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Banned
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I do not think that enough can ever be documented, noted, distributed, and protested, concerning the pattern of lies that eminate from the lips of our criminal president, especially when large numbers of us are in crisis, agravated by the incompetence and deceit of these same leaders, passing themselves off as the champions of the "christian right", whoi fund them, vote for them, appologize for them, and cheer them on !
Quote:
http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml%3Fpid%3...exercise&hl=en
...........at one point Diane Sawyer asked him to respond to the frustration people were feeling with the apparently slow and disorganized federal response to the crisis. After promising that help was on the way, Bush explained that a faster response was not possible because it was not possible to imagine this kind of catastrophe.
Sorry, but that just isn't true. Not only has the prospect of a hurricane breaking through the levees and <a href="http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10180">flooding the entire city</a> been the subject of <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313">widespread media coverage</a>, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) actually practiced for precisely this scenario just over a year ago.
As a summary report of the exercise explains, in the simulation FEMA gathered emergency response officials to see how they would respond to a fake storm named Pam that devastated New Orleans just as the real-life storm, Katrina, now has:
BATON ROUGE, La. -- Hurricane Pam brought sustained winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana and storm surge that topped levees in the New Orleans area. More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, state, federal and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a five-day exercise held this week at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.
The exercise used realistic weather and damage information developed by the National Weather Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the LSU Hurricane Center and other state and federal agencies to help officials develop joint response plans for a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana.
"We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts," said Ron Castleman, FEMA Regional Director. "Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies."
"Hurricane planning in Louisiana will continue," said Colonel Michael L. Brown, Deputy Director for Emergency Preparedness, Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. "Over the next 60 days, we will polish the action plans developed during the Hurricane Pam exercise. We have also determined where to focus our efforts in the future."
You can read the full summary <a href="http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=13051">here</a>, including the agency's finding that it would need to operate 1,000 shelters for 100 days while establishing special medical and search-and-rescue operations to take care of those left in the city.
The report doesn't say how the simulation went. And, in any event, simulations are never quite like the real thing. Still, it's clear FEMA knew very well that New Orleans could be facing exactly the sort of crisis it now faces. And the apparent confusion and delays that have beset its response certainly raise some questions about why the agency--and those who oversee it--didn't do a better job.
UPDATE: Knight-Ridder has <a href="http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm">more</a> about the simulation. It also solicits expert opinion on the response so far--and the verdict is pretty damning:
WASHINGTON -- The federal government so far has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.
The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, told Knight Ridder that the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting the global war on terrorism.
The disaster preparedness agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was enveloped by the new Department of Homeland Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of al-Qaida.
"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
In interviews on Wednesday, several men and women who've led relief efforts for dozens of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes over the years chastised current disaster leaders for forgetting the simple Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.
Bush administration officials said they're proud of their efforts. Their first efforts emphasized rooftop rescues over providing food and water for already safe victims.
"We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said during a news conference Wednesday in Washington.
--Jonathan Cohn
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Quote:
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate...g/12557559.htm
............Thursday, Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
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We have all been here before...."the pattern of lies" seems right out of the movie, "Ground Hog Day". Thank heavens for Fox "news"....Bush's apologists and enablers would have new heaps of reality to twist and to deny, if not for the "look at the looters" coverage that they watch, over and over.
Bush said the following to the press (it is still available on the white house website), just 5 days after 9/11.............
Only later did we find this to call the president's remarks into question:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A16
While planning a high-level training exercise months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. military officials considered a scenario in which a hijacked foreign commercial airliner flew into the Pentagon, defense officials said yesterday.
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Quote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...18-norad_x.htm
NORAD had drills of jets as weapons
By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center...................
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Quote:
http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Contingency_Planning.html
Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates
scenarios in preparing for emergencies
Story and Photos by Dennis Ryan
MDW News Service
Exercise SimulationsWashington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2000 — The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard.
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Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in509471.shtml
'99 Report Warned Of Suicide Hijacking
WASHINGTON, May 17, 2002
Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the report was written, said U.S. intelligence long has known a suicide hijacker was a possible threat.
(AP) Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building......
(Edited to add lil "dots" between the quoted article segments.)
......"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.
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Wake the Fuck up, America, moveon.org and Michael Moore are not the enemy. You criminal, lying POTUS, Geroge W Bush is a much more plausible suspect for that "honor". Ted Kennedy killed one woman, 36 summers ago.
...and you think that I'm the one who is too "shrill", here ????? |