COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Anytime I see some idiot newspaper reporter using the term "raises questions" I am almost invariably seized with an overwhelming urge to shove a pencil in his neck.

Case in point:

Now that Mr. Brown has resigned from FEMA, he's free to stick up for himself in the press a little bit better. Here's the New York Times account of an interview he gave yesterday.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/15/national/nationalspecial/15brown.html?ei=5090&en=5a22b2aef8b6b7f0&ex=1284436800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.

"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."

By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Mr. Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort.

He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré of the Army as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces began to turn the situation around.

In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director on Monday under intense criticism, Mr. Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.

"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," he said.

He focused much of his criticism on Governor Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes.

That is how the New York Times characterizes Mr. Brown's "version of events." But then, a couple of paragraphs down, we get this:

Mr. Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Mr. Chertoff acted aggressively enough in the response.

No, it does nothing of the sort. Maybe some other things do. But Mr. Brown was absolutely unequivocable in his defense of the Bush Administration.

New Orleans convulsed in looting and violence after the hurricane, and troops did not arrive in force to restore order until five days later.

If the New York Times would pull its head out of its ass long enough to examine it with a corn dog, it would know by now that the restoration of law and order is a state and local responsibility, and that federal troops are prohibited by law from acting in this capacity within the United States.

But this article contains no mention whatsoever of the availability of National Guard troops for this purpose, nor does it mention that the National Guard troops who are trained to assist law enforcement in restoring order are under the command of the governor, and explicitly NOT the federal government.

More:

The crowd in the Superdome, the city's shelter of last resort, was already larger than expected. But Mr. Brown said he was relieved to see that the mayor had a detailed list of priorities, starting with help to evacuate the Superdome.

Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done.

Got that? Mr. Brown passed the the governor's priorites on to the STATE emergency operations center. That is, the governor's own EOC. NOT the federal EOC. It is state and local officials that are responsible for running EOCs in their own areas. Apparently the governor was out of contact with her own EOC, and the EOC, apparently, did not know what the governor's priority of work was as late as the day after the storm.

If this account raises questions, it raises them about the failure of command that occured in Louisiana. Not about the Federal response, which could only have been marginally improved. given the significant logistical challenges associated with moving large scale relief from the outside into a disaster area hundreds of miles in diameter.

And if, two weeks into the disaster, the New York Times editors can't grasp the difference between FEMA and a State EOC, if they still don't know the difference between National Guard and federal troops, if they can't grasp posse comitatus, then this article raises grave questions about the ability of the New York Times editorial staff to provide competent coverage of the relief effort.

Splash, out

Jason






The account also suggests that responsibility for the failure may go well beyond Mr. Brown, who has been widely pilloried as an inexperienced manager who previously oversaw horse show judges.