Over at Crooks & Liars they have the AP video to go with this AP story, Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina. The video can be watched directly from the AP site here.
Is it a slow news day? In what parallel universe does video of disaster planning video teleconferences constitute the AP equivalent of the Drudge siren? The parallel universe is the “Bush Controls Nature” section of the Bush Derangement Syndrome universe.
There’s lots of heavy breathing on the left about the AP story, but unfortunately for them it has all the hallmarks of the Bush Air National Guard story on 60 Minutes II by Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. The AP has dressed up mundane video to try and prove that President Bush (and everyone else) knew that the levees in New Orleans were going to breech. The problem is the evidence they present in their story to make that point does nothing of the sort.
Let’s look at the AP story (emphasis mine).
WASHINGTON (AP) – In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.
Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”
…Homeland Security officials have said the “fog of war” blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. “I’m sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,” National Hurricane Center’s Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.
…”I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.Notice what the expert is NOT talking about? Breached levees. But he’s the person AP relies on in their video report to counter Bush’s statement. How dishonest is that?
Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm – and Bush was worried too.
If such talk is in the video and transcripts AP has not provided it. The only example of talk about breached levees the cite occurs AFTER the hurricane hit.
I invite you to look through our Katrina archives from the beginning – you can learn a lot about what actually happened and when. Wizbang was in the unique position to have one of our bloggers, Paul – an engineer by trade, who just so happened to live in New Orleans. That provided us with a unique local angle on the story.
On August 27, 2005 Paul noted everything discussed in the briefings seen on the AP video and more. How did he know this? Well for starters the entire New Orleans area had avoided a similar fate in 2004 when it looked like they were headed for a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane (Ivan, not Andrew as I originally stated). The Katrina being discussed in the AP video is the monster Category 5 version of Katrina that was bearing down directly on New Orleans.
And that’s where the dishonesty in the AP story really lies. Contrary to popular belief New Orleans DID NOT take the brunt of Katrina. The Gulf Coast in Mississippi had that honor. As it veered east of New Orleans the force that Katrina hit the New Orleans area with was the equivalent of a Category 1 (or possibly Category 2) hurricane. On the video those officials are discussing a direct hit of a Category 5 storm, just as Paul was. A Category 5 storm didn’t hit New Orleans…
When the President said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” he probably should have been more specific for the casual arm-chair quarterbacking of the left. What he should have said was, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees in New Orleans from a Category 1 hurricane, since the levees were built to withstand the storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane.”
On August 29, 2005 I noted from U.S. Army Corp of Engineers data that the levees did not top. Less than 24 hours later Paul noted that New Orleans was 80% underwater and was for all intents and purposes destroyed.
What changed in the interim? We all know now that the levees were not topped, they crumbled in many spots (most of which were less than a decade old) were they could not withstand the surge they were designed to contain. As Paul noted November 11, 2005, Katrina did not flood New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did.
Absolutely no one in the AP story mentions the possibility that monumental incompetence, generations of corruptions, and shoddy engineering would doom New Orleans even if it did manage to avoid a direct hit…
But that’s exactly what happened…
Update: John Hinderaker at Powerline draws similar conclusions about the dubious quality of the AP story. He does note one of the mysteries of the story:
The AP article is fatally compromised by its factual errors, and adds nothing to our understanding of the issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina. It also raises an important point about the leaks that form the basis for many news stories these days. The AP took what appears to have been a substantial quantity of leaked material, and turned it into a brief against the Bush administration. Whether the documents themselves contain anything noteworthy, and whether, on balance, they support the AP’s tendentious interpretation, is impossible to tell.
If you watch the video it’s pretty obvious who the AP’s source is – just look for the person who turns up smelling like a rose. Brownie you’re doing a heck of an image rehabilitation job…
Update 2: Captain Ed links to partial transcripts of the videos at The New York Times. He notes that the word “breach” is mentioned exactly one time in the two video conferences, and it’s use is not if the form of a warning. Here’s what Ed says,
- “That certainly doesn’t sound like a warning — and this was on the day the levees broke. That transcript clearly shows that the conference considered the storm surge and precipitation runoff to be the major threats of flooding in New Orleans. The possibility of breaches, even on the 29th, had been discounted.
