Could this be a smoking gun? NPR on today's Morning Edition had a report along with an interview with Leo Bosner, an emergency management specialist and long-serving FEMA official, who described in detail the daily e-mails (called National Situational Updates), which were sent to Agency heads (and received on their Blackberries by both Chertoff and Brown), in the days before Katrina made landfall. The e-mails, starting August 26th (and viewable at the NPR website) urgently and starkly warned that a catastrophic storm was on the way which had the potential to drown New Orleans.
Mr. Bosner said he and his colleagues at the Washington D.C. FEMA headquarters "were shocked by the lack of response."
link after the flip
You can read the report, listen to the interview and view the e-mails Bosner refers to at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4849706
This needs to hit the network news tonight. So far I haven't seen it picked up anywhere, including (as far as I've seen so far at least) the blogosphere. It needs to receive a lot more coverage.