pansmermaidzlagoon
<font color=blue>Mickey asks that you not advise s
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2005
swilphil - great article - I always like to hear what she has to say.....
The Liberal Thread- No political debate please!
- Thread starter SPAM
- Start date
- Status
I would never blame relief workers who are currently helping others. I think the head of FEMA should have met with the govenors who are most likely to experience and asked what can we do to minimize the impact of a future disaster. I can't believe the number of people who are refusing to get involved with political threads. I love a good fluff discussion but right now Harry Potter seems meaningless. I also wonder who would be advocating support for the President if John Kerry was in office.
Laura
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 21, 1999
LastTycoon
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- May 26, 2005
NY Times OP ED
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's ******* offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's ******* offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.
LastTycoon
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- May 26, 2005
From Time:
Dipping his toe into disaster
Slow and awkward, Bush mishandled the storm's first days.
It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week.
Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring?
Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years?
Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Alabama, a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association?
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said the President.
Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house -- a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad.
Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move.
And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action.
And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing -- almost simultaneously -- strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain.
There was no breaking off from his commemoration in Coronado, California, of the 60th anniversary of victory over Japan, but there were videoconference calls and the like.
The White House is "very, very slow sometimes," says a former Administration official. Besides, members of the A team were on vacation: chief of staff Andy Card was in Maine; Dick Cheney was in Wyoming; even Condoleezza Rice was out of town, shoe-shopping in Manhattan.
Many of Bush's best p.r. minds, including media adviser Mark McKinnon, were in Greece at the wedding of White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. Had they been around, perhaps Bush would not have been accompanied only by his dog Barney when he returned from vacation in Crawford.
Part of what dogged Bush was long-standing traits. He showed his usual reluctance to ask for sacrifice from Americans, and that added to the sense that he just didn't get it.
While Southern Governors facing fuel shortages in the coming days have called on drivers to scale back use of their cars, Bush did so only as an afterthought.
"We ought to conserve more," he finally said on Thursday, making it seem like a vague option.
The same day, Bush all but spurned offers of help from allies because of the way it would look. "I'm sure he saw it as a sign of American weakness to be taking aid from other countries," says the former Administration official.
A Bush aide countered that his boss "wasn't rejecting offers; he wasn't focused on it."
Bush did begin to admit that the response was "unacceptable." But even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the government was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than empathizing with people.
That may be why the White House wheeled out his pitch-perfect wife Laura on Friday, to lend some genuine compassion to the moment.
Of course, Bush has a history of floundering at the start of a crisis and then finding his voice. Handling September 11 is now considered his finest hour, even though he stumbled dramatically at first.
But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive." The victims didn't need a photo-op gesture of reassurance so much as water, food and escape, plus help for the long haul.
And for an Administration that has staked its reputation on fighting the war on terrorism, no one can be very encouraged by the first crisis test-drive of the Department of Homeland Security.
What's more, while Americans might have rallied around Bush as he faced a foreign threat, this time the enemy is his own bureaucracy, the one that left American refugees to fend for themselves far longer than anybody thinks is acceptable.
As he drove to meet the President, Bobby Jindal, the Republican Congressman from metro New Orleans, complained about aspects of the federal response: "The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It's appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can't be done to the exclusion of everything else."
Jindal, who served in the President's Administration, would like Bush to ask Colin Powell to come back to run the relief operation.
Others urge Bush to rope in New York City's savior Rudy Giuliani.
Given the President's own performance, passing the buck wouldn't be the worst thing.
Dipping his toe into disaster
Slow and awkward, Bush mishandled the storm's first days.
It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week.
Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring?
Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years?
Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Alabama, a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association?
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said the President.
Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house -- a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad.
Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move.
And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action.
And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing -- almost simultaneously -- strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain.
There was no breaking off from his commemoration in Coronado, California, of the 60th anniversary of victory over Japan, but there were videoconference calls and the like.
The White House is "very, very slow sometimes," says a former Administration official. Besides, members of the A team were on vacation: chief of staff Andy Card was in Maine; Dick Cheney was in Wyoming; even Condoleezza Rice was out of town, shoe-shopping in Manhattan.
Many of Bush's best p.r. minds, including media adviser Mark McKinnon, were in Greece at the wedding of White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. Had they been around, perhaps Bush would not have been accompanied only by his dog Barney when he returned from vacation in Crawford.
Part of what dogged Bush was long-standing traits. He showed his usual reluctance to ask for sacrifice from Americans, and that added to the sense that he just didn't get it.
While Southern Governors facing fuel shortages in the coming days have called on drivers to scale back use of their cars, Bush did so only as an afterthought.
"We ought to conserve more," he finally said on Thursday, making it seem like a vague option.
