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More re bushie & the disaster...
Subject: t r u t h o u t - Sidney Blumenthal | "No One Can Say They
Didn't See It Coming"
"A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New
Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush
administration ordered that the research not be undertaken."
"In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report
stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most
likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York
City."
and many more below.
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090105L.shtml>
Go to Original:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/31/
disaster_preparation/index.html
"No One Can Say They Didn't See It Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Wednesday 31 August 2005
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one
of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush
administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to
pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has
left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and
hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the
evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico.
But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result
of an act of nature.
A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how
New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the
Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After
a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast
Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers
strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a
hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely
disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.
But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project
essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the
Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district
of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake
Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning
of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since
2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring
freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans'
levees, but it was too late.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane
published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses
are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it
coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious
questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to
developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of
the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost
wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between
the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had
promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's
administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his
approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of
Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they
could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to
interstate commerce.
In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental
groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without
wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary,
much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how
mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said
one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council
on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable,"
and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."
"My administration's climate change policy will be science based,"
President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the
Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to
the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as
"a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change
assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA
issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating,
"Climate change has global consequences for human health and the
environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and
all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush
successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists,
meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising
temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.
In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including
20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific
Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has
played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of
America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly
prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered
to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and
implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has,
however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific
knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely
ignored this statement.
In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of
science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The
Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of
the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific
evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific
advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage
in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian
agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to
delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are
subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to
buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of
Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion
no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at
which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite
her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a
former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional
background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and
prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious
materials through the Park Service.
On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech
in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to
Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace
and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had
boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."
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Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to
President Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a
column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
___________________________________
Annie Finch, Director
Stonecoast Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
University of Southern Maine
222 Deering St.
Portland, Maine 04104
Phone: 207-780-5973
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.anniefinch.com
http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/
—THE BODY OF POETRY: ESSAYS ON WOMEN, FORM, AND THE POETIC SELF —just
out in the Poets on Poetry series from University of Michigan Press—
___________________________________
Annie Finch, Director
Stonecoast Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
University of Southern Maine
222 Deering St.
Portland, Maine 04104
Phone: 207-780-5973
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.anniefinch.com
http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/
—THE BODY OF POETRY: ESSAYS ON WOMEN, FORM, AND THE POETIC SELF —just
out in the Poets on Poetry series from University of Michigan Press—
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