without an investigation now, why was the federal military response relatively slow in terms of days, when thousands of lives might have been saved in New Orleans, people who we suspect have been drowned? Why did it take days to begin moving thousands of Guard troops into the area?

SEC. RUMSFELD: It didn't. The -- as the storm was approaching, the Department of Defense met and discussed the importance of anticipating things that the department could be asked and being prepared to assist the people who do have the responsibility, federal and state and local, and arranging things, actually pre-positioning things before they ever hit.

Did you hear that folks? IT DIDN'T. Has Rumsfeld no shame about making bald faced lies? I can't even tell you how tired I am of all his lies. I've lost count of all of them now. If we put together all the lies and evasions that this administration has told over the past five years, from Bush to Condoleeza, to Dick Cheney to Karl Rove, to our most outrageous whitehouse mouthpiece, McLellan, we would drown like the people of the south, in a sea of counter-truths and excuses.

Q: You want to --

GEN. MYERS: I think -- and before the storm even hit, as I said in my remarks, there were actions undertaken by the Department of Defense to be ready to assist FEMA, which is our role, and the Department of Homeland Security. And we did that.

The headline, of course, in most of the country's papers on Tuesday were "New Orleans dodged a bullet," or words to that effect. At that time, when those words were in our minds, we started working issues before we were asked. And on Tuesday, at the direction of the secretary and the deputy secretary, we went to each of the services. I called each of the chiefs of the services, one by one, and said we don't know what we're going to be asked for yet. The levees and the flood walls had just broken. And we know some of what's going to be asked, because we'd already had some requests for assistance, but there's probably going to be more. And so as you, a service, think of capability that might be needed, you work with Northern Command, Admiral Tim Keating, and you push it forward. And we used what we call “VOCO” or vocal approval of orders. And then we'll sort it out later. If NORTHCOM says that's a good capability to push forward, then we'll push that forward. And we started that before the magnitude of this tragedy was even understood by anybody at any level. And so that movement was moving -- working.

HUH? That movement was moving -- working. WHEN? He keeps saying that, but the events speak for themselves. New Orleans was pleading for help and they weren't getting any.

Q: So you're saying there was no delay --

GEN. MYERS: There was no --

Q: -- in addressing the situation by the military in terms of sending troops in there?

GEN. MYERS: I think we responded as -- not only was there no delay, I think we anticipated, in most cases, not in all cases, but in most cases, the support that was required, and we were pushing support before we were formally asked for it. And some -- some -- most was needed; some perhaps was not. We're sorting that out right now. We may have more assets, for instance, afloat than we actually require right now, although we require a lot of that afloat capability.

Is this guy's cranium lodged in his rectum? If they don't feel that anything went wrong with the response this time, what are our chances when it happens again or something else equally destructive? How can we trust that the response would be adequate if something twice or three times the scale of Hurricane Katrina occurred? As Jon Stewart said on his program last night, "we're *bleeped*."

Q: Mr. Secretary, one of the strains of thought and complaints we've been hearing in the last few days is that people are wondering, if this was a WMD attack, would the response be both perceived as slow as a lot of the public thinks it was, and in some cases actually as slow? Is that a valid concern right now that you need to allay the public's concern on or review on your own?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, as you know, being a Pentagon reporter, the department -- one of the things this department does very well is lessons learned. And from the first day, I asked Admiral Giambastiani to see that we put in place a lessons learned process. So this has been going on, and we will know a good deal more after we have time to complete that work and get briefed on it and make judgments.

But I think your question's a fair one. The Department of Defense -- just as the Department of Defense does not have lead responsibility with respect to natural disasters, so too, we do not have lead responsibility with respect to attacks within the United States from within the United States, and that would characterize what you posed as a question. And I'm sure that the government will be addressing that question in a serious way, as we all should.

At this point, the man has just lost his mind. Did him and Bush both get bitten by some kind of rambling idiot bug? ANSWER THE QUESTION ya fuck!

Q: Mr. Secretary, I -- and General Myers, I want to ask about one narrow aspect of the response. Late last week we began to see helicopters dropping food and supplies to people on the ground that were in areas that were hard to get to. A lot of people are wondering, including some of the victims who are on the ground and in very desperate situations on -- particularly on Tuesday and Wednesday, why we didn't see those sort of helicopter air drops, for instance, to the Louisiana Superdome, where thousands of people were without food and people were dying in front of other people's eyes, and in remote areas of the Mississippi coast, where people were expecting to see the military deliver aid and didn't see it for a couple of days. And my question is, is that -- is that expectation, was that expectation unrealistic? Why couldn't helicopters have delivered some essential aid to those kinds of places on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Thursday and Friday?