The same day, Bush all but spurned offers of help from allies because of the way it would look. "I'm sure he saw it as a sign of American weakness to be taking aid from other countries," says the former Administration official.
A Bush aide countered that his boss "wasn't rejecting offers; he wasn't focused on it."
Bush did begin to admit that the response was "unacceptable." But even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the government was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than empathizing with people.
That may be why the White House wheeled out his pitch-perfect wife Laura on Friday, to lend some genuine compassion to the moment.
Of course, Bush has a history of floundering at the start of a crisis and then finding his voice. Handling September 11 is now considered his finest hour, even though he stumbled dramatically at first.
But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive." The victims didn't need a photo-op gesture of reassurance so much as water, food and escape, plus help for the long haul.
And for an Administration that has staked its reputation on fighting the war on terrorism, no one can be very encouraged by the first crisis test-drive of the Department of Homeland Security.
What's more, while Americans might have rallied around Bush as he faced a foreign threat, this time the enemy is his own bureaucracy, the one that left American refugees to fend for themselves far longer than anybody thinks is acceptable.
As he drove to meet the President, Bobby Jindal, the Republican Congressman from metro New Orleans, complained about aspects of the federal response: "The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It's appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can't be done to the exclusion of everything else."
Jindal, who served in the President's Administration, would like Bush to ask Colin Powell to come back to run the relief operation.
Others urge Bush to rope in New York City's savior Rudy Giuliani.
Given the President's own performance, passing the buck wouldn't be the worst thing.
barbeml
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2002
It still amazes me (don't know why) how many Bush adorers on these Boards still defend him in all this. (I swear some of them must be on the family payroll). If a Democrat President had cut a birthday cake and strummed a guitar while people sat on rooftops in a flood, they would be foaming at the mouth and screeching for impeachment ten times over...and so would I.
Laugh O. Grams
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2004
Took the President almost a full term and a half, a terrorist attack, a meaningless occupation, and a natural disaster of Biblical proportions to come up with that utterance on his energy policy!! With brilliant deductions like that gem from the President on record, now I finally know why the White House wants to keep the records of the energy task force that Cheney put together a secret!!
I've been shocked at how quick we've started blaming the victims in this tragedy. Bush was quick to find fault with the Govenor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans both Democrats. Yet the Republican Govenor of Mississippi a Republican did everything right. The victims of the flood have been called lazy, ill-prepared and dependent on the government. Noone ever stopped to consider that some of the flood victims worked in the hotels and restaraunts in the area. Bill Clinton would have been there as soon as possible. Over on the Katrina board someone had the gall to question whether America had gone soft. I think anyone who survived Katrina has the strenth of Hercules.
Laura
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07navy.htm
l
Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded
By DAVID S. CLOUD
September 7, 2005
PENSACOLA, Fla., Sept. 6 - Two Navy helicopter pilots and their
crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted
as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to
safety.
Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt.
Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians
when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to
military installations along the Gulf Coast.
"I felt it was a great day because we resupplied the people we
needed to and we rescued people, too," Lieutenant Udkow said. But
the air operations commander at Pensacola Naval Air
Station "reminded us that the logistical mission needed to be our
area of focus."
The episode illustrates how the rescue effort in the days
immediately after Hurricane Katrina had to compete with the
military's other, more mundane logistical needs.
Only in recent days, after the federal response to the disaster has
come to be seen as inadequate, have large numbers of troops and
dozens of helicopters, trucks and other equipment been poured into
to the effort. Early on, the military rescue operations were
smaller, often depending on the initiative of individuals like
Lieutenants Shand and Udkow.
The two lieutenants were each piloting a Navy H-3 helicopter - a
type often used in rescue operations as well as transport and other
missions - on that Tuesday afternoon, delivering emergency food,
water and other supplies to Stennis Space Center, a federal facility
near the Mississippi coast. The storm had cut off electricity and
water to the center, and the two helicopters were supposed to drop
their loads and return to Pensacola, their home base, said Cmdr.
Michael Holdener, Pensacola's air operations
chief.
"Their orders were to go and deliver water and parts and to come
back," Commander Holdener said.
But as the two helicopters were heading back home, the crews picked
up a radio transmission from the Coast Guard saying helicopters were
needed near the University of New Orleans to help with rescue
efforts, the two pilots said.
Out of range for direct radio communication with Pensacola, more
than 100 miles to the east, the pilots said, they decided to respond
and turned their helicopters around, diverting from their mission
without getting permission from their home base. Within minutes,
they were over New Orleans.
"We're not technically a search-and-rescue unit, but we're trained
to do search and rescue," said Lieutenant Shand, a 17-year Navy
veteran.
Flying over Biloxi and Gulfport and other areas of Mississippi, they
could see rescue personnel on the ground, Lieutenant Udkow said, but
he noticed that there were few rescue units around the flooded city
of New Orleans, on the ground or in the air. "It was shocking," he
said.
