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Ah, the
classic states vs federal rights battle. Not a good moment for Chief Justice
Rehnquist to die, but he did. Oy, vey. Trust me, they
are not worried about looting in New Orleans and the towns in the affected
areas. Local police and fire
departments were handicapped, not just because many are also reservists and
serving overseas, as is the case in all states, but because there was only one
police channel working. The very outspoken mayor says most of the thuggery was
by gangs and druggies, that the majority of the families left behind were
behaving as ordinary citizens might under desperate circumstances (police in
some areas told looters to take food, water, diapers, baby formula, clothing/shoes
that fit them, but leave everything else alone). So by sending
an abundance of troops to the area, they are not concerned about protecting Wal
Mart, Walgreens, Saks Fifth Avenue and the ritzy hotels. Banks, certainly. They
are responding to the appearance of losing control, and they are protecting
much more vital property in the area. You probably figured out that Cheney
arrived back from vacation Friday. KwC Thousands Remain To Be Evacuated: White House
Shifts Blame to Local Officials By Manuel Roig-Franzia
and Spencer Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, September 4, 2005; A01 President Bush
authorized the dispatch of 7,200 active-duty ground troops to the area -- the
first major commitment of regular ground forces in the crisis -- and the
Pentagon announced that an additional 10,000 National Guard troops will be sent
to Louisiana and Mississippi, raising the total Guard contingent to about
40,000. Authorities reported
progress in restoring order and electricity and repairing levees, as a hospital
ship arrived and cruise ships were sent to provide temporary housing for
victims. As Louisiana officials expressed confidence that they had begun to get
a handle on the crisis, a dozen National Guard troops broke into applause late
Saturday as Isaac Kelly, 81, the last person to be evacuated from the
Superdome, boarded a school bus. But there remained an
overwhelming display of human misery on the streets of New Orleans, where the
last 1,500 people were being evacuated from the Convention Center amid an
overpowering odor of human waste and rotting garbage. The evacuees, most of
them black and poor, spoke of violence, anarchy and family members who died for
lack of food, water and medical care. About 42,000 people
had been evacuated from the city by Saturday afternoon, with roughly the same
number remaining, city officials said. Search-and-rescue efforts continued in
flooded areas of the city, where an unknown number of people wait in their
homes, on rooftops or in makeshift shelters. Hundreds of thousands of people
have been displaced by the flooding -- 250,000 have been absorbed by Texas
alone, and local radio reported that Baton Rouge will have doubled in
population by Monday. Federal officials said they have begun to collect corpses
but could not guess the total toll. Behind the scenes, a power struggle
emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov.
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush
administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal
takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's
emergency operations center said Saturday. The administration
sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units
reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks
throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a
federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive
behind the request.
"Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the
locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the
source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly. A senior administration official said that
Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell
civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify
the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana
governor and the New Orleans mayor. Louisiana did not
reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday,
three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of
emergency,
the senior Bush official said. "The federal
government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New
Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett
said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of
Louisiana." Blanco made two moves Saturday that
protected her independence from the federal government: She created a
philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal
Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise
her on the relief effort. Bush, who has been
criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used
his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels
of government. The magnitude of the crisis "has created tremendous problems
that have strained state and local capabilities," he said. "The
result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need,
especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable." In a Washington
briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said one reason federal
assets were not used more quickly was "because
our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state
with the governor." Chertoff planned to
fly overnight to the New Orleans area to take charge of deploying the expanded
federal and military assets for several days, he said. He said he has
"full confidence" in FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, the DHS
undersecretary and federal officer in charge of the Katrina response. Brown, a frequent
target of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin's wrath, said Saturday that "the
mayor can order an evacuation and try to evacuate the city, but if the mayor
does not have the resources to get the poor, elderly, the disabled, those who
cannot, out, or if he does not even have police capacity to enforce the
mandatory evacuation, to make people leave, then you end up with the kind of
situation we have right now in New Orleans." New Orleans City
Council President Oliver Thomas acknowledged that the city was surprised by the
number of refugees left behind, but he said FEMA should have been prepared to
assist. "Everybody shares the blame here," said Thomas.