SEC. RUMSFELD: General Honore answered that question when General Myers and I were with him on Sunday. And he pointed out that the first thing that one does when a hurricane is approaching is to move assets -- aircraft, helicopters, all those kinds of capabilities that can be destroyed in a hurricane -- away from the area that's being targeted by the hurricane so that they will be available at some point. So, there was a substantial movement of things away from the hurricane by private people, by military people. When I was a Navy pilot, we used to have a hurricane evacuation where we would get in the planes and fly them up to Memphis, Tennessee. And that's a very normal pattern. As the situation evolved, they were brought back, and very rapidly. And the numbers, as you know, people have watched what's going on on the ground. They are not in the remote areas, because CNN isn't in the remote areas. But the -- in --

Q: We are Sir. We’re in many of the remote areas. We're not everywhere, but we have over a hundred reporters --

SEC. RUMSFELD: Right. But -- but what we're seeing in large measure is New Orleans. And there, as General Myers said, today something like 355 military helicopters are operating there -- many, many multiples of anything anyone could have imagined. And they're all -- it came up from having evacuated and then bringing them up.

Right. But. Shuddup. You're not making any sense and you're not answering the questions and you're so out of touch with reality that I could just claw my own hair out. Reporters have been out there in the remote areas since long before the president "interrupted his vacation" to fly over the disaster from a safe distance in Airforce One on his way to Washington, and the reporters have been there ever since, while Bush could only be bothered to swoop in to a convenient location a couple days later for his obligatory (and shamelessly contrived) photo-op.

Q: So when people were at the Louisiana Superdome on Wednesday at the most desperate point before the -- substantial aid got there and they were crying out for aid, was that a -- was it unrealistic? There was no way to get helicopters to drop food in? Maybe General Myers could address this. The reason I'm asking is because the public is asking, because the people who were affected are asking this question.

GEN. MYERS: I just -- I'm not going to quarrel with your premise, but I -- from what I understand, there were -- there was food and water being brought in, and maybe those quantities weren't sufficient. But you go to look at the priorities in that day --

Q: There were no helicopter drops --

If saving lives had been a little more of a priority, perhaps there would have been saving for those thousands stuck in the Superdome for days on end while violence and death, sickness, hunger and thirst all ruled.

GEN. MYERS: The first -- the first priority was to save lives. So the helicopters they had were out trying to save lives from people that were in the flood waters, to save lives.

And then the next thing you think about is food and water and shelter, and then you think about medical. And those were the priorities that General Honore, as part of our response, and the state governments, with their adjutant generals or the folks that led their disaster response, were struggling with.

And I think that as situations became known -- and part of Tuesday afternoon, of course, was made assessing the -- and Wednesday morning were made assessing what the needs were, because again, recall what the headlines were Tuesday, and you're talking about Wednesday, and we're talking about by Friday things were pretty much resolved not only in the Superdome but also in the - I think they call it the civic center or convention center -- they were pretty much -- by Friday night, Saturday morning, pretty much resolved, which I think, given the magnitude of the tragedy, as General Honore said -- and I think it was probably not an exaggeration if you look at other storms, other Category 5 storms -- he said of biblical proportions. So I think they prioritized and they did what they could do.

SEC. RUMSFELD: When we were down there, we happened to meet with a National Guard outfit, helicopter outfit. They had eight helicopters. And between August 30th -- that's Tuesday, the day you're talking about -- and September 3rd, they flew -- just with eight helicopters -- they flew 781 sorties; refugees and patients they pulled out, 6,644; they delivered cases of MREs, 1,656, with 12 times the number of meals in a case -- there's 12 meals in a case; and water at sixteen-fifteen cases; and they carried breach fill, sling loads to fill the levee breach, something 1,551,000 pounds of materials to fill that breach.

GEN. MYERS: One Texas Guard small helicopter outfit with --

SEC. RUMSFELD: One outfit. So there was a lot going on during that period.

GEN. MYERS: -- way less than 15 helicopters.

SEC. RUMSFELD: And as General Myers says, the first priority was to save lives and the sustainment of people, and the filling of the breach and those other things followed.

Q: Mr. Secretary?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Yes?

Q: Would the response have been faster if it had been federalized right from the beginning? If it had been a federal response? Particularly in light of the fact that, as you pointed out, first responders were swamped by the hurricane and its aftermath?

