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Bush blamed for Katrina
02/02/2006 08:00 - (SA)
Washington - The White House and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff failed to act decisively enough when Hurricane Katrina struck, congressional investigators said in a stinging assessment of slow federal relief efforts.
No clear chain of command was in place when the massive storm hit the Gulf of Mexico coast on August 29, investigators with the Government Accountability Office said. For that, they said, much of the blame belongs to President George W Bush, who had not designated any particular official to co-ordinate federal decision-making. Bush has accepted responsibility for the government's halting response, but for the most part the public face of the failures has been that of Michael Brown, who quit as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency within days of the hurricane's landfall.
"That's up to the president of the United States," GAO Comptroller General David M Walker told reporters after being asked whether Chertoff should have been the lead official during the emergency.
'Up to the president'
"It could have been Secretary Chertoff" or someone on the White House staff, Walker added. "That's up to the president."
The report, which the congressional agency said was preliminary, singled out Chertoff for several shortcomings. Until now, Chertoff has largely escaped direct criticism for the government's poor preparations and slow rescue efforts. More than 1 000 people died in New Orleans, Louisiana, alone.
The Homeland Security Department angrily responded to the GAO report, calling the preliminary findings a publicity stunt riddled with errors.
Homeland Security oversees FEMA and issued a national plan last year for co-ordinating federal disaster response with state and local agencies.
In their nine-page report, investigators noted that they had urged the White House more than a decade ago, during President Bill Clinton's tenure, to appoint a single disaster co-ordinator after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Andrew. Still, they said, the Bush administration continued the failure with the lack of a clear chain of command. That led to internal confusion when Katrina struck, they said.
"In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command," the report found.
The assessment - the first of several reports about the response to Katrina - noted that Chertoff authorised additional federal assistance to overwhelmed state and local resources on August 30, a day after the storm hit. But Chertoff did not specifically classify the storm as a catastrophic disaster, which would have triggered a faster response.
"As a result, the federal response generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance," the report found.
Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke called the report misleading.
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