So that you can search through the transcripts I’ve run the PDF’s through OCR and republished them (Aug 28 and Aug 29) in a searchable PDF form.
Update 3: You’re never going to guess where (it appears) one of the AP story authors used to work. Does Rathergate ring a bell?
As a former resident of New Orleans (I escaped a year ago last September), we had friends stay with us during the hurricane. They brought 3 days worth of clothes……as most did…..because what happened took EVERYONE by surprise. Both Republicans and Democrats lost homes. The storm missed New Orleans. The mayor said himself that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. The fact is, it would have taken years to prevent what had happened. In the past, millions of federal dollars were pumped in to a Democratic strong hold and the funds were misused. Before Nagin became mayor, the accounting system for New Orleans was done by hand….on paper. The school system was corrupt. The school superintendant’s father was a janitor making $70k a year…the police force had the FBI investigating it again and again. The levee board was loaded with corruption. Nagin did do some cleaning up and for that, he received death threats.
The hurricane did not flood New Orleans, it was a levee breach on the 17th street canal that flooded parts of Metairie, Kenner and New Orleans THE DAY AFTER THE HURRICANE. If the hurricane was an imminant threat, Mayor Nagin should have called for a manidory evacuation 72 hours prior to landfall as stated in the plan he came up with. But he didnt do that because it came down to money. He did not want to spend the money to take the people out of the city for a storm that may or may not hit. It was the plan he and his administration came up with.
The govorner did not call for an evacuation either.
The senator didnt call for an evacuation either.
President Bush did call for an evacuation but chose not to impose his will on the local government.
The president failed because he trusted the word of a Democrat and people died because of that. I hope he has learned his lesson….never trust a Democrat when a life is in the balance…..
It is a fact that those who screamed warnings of levee breaches had done so for decades. Eventually they are tuned out because they predict doom and gloom every hurricane.
Everyone knew they lived in a bowl. Everyone knew it could happen at any time. It is a city that was very apathetic about the whole thing.
If you live below sea level, in a bowl, in the path of hurricanes, what do you think is going to happen? They did little to prepare for it.
One would think that during the Clinton years with Democratic leadership from federal top to local bottom for the city that it would have been utopia. There would be no homeless. Everyone would have a college degree and a car. The levee system should have been made 100 feet high out of concrete. But nothing changed over those years. The corruption and care free attitude continued. The poor remained poor. Things never got better for them and they sucked the teet of the government sow for all it was worth.
Screaming that it was Bush’s fault seems to get the milk flowing because Republicans actually care about the welfare of people…in fact, these supposed victims are living better than they ever have.
The people in the 9th ward of New Orleans suffered for many, many years under Democratic rule. Nothing was done to ease their plight until the president stepped in. It took a disaster to give him the authority to do so.
The Democrats have raised generation after generation of poor, black, uneducated, and most of all ignorant people. The kept them on a plantation of false hope that if they just kept voting Democrat, then next year would be better.
Well, next year came and now the shacks that they lived in are gone….replaced by various forms of housing all better than where they came from….and who do they have to thank for this new opportunity in life? None other than President Bush!
EGBooth:
To my knowledge, none of the Levee’s were ‘overtopped’, ie the storm surge was never so high that water flowed over them. Certain Levee’s failed, ie collapsed while until that such successfully holding back water. Isn’t this the key point?
*”ie collapsed immediately after a time when they had succesfully been holding back water”
Andrew,
I’m not sure where you got your information from but the levees most definitely overtopped.
This is from the “Preliminary Report on the Performance of the New Orleans Levee Systems” given to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs:
“Most of the levee and floodwall failures were caused by overtopping, as the storm surge rose over the tops of the levees and/or their floodwalls and produced erosion/scour that subsequently led to failures and breaches.”
I encourage you to read through the whole report. It’s really interesting (at least for a geek like me) It’s available here: http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=290
I also was fortunate enough to see the group who published that report present at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting this past December. They extensively surveyed the flood damage with LiDAR. They had incredible 3-D animations of the enormous scour holes formed by the overtopping of the levees. The scour holes were present next to where the levees used to be but the levee materials were sometimes a hundred yards or more away.
Thanks for the laugh all you right wing wackos. Republicans caring about anybody but themselves is really funny.
