Brownie Places the Blame
by Pamela LeaveyFormer head of FEMA, Michael Bown placed the blame today for the miserable failures Hurricane Katrina response, squarely on Homeland Security and the Bush administration.
Top White House and Homeland Security officials were told that New Orleans was flooding just a few hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, former disaster chief Michael Brown said Friday, challenging agency officials who have said they did not know the magnitude of the problem until the next day.
“I find it a little disingenuous,” Michael Brown, who at the time headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told a Senate oversight committee. “For them to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney.”
Asked if he felt like a scapegoat, Brown responded “Yes,” adding: “I certainly feel somewhat abandoned.”
Brown said in his testimony today that he had spoken by phone to top White House official, Joe Hagin — “on at least two occasions on that day to inform him of what was going on.” Hagin was vacationing in Crawford with Bush, at the time.
“I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true,” Brown said.
He said he made similar comments in an e-mail message to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
Brown’s testimony was both cooperative and confrontational, and “went much further than he had previously in blaming other parts of the Bush administration for the government’s halting reaction to the massive storm.”
It’s about time someone finally comes clean on this mess. The White House had decided not to “protect” Brownie from fully testifying today.
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Frankly, I’m glad somebody chewed norman coleman out.
Brown still mucked it up badly but Bush and Chertoff did worse. The buck stops at the top and its pass time somebody held bush accountable for this failure among many.
Bush lied to the american people when he said they didn’t anticpate the levy breaks and while he knew the levy spilled over the bastard went to san diego and celebrated John “fork’d tounge”McCain’s birthday while a whole city was being submerged in water and a whole region was decimated.
FEMA needs to be taken out of Homeland Security.
Brownie should have spilled it about bush a long time ago and I don’t absolve brown of his share of the blame.
The congress needs to set up a committee with full powers to deal with the gulf rebuilding because its clear the whitehouse can’t do it.
The congressional delegations from that region better realize they are being hung
out to dry and they better fight for their state instead of keep giving bush and rove what they want.
Anderson cooper 360 did a show on NO tonight and I kept thinking the dems need to be down there working to get the region not just NO on its feet. See why no body has delivered the 300 million dollars worth of trailers to the folks in the gulf. Why in the hell after 5 months those trailers are still stitting in Arkanasas?
What are they doing about schools?
If people have no place to stay how can they return with their families to rebuild?
If bush and the GOP leadership don’t want to help Katrina ravaged areas then the congress needs to do it and dare rove and bush to veto.
Final thought- The more I think on it the more I believe bush set Brown up as the scapegoat with the “Brownie your going a heck of a job” speech. This speech put brown as the face of a broken fema and poor government response. It angered the heck out of everyone and made many despise brown more because it looked like he was getting congrads for the lame response of fema.
That slogan was every where and all eyes and most of the venom went to brown instead of chertoff and bush. we know bush lied about the levees so he had to focus blame somewhere else to keep from telling the people that he knew they were drowning all along.