GEN. MYERS: I think the response by the National Guard, which is under state authority in both Louisiana and Mississippi, and I assume Alabama and Florida as well, was, I think, very quick. I think if you asked the TAGs [The Adjutant General] of that state, I think they responded very quickly. And the quickness with which we used the compact between the states to bring other National Guard in there was -- the buildup was quite impressive. If you give me -- give me slide one. I'll give you a comparison to another Category 5 hurricane. On the left you have Andrew in 1992. And I don't know if you can read the chart, but the total there is 14,000 at day five of the event. And then, if you look under number two -- or above number two, you see roughly 30,000 for Katrina, and that was the rapidity of the response.

And bear in mind that there was no major city involved. The hurricane hit south of Miami, Florida, so there was no major city involved, and we had a major American city that -- three quarters of which was under water. And so -- and some of the roads into the city, of course, were under water as well.

And Mississippi, of course, as you get below Hattiesburg, the infrastructure was -- a lot of the east-west roads we saw for ourselves were just chopped up. So bridges, roads were out of there. I think that's -- you know, you can never be perfect in a tragedy like this. You'd like to be perfect and be there the moment someone needs help, but it's just not -- as hard as these people tried and the states tried, it's just not possible.

SEC. RUMSFELD: One of the other shortfalls besides the fact that first responders were in many cases victims, of course, was the communications system in the city disappeared. Cell phones weren't working and that problem. The Department of Defense has since gone in and provided bandwidth, so that the city is getting backup with that.

Yes.

Q: Mr. Secretary, there are some critics out there saying that the deployment in Iraq somehow hindered your ability to respond to this disaster militarily.

SEC. RUMSFELD: That's just flat wrong. Anyone who's saying that doesn't understand the situation. Do you want to comment on it?

GEN. MYERS: I don't what else I can say except it is flat wrong. It's -- well, I can say a few other words. There were some other articles that people, I think, are misconstruing; that maybe our response to the October referendum in Iraq and to the September elections in Afghanistan are going to be somehow modified because of the humanitarian assistance we're providing along the Gulf Coast. That's wrong too. The plan that we've had in effect will stay in effect. Those that need to deploy are deploying. The troop levels are going to be what the commanders wanted and what they've asked for, so nothing has changed.

And on top of that, we've had the flexibility to find those service members, as you know there's brigade combat teams out of both Louisiana and Mississippi that were forward deployed, and we have found those members of those units and other members, active-duty and Guard, that may have family members in those regions. And those that have serious issues we're bringing back to deal with their own personal situations.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Thank you, folks.

GEN. MYERS: Mr. Secretary, can I give one other little story about that -- about response?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Sure.

GEN. MYERS: And I think it's a tribute, and it's how I ended up my formal remarks. But it's a tribute to the spirit of the men and women in the armed forces, and this is -- it's not a trivial thing. But one of the agents that was supporting Secretary Rumsfeld and I -- I'll just leave his name out of it, but -- he trained hard with a special unit ready to go to Iraq. He was supporting our mission in a volunteer status. His house was at -- in the Keesler area, and it was wiped out. His wife was in Montgomery. He was at Fort Bragg getting ready to deploy, came back to support our mission, and then in two days was going to be gone to Iraq and all willingly. He said, “That's what I do, and since we don't have any household goods, my wife will work that part of it. But she's going to work that, and I'll go do my job that I've trained for for months.”

You hear story after story after story like that, and we ought to take comfort that we have people that want to do that kind of work and that have that kind of dedication.

Q: Mr. Secretary, a housekeeping issue?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't do housekeeping.

Well that's just a cryin shame ain't it? And how is that story supposed to be heartwarming General Meyers? It just makes me want to cry that that man has to go off to war while his wife stays and struggles with the loss they've faced. That story is fucking sick!

Q: Well, I understand that, but -- (laughter) -- everybody keeps talking about how the U.S. military -- how the Pentagon had anticipated the disaster. Is it possible to get a detailed timeline of when assets were moved, when decisions were made, because we keep hearing that the military was ready, but quite frankly, the pictures, the images and the stories out of New Orleans fight that. It's hard for us to get – to wrap our minds around that concept when it took so long to see the results of the U.S. military efforts. Is it possible to get a detailed timeline of when things were moved, when they were available, and when decisions were made to deploy them?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I would think -- I don't know that, but -- what kinds of precise records were kept. But certainly the --

MR. DI RITA: Yeah, we’re pulling something together on that --

(Cross talk.)

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- the lessons learned -- just a minute. Just a minute. The lessons learned project, which will take some time, clearly will recapture everything that can be recaptured of that type. And we'll know an awful lot more then. And we've got a good group of people working on it -- folks, as a matter of fact, who have done it several times, so they'll be good.

Haven't we learned yet that it's no good to assign the job of finding out what went wrong and how never to do it again, and to hold people accountable for their errors, to those who committed those errors in the first place?

Posted by Maria at September 6, 2005 07:36 PM | TrackBack