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02/14/2006:

"Republicans brand Katrina response a national failure"

The response to Hurricane Katrina was "a national failure" and "an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare", according to details from the first of three anticipated reports into the disaster, published yesterday.

The report, by a committee of Republicans in the House of Representatives, declared that "all the little pigs built houses of straw".

The report, entitled A Failure of Initiative, is due to be published on Wednesday. It criticises the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, saying his detachment from events led him to implement federal emergency response measures "late, ineffectively or not at all".

It finds that President George Bush was the one person who could have cut through the bureaucratic paralysis crippling the federal response to last summer's hurricane. "Earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response," it says.

It adds that the White House did not "substantiate, analyse and act on the information at its disposal". It also questions why the "untrained" Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) chief, Michael Brown, was selected to lead the response to the disaster, noting that he and the US military set up rival chains of command.
guardian.co.uk