Comments on: What Went Wrong

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 02:03:50 +0000

The BBC reported today that Al Qaeda just claimed repsonsibility for the London metro bombings, Hurricane Katrina, and the last 2 seasons of Saturday Night Live.

By: gzombie

gzombie — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:08:29 +0000

If you criticize the Bush administration, then you’re giving aid and comfort to the hurricanes.

By: KF

KF — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 23:00:13 +0000

Oh, yeah. And the Bush administration has already beaten Faux News to the punch: Scott McClellan, in a news conference today, responded to a reporter who asked about my third item by saying that this wasn’t the time for playing politics…

By: Eric S.

Eric S. — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 22:50:45 +0000

You know what I’m pre-emptively pissed off about? Although I haven’t actually read or heard such statements yet, it’s guaranteed that Fox News types will be or already are busy condemning anyone who points out facts like the ones you’ve cited above as politicizing a tragedy.

By: Francois Lachance

Francois Lachance — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 18:42:58 +0000

In absolute numbers 10,000 is a lot of National Guards. I wonder what it represents as a percentage of the total for those three states.

By: Jonathan Vanasco

Jonathan Vanasco — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 17:11:50 +0000

You might find this interesting - a web company has been running non-stop off of generators in a highrise, and blogging/running a webcam non-stop.

Pics of looting and more.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

By: marcus

marcus — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:10:16 +0000

and here’s an article from a year ago about how the current administration has diminished the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mitigation programs, designed to prepare communities for disasters :
http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2004-09-22/cover.html

By: marcus

marcus — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:00:21 +0000

here they’ve been blogging quite a bit on the administration’s failure to prepare for Katrina or react to its aftemath :
http://americablog.blogspot.com/

By: marcus

marcus — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:50:38 +0000

your first and third items are directly linked to Iraq, a war supposedly waged to make America safe from terrorism (one of the nominal reasons sometimes advanced by war supporters). Resources for prevention and for crisis management have been diverted off to war in Iraq.

And looking at the chaos unfolding in NO I wonder how anyone could feel we are thus more ready to face a large-scale, unexpected terrorist attack, if things fall apart for a scenario foreseen for a long time.

What if this had been some sort of dirty bomb--a scare tactic used in the drumbeat towards Iraq-- creating refugees in a climate of nuclear fallout ? Or a bomb at a nuclear plant ? Watching the miscommunication and disorder in NO doesn’t make me optimistic for other, less foreseeable disaster scenarios.