It’s worth noting that Cuba was hit by Ivan, a Category 5 hurricane and they had zero deaths. Since Castro is a better leader than Bush I’m not sure what all the hay is about.
Bush slept before 911, slept during intelligence briefings on WMD, slept during budget talks (largest deficits in history) and slept while we lost a city to Katrina.
If Bush wasn’t so incompetent the right could brag about his many accomplishments, instead of defending his enumerable failures.
Don’t you dimwads get it?
NOBODY IS BLAMING BUSH FOR THE FACT THAT KATRINA HAPPENED. If they are, liberal or conservative, they are dumbarses.
What people are blaming Bush for, and the reason that all this furor exists, is Bush’s absolute and utter inability to admit when HE has made a mistake.
This problem seems to be endemic in the administration; Cheney shoots a man, and then has the balls to blame that man. Yes, he later changed his tune a bit, but at first, it was all about how that guy shouldn’t have been in the way.
Was that a stupid hunting accident? Of course it was. But the point is the same: instead of stepping up to the plate and being men (and women) about it, the Bush administration is showing a trend, again and again, of being completely unable to admit to mistakes, being unable to simply take responsibility and fix things. They seek scapegoats, they cast the blame, or they flat out lie (and then when caught in those lies, they rely — with a fair degree of success — upon a fairly large network of professional and amateur spin-doctors to make everything right).
This argument over whether the levees were “breeched” or topped is as irrelevant and disgusting as Bill Clinton arguing about what the definition of “is” is. George W. Bush ran, at least partially, on a platform of making us all safer, and on his personality as a straight-shootin’, get-things-done kinda guy.
He is failing on both counts, utterly, and things like this, and the fact that you spinsters are more interested in saving his political bacon than making sure that the ENTIRE administration, from Nagin to Bush, are held accountable for their failures and making sure this NEVER happens again. Instead, you want to find ways to shift the blame from your Golden Boy Bush.
I thought that with a real leader, “the buck stops here.” I guess that Bush isn’t a real leader, then. Why can’t he and Cheney and Rummy and the rest learn some humility, and just say “hey, we (not Chertoff, not Brown, but WE) screwed up. We’re going to fix it”? Apparently, humility and responsibility — you know, that much-vaunted personal responsibility that you’re all howling about, blaming the poor residents of New Orleans for not being able to fix their own darned levees! — are simply beyond this administration.
THAT is what the furor is about. THAT is what “Portgate” is about. THAT is why people are pissed, and George W. Bush’s approval ratings are starting to make Nixon look good.
But I guess you’ll just spin that, attack the messenger, and miss the point again.
I’ll make it easy for liberals to understand the difference between “overtopped” and “breached”, using one of their heroes as an example.
When Ted Kennedy drinks liquor, the booze overtops the glass and goes into his alcoholic body. When he drove his car off the bridge, the water breached the car windows and doors, drowning that poor young girl.
to Forrest Gump. Some parts of Old Metairie flooded from the 17th Street Canal breach. Kenner and other parts of Metairie flooded because the pumps were turned off and the pump stations evacuated by Aaron Broussard.
GW claims that he heard news reports that claimed we had dodged a bullet and thus, no one anticipated the levees would breach. Funny, but I think I also remember hearing him say that he does not read the news… I thought this man said what he meant and meant what he said. Doesn’t matter anyhow because he did not even come to the region until 4 days after the storm. Until then, he was eating cake and playing guitar (while on a working vacation) And those in New Orleans suffered.
Kim, it made a lot more sense for Bush to stay out of the way in the immediate aftermath. What did you expect him to do, get in a boat and start rescuing people? Why come over here in the midst of the chaos just for a photo op, hindering rescue efforts with Presidential-level security issues? Anything administrative he needed to do could be done quietly, either in Texas or here but on Airforce 1 where security was easier to deal with.
And yes, I realize he had his picture taken in Biloxi. I thought that sucked and he should have kept out of the way.
Hmmm.
Sigh. You liberals really bore me.
Wow, what a slugfest this thread has become…yikes.
First, time to eat crow: mantis, you were right; I was wrong, regarding Brownie’s appointment. Not one of GWB’s better decisions, by far. And I do recall Paul (here) screaming about Brownie’s incompetence long before anyone else had picked up speed, as it were, on this blog, including me. Paul was in it, living it, and I was not.
