The waters receding from a flood zone always leave exposed the unseemly reality lurking beneath the surface.
In the case of Hurricane Katrina, we're being told not to look. Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, ask news organizations not to publish pictures of the New Orleans dead, and National Guard troops threaten photographers who hoist cameras within range of floating corpses.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday September 15, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Golden State column -- Michael Hiltzik's column in Monday's Business section about assessing blame for problems with the government's hurricane response said there were thousands of suspected terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay. According to a Defense Department memo issued in August, there are approximately 505 detainees at the U.S. base.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday October 13, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 74 words Type of Material: Correction
Hurricane Katrina -- The Sept. 5 and Sept. 12 Golden State columns in the Business section about the Bush administration's reaction to Hurricane Katrina said Joe Allbaugh, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and his successor, Michael D. Brown, were friends in college. A representative for Allbaugh says that the two men have known each other for more than 25 years, but that they did not know each other in college.
Meanwhile, the White House contends that now isn't the time for "pointing fingers." In other words, they don't want anyone peering too closely at the human toll of the government's dereliction of duty in the days after the hurricane, or at how little we have bought with more than $30 billion a year in federal disaster preparedness planning since Sept. 11, 2001.
On CNN, George H.W. Bush laments the "blame game" while Larry King, obediently playing the Mr. Bones role in this vaudeville act, nods his head solemnly, as though Bush were a sage of good government rather than a father trying to sugarcoat his child's embarrassing performance.
Others, including the usual shadowy whisperers in the White House, blame the suffering in Katrina's aftermath not on the federal government, but on the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana.
Let's accept that the city and state governments deserve their share of blame. But let's accept that it's not awfully relevant to our assessment of the federal response. For one thing, most of us don't vote for mayor of New Orleans or governor of Louisiana. We do, however, vote for president, so a judgment of the man we've elected is appropriate.
Moreover, the inadequacies of local officials hardly justify the catatonia of federal agencies before and immediately after the storm. A few inside-the-war-room articles over the last week have depicted White House aides desperately parsing the laws governing the powers of presidents and governors to deploy troops or national guard units. Leaving aside that these questions should have been answered long ago as part of our post-9/11 establishment of crackerjack emergency preparedness, the Bush administration is not famous for standing on legal ceremony when it wishes to achieve something: Witness the detention of nameless thousands of supposed terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and the apparent trampling of habeas corpus in the Jose Padilla terrorism case (which is creeping toward the U.S. Supreme Court).
