“I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” explained Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice regarding the striking victory by the
militant group Hamas in the recent Palestinian election.
Good question. It’s not like Ms. Rice’s department was
blindsided by a surprise election in Botswana or some other place
of no consequence in the administration’s battle to neutralize the
evildoers of this world. This was front-line territory grabbed by a
top terrorist group.
Gallup could have probably called the election correctly to
within a point or two with 10 pollsters in the field for two days.
The State Department, in contrast, couldn’t see it coming with a
$30 billion budget and 30,000 employees.
It was the same with Katrina. Three days after the storm hit,
the official word from the White House was that the storm’s
horrendous damage was unexpected and unpredicted. “I don’t think
anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” explained President
Bush.
In fact, detailed warnings about Hurricane Katrina’s probable
impact, including forecasts of breached levees, massive flooding
and major losses of life and property, were steadily flowing into
the White House for 48 hours before the storm made landfall.
A warning from the Department of Homeland Security the day
before Katrina hit predicted that a storm rated Category 4 or
greater “will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee
breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks
or months.” Katrina made landfall, as predicted, at Category 4
strength.
In Senate hearings, William Lokey, the chief of response
operations at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, testified
that he was unaware of the offer from the Interior Department to
send planes, trucks, boats, and personnel to help rescue Katrina’s
victims. In addition, state and city officials, in what appeared to
be a turf war between politicians, turned down federal assistance
in the early and critical stages of the storm.
“Communications and coordination was lacking, preplanning was
lacking,” explained Lokey. “We were not prepared for this.”
In short, the lack of government preplanning rose to the level
of being criminally negligent, the federal government’s top
“coordinating” officer wasn’t coordinating, and the politicians
busied themselves bickering about who should run the rescue efforts
that weren’t occurring.
Today, after more than 1,300 Katrina-related deaths and more
than 3,200 people still officially unaccounted for, a Senate
inquiry into the government’s response to Katrina has been
effectively crippled by a White House gag order that prohibits
administration officials and presidential advisers from testifying
before Congress.
Defending the administration’s decision to withhold documents
and testimony, White House spokesman Trent Duffy explained that the
White House is seeking to “preserve any president’s ability to get
advice from advisers on a confidential basis.”
Go back to July 2001, two months before the attack of Sept. 11,
and the same government ineptness was on full display in the FBI.
Kenneth Williams, a counterterrorism agent in the FBI’s office in
Phoenix — who’d done previous duty with the Osama bin Laden unit
of the FBI’s international terrorism section — noticed a large
number of suspects signing up for flight training. A lengthy memo
from the Phoenix FBI office to the agency’s Washington headquarters
warning that bin Laden might be using flight schools in the United
States was wholly ignored by the D.C. bureaucracy.
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsch reported
in May 2002 that the missed signal from Phoenix was just “part of a
whole summer of missed clues that, taken together, seemed to
presage the terrible September of 2001.”
The failures were at every level, explained Isikoff and Hirsch,
“from the shortcomings in the law-enforcement trenches — the FBI’s
poor record at domestic surveillance, the CIA’s poor record at
infiltrating Islamic groups and the lack of cooperation between the
two agencies — to the fixed strategic mind-set of the Bush
administration.”
On August 6, five weeks prior to the September 11 attack,
President Bush received a “presidential daily brief” at his
Crawford ranch that specifically pointed to the threat of al-Qaeda
hijacking airplanes within the United States.
In Senate testimony eight months after the attack, Secretary of
State Rice declared, “I don’t think anyone could have predicted
that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World
Trade Center.”
And who could have predicted that Hamas would win, or that the
levees wouldn’t hold? Anyone see a pattern?