Also, I did note that you agreed with GWB on the ports deal. So if it means anything to you, I freely admit I was speaking out of my ass when I typed what I said about you, and I was wrong. You have demonstrated your reasons for things far more fairly than I have given you credit for.
Second, to “Kiwi”: yes, I am here in New Zealand. Get over it. Your country loves my money, but it comes at a price: you get my opinions along with the greenbacks. Go re-read what I wrote, and discover that I was talking about how your countrymen simply don’t understand United States disaster management emergency standard operating procedure (ESOP), because those ESOPs build up from local to national, not national down to local, as in NZ and most countries in Europe.
In my own experience, many people in NZ understand things about the USA only as far as the Nanny Herald’s regurgitation of Independent and Guardian (UK) stories will allow. And Fiskie is well regarded here.
Your country survives off of the financing, industry, export markets, and relative peace on the high seas that is provided by the stabilising presence of US money, markets, and political hegemony. You may not like it, but you will deal with it. And as to “insulting leaders”, I voted in the last NZ election, which gives me as much right to criticise this Government as much as anyone else who voted.
BTW I noted with a smile that one of the first stops on the maiden voyage of CVN 76 was Brisbane. Must be that free trade agreement thingy…
I for one am horrified at the way the administration has allowed Michael Brown to be thrown under the FLEET of buses that they recently drove over him…..I originally thought this guy Brown was worthless…..only to find out that while he’s certainly not squeaky clean, he ain’t as bad as the administration made him out to be!!
In a large public corporation, now would be the time for the board of directors to quietly ask for the CEO’s resignation, and if they didn’t get it, force him out….IF SOMEONE ISN’T DOING THEIR JOB, THEY GET FIRED!!
We certainly have our fair share of political posturing and finger-pointing going on, but Bush himself has said he takes reponsibility for the disaster. He hired these guys, and he should’ve fired these guys, at least Chertoff….how many lost their lives in Katrina? I have heard a lot of numbers, 2-3000 maybe? maybe more, maybe less, I don’t know. But if you run a snowplow company, and a big blizzard is coming, and you assure everyone that you’ve got ’em covered, and then it hits, 5 feet of snow, and you don’t even start the plows for a couple of days, meanwhile people freeze to death in their homes, car accidents abound, who’s at fault? Who gets sued? Who is liable? It seems clear to me, that Bush WAS advised that it was distinctly possible that flooding, and maybe SERIOUS flooding, could/would occur, yet days later, he stated that no one considered the possibility the levees would fail…?! They are only rated for a Cat3 storm at most, and this was a big Cat5 less than 24 hours before landfall, how could they be doing their jobs, if they WEREN’T considering that possibility?! Heck, I sat at home, and watched the coverage, and -I- considered the possibility!!
Bottom line, it is time for this country to consider removing the President in defense of itself. He is not leading us in a clear and strong manner, he staggers from one incompetent bungling to another, only every time he bungles, a couple of thousand people die!
This who-knew-what-and-when nonsense is nothing but a blame game designed to sell newspapers and generate website hits and TV ratings.
My house flooded in Katrina. All I want is for New Orleans to be fixed. When a patient dies doctors do a post-mortem to figure out what went wrong. A post-mortem is inappropriate when the patient is still alive! New Orleans is not dead and gone, and the most offensive thing about this squabble is that the citizens of this great city struggle every day to get back on their feet while the foolish pundits argue about what happened in some kind of a vacuum, as if Katrina were a fait accompli.
Stop arguing and help, or be quiet.
I love theoryhead’s little parable and similar sentiments expressed elsewhere. BSD is not a phenomenon of the Democratic party per se, I have found. Most of these reactionaries find the Dems too pussilanimous in their Nazification of George Bush as well as their pace of progress towards a worker’s paradise. The negativity of our society has accreted into this pall the Dems intend to mine for votes as they have done so successfully in the past but the peak was long ago, if vote fraud did not serve them so well. Presumably, in theroyheads Aesopean icecream truck, vanilla is Republican (natch!) and chocolate Democrat. But smarty smart smart, she likes pistachio. As do I. But what party is pistachio? What kind of market share does pistachio enjoy? And we’re going to another truck? The truck I guess is the Constitutional republic we have known so long, right? So where is the other truck? Does this neighborhood have two? More? Sorry, unless you are talking some sort of revolution their ain’t no second truck, much less any more. Pistachio is out there but it isn’t winning ANY elections. Hilarious! Enjoy that pistachio, hoss. You and all the other pistachio voters can have a nice convention in a Baskin-Robbins somewhere. And not a large Baskin-Robbins at that.
