White House, DHS issue counterpunch to Katrina critics
With a scathing report from the House committee investigating the response to Hurricane Katrina slated to come out Wednesday and former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown's testimony to the Senate late last week still lingering in the minds of many, administration officials took bold steps Monday to strike back in what is rapidly becoming a public-relations crisis.
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"Let's be clear about the facts," Fran Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, told an emergency management conference in Alexandria, Va. "As you know, President Bush was highly engaged in the preparation and response effort, beginning when Katrina was a tropical storm off the coast of Florida."
Timing, as Townsend's remarks indicate, will be a crucial battlefront for the White House in coming weeks as congressional committees wrap up their assessments of the government's performance during and immediately after the storm. Brown stated last week in sworn testimony that he told top White House officials about New Orleans levee breaches just hours after the storm made landfall on Monday morning. And reports over the weekend indicated that the upcoming House assessment, which will be released by an almost entirely Republican committee, skewers the administration for downplaying the importance of when it learned of massive breaches in the New Orleans levees. Administration officials have claimed they became aware of the breaches on Tuesday.
"Any delay in confirming the breaches," a draft of the House report says, according to the New York Times, "would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city."
Townsend used her platform to pre-emptively reject that conclusion.
"Levees like those in New Orleans cannot be repaired in a matter of hours, or even days," she said. "So knowing exactly when they deteriorated ... would not have magically changed our response."
Brown's shadow, however, loomed large in other ways Monday. Townsend referred to those who had "become bitter and lash[ed] out, trying to find someone else– anybody else– to blame." And Chertoff, in his own remarks, seemed to refer to Brown's testimony last week that he avoided DHS and went to the White House instead because Chertoff would have "wasted [his] time."
Chertoff said: "There is no place for a lone ranger in emergency response, for the person who wants to go it alone, doesn't want to integrate with everybody else, to show they can do it themselves."
The DHS chief also seemed to take aim at the press when he referred specifically to recent reports that have painted DHS as a terrorism-only-focused agency. Brown, for his part, also testified that he believed DHS would have instantly mobilized if a terrorist had bombed the walls holding back the rivers in New Orleans.
"I unequivocally and strongly reject," Chertoff said, "this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters."
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