If his mouth is moving, he is lying:
This little tidbit hidden away on page 25A of the print edition of today's (09/17/05) Dallas Morning News:
Military's Orders to Move Delayed
WASHINGTON - Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush announced a massive federal rescue and relief effort. But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.
How long did it take our troops to arrive once the order was given? After the jump.....
Our military was on the move in a nanosecond, compared Bush's dithering:
Once orders arrived, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.
Did it really matter that Bush took so long - TWO days of vacation before returning to the White House and THREE days before issuing the orders to roll-out? A total of five days of waiting for those in dire, desperate straits?
Gen. Julius Becton, Jr., a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said if the troops had been dispatched sooner, more lives probably could have been saved.
What does this have to do with Bush and his insatiable lust for centralized control and power?
Mr. Bush has said that laws need to be changed to allow for easier military involvement in domestic disasters, but many emergency response experts say the problem was reaction by leaders, not legal impediments. (staff and wire reports)
(emphasis added)
That is, a complete and total LACK of reaction by leaders! The lying scum let people thirst, bake in the sun, drown and perish for five days through his own - and his hand-picked administration's - negligence. And now, he wants to use this horrific tragedy to agrandize his power.
See what he is doing? Because of his own slowness to act (which is starting to appear deliberate to me), Bush caused more deaths. But, rather than really accept blame (note that during his "I accept responsibility for that" statement, his head twisted from side to side, his eyes darting down and sideways - any direction but straight-ahead and forthright), Bush is playing for another huge power grab:
The end of the Posse Comitatus act, which restricts Federal Troops from acting as local law enforcement. A Friday, Sept 16, 2005, attorney's interview on NPR stated that this act in NO WAY restricted use of federal military assets from search-and-rescue, logistics support, infrastructure repairs, transportation, medical care, or anything else related to disaster recovery.
That doesn't matter to Bush. He simply wants to have the power to usurp local authorities whenever he wishes. He also wants to destroy the EPA and he sees these two actions as complimentary results of the power he seeks.
Delayed military response confirmed here:
Cargo planes had been put on alert, but
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took in a baseball game in San Diego on Monday night, Aug. 29, while floodwaters inundated New Orleans. The military didn't set up a task force to respond until Wednesday, Aug. 31, two days after landfall. By then, Katrina was little more than a rainstorm over Ohio.
......{snip}.....
But no member of the White House staff was assigned responsibility for tracking federal actions and no senior-level official was given oversight responsibilities. Asked in an e-mail who had been in charge at the White House as the storm bore down, administration spokeswoman Dana Perino replied, "Overall, the president is in charge at the White House."
We need Democratic Congressmembers and Senators with back-bone, honest military officials who care about the future of our nation, and all of our support to STOP this rush toward Bush's power shift. We must do all we can to stop him from extending military power to enforce local law - all disaster relief can be accomplished without ANY changes in the law - and we must do all we can to stop Bush from further ruining the Environmental Protection Agency through a slew of "emergency exceptions" that will become permanent and wider spread in the months to come!
[UPDATED] with online link to an expanded version of the article printed in the Dallas Morning News:
"If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. "We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that."
Federal officials have long known that the active-duty military is the only organization with the massive resources and effective command structure to handle a major catastrophe.
And it reinforces Bush's lack-of-contact with reality:
Addressing the nation on Thursday night in a speech from New Orleans, Bush said the storm overwhelmed the disaster relief system. "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice," he said.
Several emergency response experts, however, questioned whether Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff understood how much authority they had to tap all the resources of the federal government - including those of the Department of Defense.
"To say I've suddenly discovered the military needs to be involved is like saying wheels should be round instead of square," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor and the director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security.
and confirms that there is no need for expanded authority, only expanded LEADERSHIP:
Scott Silliman, a former judge advocate general who's now the executive director of Duke University Law School's Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, said he was surprised that military forces weren't on the scene more quickly after Hurricane Katrina.
"I see no impediment in law or in policy to getting them there," Silliman said. "We could have sent in helicopters. We could have sent in forces to do search and rescue and to provide humanitarian aid. Everything but law enforcement."
He said someone failed to pull the trigger, but he added that an investigation is needed by an independent commission to determine who's to blame.
"They're trying to say that greater federal authority would have made a difference," said George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff and the co-author of a textbook on emergency management. "The reality is that the feds are the ones that screwed up in the first place. It's not about authority. It's about leadership. ... They've got all the authority already."