The Associated Press has obtained video footage of federal disaster officials briefing President Bush and his homeland security chief for several days before Hurricane Katrina struck. Hurricane experts warned just how bad the impending tragedy was shaping up to be -- the President was told the storm could breach levees, overwhelm rescuers and put lives at risk in the New Orleans Superdome. Seven days of briefings went on before the catastrophic storm made landfall, with top hurricane experts expressing "grave concerns" about the levees.
FEMA director Michael Brown (who took a lot of the blame for the poor response) told his bosses the day before Katrina hit: "I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe." And yet, four days after the storm devastated the Gulf Coast, Bush says nobody could have predicted
what happened.
The AP story said the tapes "show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster. Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm." According to the report, Bush asked no questions during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured Gulf state officials: "We are fully prepared."
He apparently wasn't concerned by all he had heard -- even after the storm hit. In the days following Katrina's landfall Bush jaunts around Arizona and California far from the devastating hurricane, the rising waters and the fiasco of official response to it. He attends birthday parties, campaigns, strums a guitar and finishes his vacation. He isn't alone in avoiding the crisis -- Condoleeza Rice takes in a Broadway show and Rumsfeld goes out to the ballgame while the hurricane batters the area, breaches levees, floods New Orleans, wrecks the Mississippi coast, displaces hundreds of thousands of people and, ultimately, kills over 1,300 people. He finds time to talk with Diane Sawyer on September 1 (before he flew over New Orleans in Air Force One), and tells her: "Well, there's a lot of food on its way. A lot of water on the way. And there's a lot of boats and choppers headed that way. Boats and choppers headed that way. It just takes a while to float 'em!"
That's our president -- prepared, fully briefed and standing by (somewhere) -- from a distance.
