The NY Times has a very extensive piece on the NORL disaster
HERE"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on Monday.
Kind of hard to parse that, hmm, Karl? The story addresses to some degree the specific issue of the buses:
The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
MORE BELOW THE JUMP
Bush is gonna take a beating from this, imho. Although handicapped by poor communications, the issue of request of help is clear, and so is the promise for buses. The Times reporters put some blame on the locals, but the big message is writ large, imho, and it is B-U-S-H personally as well as F-E-M-A
an initial examination of Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11 attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show....FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause "human suffering incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after Katrina passed on Monday, Aug. 29.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.
State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and order.
The Times has a few words about the Guard:
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded.
Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority, according to the officials involved in the discussions. In the end, they rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National Guard forces, including many trained as military police.A telling comment from a former Bush administration official:Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising" about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath said.
The piece devotes considerable time to the terrible conditions at the Superdome, bureaucratic snafus, and other parts of the disaster. Well done, and worth the read. Homeland Security now gets $15 million to discover how it screwed up. Mr. Knocke, the DHS spokesman, said...
"There is going to be enough blame to go around at all levels," he said. "We are going to be our toughest critics."
I wouldn't bet the ranch on that, Knocke.