« Delay indicted! | Main | Scopes II »
Brown off script?
September 28, 2005 ( politics )
Also, Michael Brown, our favorite horse-man, seems to have gone off script. After attacking Blanco and Nagin, he goes on to spread the blame a little wider:
But he also spread responsibility widely for what President Bush has called an inadequate response -- to a White House that he said was fully apprised before Katrina's Aug. 29 landfall, to a Department of Homeland Security whose leaders cut money and staff for three years as they pursued the "emaciation of FEMA," and to a military he said was slow to react.Brown admitted that FEMA's ability to move life-sustaining supplies was flawed and "easily overwhelmed" by Katrina's scale. He said that emergency communications broke down because the country made little "real progress" in learning from the 2001 terrorist attacks, and he warned that if U.S. authorities remain focused on preparing for terrorism instead of natural disasters, "then we're going to fail."
Brown said he is "happy to be a scapegoat . . . if it means that the FEMA that I knew when I came here is going to be able to be reborn and we're going to be able to get it back to where it was" when he joined the agency in 2001.
...
In Baton Rouge, La., Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said, "Mike Brown wasn't engaged then, and he surely isn't now. He should have been watching CNN instead of the Disney Channel."
Nagin spokeswoman Sally Forman said, "The governor and the mayor were totally on the same page."
The much-anticipated testimony of Bush's ousted disaster management director came against a backdrop of partisan fighting over the administration's handling of the Katrina crisis. It handed new ammunition to leaders in both parties who have expressed growing misgivings over the course of homeland security.
--WaPo
Word is that he's shopping his resume around town with not much luck.
Posted by griffjon at September 28, 2005 11:54 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.GriffJon.com/journal/MT/mt-trackback.cgi/118
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)