OK, here’s an excellent synopsis of what happened when in the Katrina time line. http://www.factcheck.org/article348.html
It will be helpful if you truly want to familiarize yourself with the FACTS as opposed to what you want the facts to be, whatever your worldview may be.
Fred, MSNBC reports on the death toll here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11281267/
After reviewing the timeline above, it’s clear as I stated way above that Bush was naive in thinking FEMA was prepared. It wasn’t, nor were the local authorities. Again, plenty of blame to go around.
And again, as Fred states, Bush did accept responsibility for the federal failures, and vowed to correct things. A review, with a focus on reform and reorganization would be very helpful. However, a review used for political finger pointing and demagoguing gets us nowhere.
On the “overtopping” vs. “breaching” issue, I think you don’t really need a video conference to know that the issue of catastrophic flooding was a fear for New Orleans. Heck, all you had to do was turn on the Weather Channel. Bush’s statement that “No one expected the levees to breach,” made to Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America, September 1, 2005, is just, well, incredible in light of what the news was reporting in the 24-48 hours prior to the landfall. How could you not anticipate it? How could you not fear it? I don’t need a video conference where “overtopping” was discussed to prove to me that the Sept. 1 statement was rather ridiculous, and at best naive.
The reaction of conservatives – me included – to the recent news reports that “Bush was warned” is to the extent of well, duh! Of course he was. No big news there. I suppose it’s the whole preoccupation with catching people in lies now. Is that Clinton’s legacy? Martha Stewart’s? Scooter Libby? I think Bush’s statement was more dumb than a lie. Or his polyanna outlook on things. Face it, he’s always a “glass is half full” kinda guy, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Some of us like his optimism.
Bush put too much faith in government at all levels to be prepared and respond appropriately after the landfall. What we got was government at all levels demonstrating it’s incompetence to respond to a disaster – at least in New Orleans. Mississippi got it right locally.
Wanderlust,
Well now I wish I’d been nicer. I can’t really blame you as I also see so many of the lefty commenters here do nothing but bash Bush or Republicans. I just don’t like to be lumped into a category with the drive-by Bush ChimpyMcHitlerBurton crowd; they add nothing to any debate and they make liberals who are interested in facts, reason, and substance (as I try to be, most of the time 😉 look bad by association. Peace.
Say what you will about evacuation, but there wasn’t that much time. I live in Baton Rouge. All week, the projected path of the storm was the FL panhandle, AL, MS, etc. I went to bed Friday night thinking we were well on the west side of the storm and didn’t have much to worry about.
Got up Saturday morning, checked the projected path and Katrina was due to hit NO. Say what????? I looked at it again, thinking I’d misssed something. I had not. I headed to the grocery store and gas station PDQ, before everyone else got up on Saturday and realized we were going to get whacked.
To “Just Me” (re your quote: “Republicans caring about anybody but themselves is really funny.”
I’m a registered Independent but vote Repuplican 99% of the time. Your statement is absurd. I volunteered untold hours at the animal shelter in Baton Rouge for at least a month. My boss was pretty liberal about work attendance so I spent several days a week, many hours a day, there. I have donated money and handmade materials for wounded soldiers and Marines, and I’m sure countless Republicans have done the same.
So the warnings weren’t about breaching, they were about the much less serious overtopping. Okay, I get it. So why do we get such serious warnings about something that’s not so serious?
Bush Air National Guard story…
I never saw where those documents were proven false. Was there a court expert or police expert who did that?
Rewriting Katrina History – AP Style
It’s odd… from the video it looks like Mike Brown was actually trying hard and Bush is being his cagey self.
The documents were produced on an MS equipped computer, not a typewriter of the ’60s or ’70s era as they would have been were they genuine. How can anyone claiming enough familiarity to discuss the issue not know that? Only intentional ignorance can explain it, as only intentional ignorance can explain so, so much these days. Rather’s ANG story was a lie, plain and simple. Mostly simple.