Monday, October 24, 2005

Creative Chaos? : "Aide Says FEMA Ignored Warnings"

Aide Says FEMA Ignored Warnings:
For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA's only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city's levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding, the staffer told the Senate yesterday.

Marty Bahamonde, sent to New Orleans by Brown, said he alerted Brown's assistant shortly after 11 a.m. that Monday with the "worst possible news" for the city: The Category 4 hurricane had carved a 20-foot breach in the 17th Avenue Canal levee.

"FEMA headquarters knew at 11 o'clock. Mike Brown knew at 7 o'clock. Most of FEMA's operational staff knew by 9 o'clock that evening. I don't know where that information went," said Bahamonde, a 12-year FEMA staffer who has worked full time since 2002 as a public affairs official.

President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all said they were told that the city's flood walls did not fail until Aug. 30. They said they assumed that the worst was over during a day-long window when operations could have been launched to rush aid to the Louisiana Superdome or rescue more than 50,000 residents and tourists before streets and homes were flooded.

"President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all said they were told that the city's flood walls did not fail until Aug. 30. They said they assumed that the worst was over during a day-long window when operations could have been launched to rush aid to the Louisiana Superdome or rescue more than 50,000 residents and tourists before streets and homes were flooded."
Is this conduct the result of incompetence alone? Or was it intentional criminal neglect?

There was a time when we could excuse these administration's failures as simple mistakes due to incompetence and would not entertain the possibility that high racking officials of the Bush administration could be lying to promote an agenda, when denying something unbelievable for us. But that trust has been long eroded. As with Iraq and the WMD, we later learned that there was intentional deception resulting from ideological planning, so it may be the case with the Katrina aftermath.

So, we need to ask if the destruction of the City of New Orleans, which the Bush Administration did nothing to stop, does not fit with the neoconservative ideology of creative chaos, (or 'destruction' 'revolution') i.e. the idea that destruction is the precondition for a reconstruction according to their radical-right agenda for the future (if you are not aware of what I am talking about read:
Flirting With Facism). This would also help to explain 9/11 'intelligence' failures, as providing the ocassion to begin to practice the notion of creative chaos at a great scale level.

You may think that I am making things up, but ever since vietnam, I have not known any other administration with as much chaos related to their failures. Is this an accident or is it ideologically driven?

It is scary to think that people with such a mentality would be ruling the USA, but it is a thought which cannot be discarded out of hand anymore.
The German People did not realize the mess the got into until it was too late, are we willing to take the risk by ignoring the signs?

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