Seeing people on the roofs of houses waving to him, Lieutenant Udkow
headed in their direction. Hovering over power lines, his crew
dropped a basket to pick up two residents at a time. He took them to
Lakefront Airport, where local emergency medical teams had
established a makeshift medical center.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Shand landed his helicopter on the roof of an
apartment building, where more than a dozen people were marooned.
Women and children were loaded first aboard the helicopter and
ferried to the airport, he said.
Returning to pick up the rest, the crew learned that two blind
residents had not been able to climb up through the attic to the
roof and were still in the building. Two crew members entered the
darkened building to find the men, and led them to the roof and into
the helicopter, Lieutenant Shand said.
Recalling the rescues in an interview, he became so emotional that
he had to stop and compose himself. At one point, he said, he
executed a tricky landing at a highway overpass, where more than 35
people were marooned.
Lieutenant Udkow said that he saw few other rescue helicopters in
New Orleans that day. The toughest part, he said, was seeing so many
people imploring him to pick them up and having to leave some.
"I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a
family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision
who to rescue," he said. "It wasn't easy."
While refueling at a Coast Guard landing pad in early evening,
Lieutenant Udkow said, he called Pensacola and received permission
to continue rescues that evening. According to the pilots and other
military officials, they rescued 110 people.
The next morning, though, the two crews were called to a meeting
with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping
civilians was laudable, the lengthy rescue effort was an
unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering
supplies. With only two helicopters available at Pensacola to
deliver supplies, the base did not have enough to allow pilots to go
on prolonged search and rescue operations.
"We all want to be the guys who rescue people," Commander Holdener
said. "But they were told we have other missions we have to do right
now and that is not the priority."
The order to halt civilian relief efforts angered some helicopter
crews. Lieutenant Udkow, who associates say was especially vocal
about voicing his disagreement to superiors, was taken out of the
squadron's flying rotation temporarily and assigned to oversee a
temporary kennel established at Pensacola to hold pets of service
members evacuated from the hurricane-damaged areas, two members of
the unit said. Lieutenant Udkow denied that he had complained and
said he did not view the kennel assignment as punishment.
Dozens of military aircraft are now conducting search and rescue
missions over the affected areas. But privately some members of the
Pensacola unit say the base's two available transport helicopters
should have been allowed to do more to help civilian victims in the
days after the storm hit, when large numbers of military helicopters
had not reached the affected areas.
In protest, some members of the unit have stopped wearing a search
and rescue patch on their sleeves that reads, "So Others May Live."
l
Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded
By DAVID S. CLOUD
September 7, 2005
PENSACOLA, Fla., Sept. 6 - Two Navy helicopter pilots and their
crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted
as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to
safety.
Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt.
Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians
when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to
military installations along the Gulf Coast.
"I felt it was a great day because we resupplied the people we
needed to and we rescued people, too," Lieutenant Udkow said. But
the air operations commander at Pensacola Naval Air
Station "reminded us that the logistical mission needed to be our
area of focus."
The episode illustrates how the rescue effort in the days
immediately after Hurricane Katrina had to compete with the
military's other, more mundane logistical needs.
Only in recent days, after the federal response to the disaster has
come to be seen as inadequate, have large numbers of troops and
dozens of helicopters, trucks and other equipment been poured into
to the effort. Early on, the military rescue operations were
smaller, often depending on the initiative of individuals like
Lieutenants Shand and Udkow.
The two lieutenants were each piloting a Navy H-3 helicopter - a
type often used in rescue operations as well as transport and other
missions - on that Tuesday afternoon, delivering emergency food,
water and other supplies to Stennis Space Center, a federal facility
near the Mississippi coast. The storm had cut off electricity and
water to the center, and the two helicopters were supposed to drop
their loads and return to Pensacola, their home base, said Cmdr.
Michael Holdener, Pensacola's air operations
chief.
"Their orders were to go and deliver water and parts and to come
back," Commander Holdener said.
But as the two helicopters were heading back home, the crews picked
up a radio transmission from the Coast Guard saying helicopters were
needed near the University of New Orleans to help with rescue
efforts, the two pilots said.
Out of range for direct radio communication with Pensacola, more
than 100 miles to the east, the pilots said, they decided to respond
and turned their helicopters around, diverting from their mission
without getting permission from their home base. Within minutes,
they were over New Orleans.
"We're not technically a search-and-rescue unit, but we're trained
to do search and rescue," said Lieutenant Shand, a 17-year Navy
veteran.
Flying over Biloxi and Gulfport and other areas of Mississippi, they
could see rescue personnel on the ground, Lieutenant Udkow said, but
he noticed that there were few rescue units around the flooded city
of New Orleans, on the ground or in the air. "It was shocking," he
said.
