WASHINGTON — Embattled Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff testified Wednesday that he did not take charge of his department's faltering response to Hurricane Katrina because his personal experience during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had convinced him that micromanaging by senior officials could make matters worse.
But members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which has spent months investigating the disaster, sharply criticized Chertoff for being so out of touch with the unfolding disaster that he went to bed unaware that the New Orleans levees had collapsed hours before, killing and injuring hundreds of people and leaving much of the city under water.
Committee chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) said it was disheartening that Chertoff was "consistently behind the curve." Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29 and a storm surge smashed the New Orleans levees later that day. Chertoff said he went to sleep that night not knowing his department had been informed of the levees' collapse.
Chertoff, who testified for about three hours, acknowledged that his department had received e-mails describing the unfolding catastrophe, but he said his staff decided to withhold information from him until it had been verified by what he called "ground truth" -- again because of his experience during the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, when top officials were bombarded with imprecise data and unchecked rumors. He said he has since taken steps to make sure that would not happen in the future.
In the months after Katrina, criticism of the botched federal response focused primarily on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its director, Michael D. Brown, who resigned under fire. FEMA is part of the Homeland Security Department, and as investigators have dug deeper, the spotlight has shifted to Chertoff because he did not step in despite signs that the response was going awry.
Although Chertoff was hailed as a brilliant choice in mid-January 2005 when President Bush picked him to head the department and he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate about a month later, the criticism of his conduct during Katrina has become so pointed that a House special investigating committee titled its 600-page report "A Failure of Initiative." It chided Chertoff for being too passive. The report was released Wednesday, though many of its findings had been reported earlier.