Seeing people on the roofs of houses waving to him, Lieutenant Udkow
headed in their direction. Hovering over power lines, his crew
dropped a basket to pick up two residents at a time. He took them to
Lakefront Airport, where local emergency medical teams had
established a makeshift medical center.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Shand landed his helicopter on the roof of an
apartment building, where more than a dozen people were marooned.
Women and children were loaded first aboard the helicopter and
ferried to the airport, he said.
Returning to pick up the rest, the crew learned that two blind
residents had not been able to climb up through the attic to the
roof and were still in the building. Two crew members entered the
darkened building to find the men, and led them to the roof and into
the helicopter, Lieutenant Shand said.
Recalling the rescues in an interview, he became so emotional that
he had to stop and compose himself. At one point, he said, he
executed a tricky landing at a highway overpass, where more than 35
people were marooned.
Lieutenant Udkow said that he saw few other rescue helicopters in
New Orleans that day. The toughest part, he said, was seeing so many
people imploring him to pick them up and having to leave some.
"I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a
family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision
who to rescue," he said. "It wasn't easy."
While refueling at a Coast Guard landing pad in early evening,
Lieutenant Udkow said, he called Pensacola and received permission
to continue rescues that evening. According to the pilots and other
military officials, they rescued 110 people.
The next morning, though, the two crews were called to a meeting
with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping
civilians was laudable, the lengthy rescue effort was an
unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering
supplies. With only two helicopters available at Pensacola to
deliver supplies, the base did not have enough to allow pilots to go
on prolonged search and rescue operations.
"We all want to be the guys who rescue people," Commander Holdener
said. "But they were told we have other missions we have to do right
now and that is not the priority."
The order to halt civilian relief efforts angered some helicopter
crews. Lieutenant Udkow, who associates say was especially vocal
about voicing his disagreement to superiors, was taken out of the
squadron's flying rotation temporarily and assigned to oversee a
temporary kennel established at Pensacola to hold pets of service
members evacuated from the hurricane-damaged areas, two members of
the unit said. Lieutenant Udkow denied that he had complained and
said he did not view the kennel assignment as punishment.
Dozens of military aircraft are now conducting search and rescue
missions over the affected areas. But privately some members of the
Pensacola unit say the base's two available transport helicopters
should have been allowed to do more to help civilian victims in the
days after the storm hit, when large numbers of military helicopters
had not reached the affected areas.
In protest, some members of the unit have stopped wearing a search
and rescue patch on their sleeves that reads, "So Others May Live."
It doesn't take much to figure out why that is.
It also doesn't take much to see how much they seem to begrudge anthing that is done for them or even for the emergency personnel.
There was a rumor of free trips to DisneyWorld..they didn't like that.
They absolutely don't like the idea of them getting to stay on cruise ships and some are just furious that the survivors don't jump up and move to new places everytime they are told to!
And the very idea that the policemen are being sent on 3 and 4 day vacations is just more than some can take!
I wonder what they'll think about the idea just announced by FEMA non-director Brown that they're issuing $2000 to each survivor immediately!
The horror! Imagine "those people" getting cash to do with as they choose!!
Not to worry though, our government is on the job....The EPA just announced that the flood water in New Orleans is dirty and no one should drink it.
mamaprincess
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2005
God help us all. To get into a political debate with folks on the opposite side of the aisle is clearly useless. Some would gladly follow their leaders to hell. Many have lost sons. Our country will continue to suffer if we blind ourselves to incompitent and unconcerned, elitest leadership. No one cares about the common man, it's about the dollar first and foremost and whatever it takes to get that dollar. A few will be exceedingly wealthy and living in protective, palatial underground shelters while the few others that survive will be there to serve and worship them.
palmtreegirl
Loving life in Florida
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2003
barbeml said:
I feel the same way.
Has anyone heard the rumors about FEMA banning the media from New Orleans? I know they've refused to allow them to go on rescue and recovery missions, but are they actually turning them away as they come into town as I've been reading and using the Patriot Act as their legal justification?
Let's hope this is just rumor, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Let's hope this is just rumor, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
jekajekalynn
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2005
I'm not thinking very happy thoughts about FEMA heads. Infact one of my responses to a thread started another thread. hehe 
Read what is happening to what FEMA is doing to ppl who want to help.
Another Thread
My response to a thread which inspired the other thread lol
Read what is happening to what FEMA is doing to ppl who want to help.
Another Thread
My response to a thread which inspired the other thread lol
Has anyone seen the new numbers on Shrub? It just keeps getting worse and worse. What's really amazing is that he's losing the support of his base. Only 15% give him an excellent rating!!!
He loses in every possible category with the exception of the so called "war on terror".
He loses in every possible category with the exception of the so called "war on terror".
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