"But when you talk about the mightiest government in the world, that's a
ludicrous and lame excuse. You're FEMA, and you're the big dog. And you weren't
prepared either." In Baton Rouge, Blanco
acknowledged Saturday: "We did not have enough resources here to do it
all. . . . The magnitude is overwhelming." State officials had
planned to turn to neighboring states for help with troops, transportation and
equipment in a major hurricane. But in Katrina's case, Mississippi, Alabama and
Florida were also overwhelmed, said Denise Bottcher, a Blanco spokesman. Bush canceled a visit
with Chinese President Hu Jintao that had been scheduled for Wednesday and made
plans to return to the Gulf Coast on Monday. Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scheduled visits to the
region, as troops continue to pour in. Top Bush
administration officials met at the White House with African American leaders
amid criticism that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has neglected
impoverished victims, many of them black. Chertoff, Housing
Secretary Alphonso Jackson, White House domestic policy adviser Claude Allen
and Pentagon homeland security official Peter Verga met for two hours with
NAACP President Bruce Gordon, National Urban League President Marc H. Morial
and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the former chairman of the Congressional
Black Caucus. The caucus's current chairman, Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.),
participated by phone. "I think they
wanted to make sure that the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, the
Urban League and the NAACP knew that they were very sensitive to trying to make
sure that things went right from here on out," Cummings said, according to
his spokeswoman, Devika Koppikar. "And I think they wanted to try to
dispel any kind of notions that the administration did not care about African
American people -- or anyone else." Caucus Executive
Director Paul A. Brathwaite said Bush officials promised to keep black leaders
informed. He credited the administration with reaching out to the caucus for
the first time to solve a national problem. In New Orleans on
Saturday, smoke from several fires that have burned for days swirled over the
French Quarter. Outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the stench and
heat worsened the long wait of the thousands of evacuees lining up for buses.
Many of them said they had no idea where they would go. Columbus Lawrence, 43,
a landscaper, shambled down St. Joseph Avenue searching for the end of the
line. He pushed a cart piled with packets of dry, chicken-flavored noodles.
"It's like a chip," he said hopefully, putting another handful into
his mouth. Others have been here
since the day of the storm, the early part of the week made increasingly awful
because there were no toilets, no water, no food. Herbert J. Freeman
arrived in a neighbor's boat with his mother, Ethel M. Freeman, 91, frail and
sick, but with an active mind. She kept asking him for a doctor, for a nurse,
for anyone who could help her. Police told Freeman there was nothing they could
do. She died in her wheelchair, next to her son, on Thursday morning. It was half a day
before he could find someone to take away her body, he said. "She wasn't
senile or nothing," he said. "She knew what was going on. . . . I
kept saying, 'Mom, I can't help you.' " Next to Freeman, Kenny
Lason, 45, a dishwasher at Pat O'Brien's, a French Quarter restaurant famous
for its signature "Hurricane" cocktail, took a long slurp out of a
bottle of Korbel extra-dry champagne. He broke a store window to get it, and he
is not ashamed. "They wasn't giving us nothing," he said. "You
got to live off the land." Outside New Orleans,
frustration boiled over among the boatmen who spontaneously left their homes in
central Louisiana to rescue stranded residents in the first hours after reports
of flooding hit the airwaves. For the past two days, many have been turned away
because of security concerns in a city that had turned violent and chaotic. "It's a tragedy
that's unfolding now," said Moose Billeaud, a former New Orleans
prosecutor who is now in private practice in Lafayette, La. "It is not
organized at all." The boatmen who made
it in came back with harrowing memories. Kenny, who did not want to disclose
his last name, said friends were shot at by stranded people who wanted to steal
their boats. "It's total chaos," he said. Isaac Kelly, the last
to depart from the Superdome, said "it feels good" as he boarded the
bus. A young guardsman put an arm around the stooped Kelly and said, "Good
luck and God bless." The dome, which once
housed more than 20,000 evacuees, became a symbol of the chaos that gripped New
Orleans, with television network cameras capturing scenes of filth and misery. Just before Kelly
stepped aboard, Isaiah Bennett, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, was helped
onto the bus. "It was hell," said Bennett. "I don't like this
kind of mess," he said. "I never thought it would be this bad. The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers has said that it will take as long as 80 days to remove the water
from New Orleans and surrounding areas. Senate Minority Leader
Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) sent a letter to Bush
Saturday urging him to provide cash benefits and transportation assistance to
stranded people and to use federal facilities for housing. They wrote that they
"are concerned that rescue and recovery efforts appear to remain chaotic
and that many victims remain hungry and without adequate shelter nearly a week
after the hurricane struck. Clearly, strong personal leadership from you is
essential if we are to get this effort on track." The administration
said that 100,000 have received some form of humanitarian aid and that 9,500
have been rescued by the Coast Guard. The administration said it is providing
funds to employ displaced workers and has arranged for Amtrak trains to help in
the evacuation. The rail service expects to remove 1,500 people daily. In
addition, the Energy Department reported that 1.3 million customers were
without electricity, down from 1.5 million Friday. The 7,200 additional troops announced by
Bush on Saturday are scheduled to arrive within three days. They will come from
the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., the 1st Cavalry Division at
Food Hood, Tex., the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif.,
and the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The
decision to employ active-duty ground troops and Marines was particularly
significant given the administration's initial desire to limit ground forces
largely to Guard units. Regular military troops are constrained by law from
engaging in domestic law enforcement. By contrast, Guard troops, who are under
the command of state governors, have no such constraints. At a Pentagon news
conference Saturday, Lt. Gen. Joseph Inge, the deputy commander of the Northern
Command, said the active-duty ground forces would be used mainly to protect
sites and perform other functions not considered law enforcement. The Air Force is
repatriating 300 airmen from Iraq and Afghanistan so they can assist their
families back in their home base in Biloxi, Miss. Law enforcement
officials said order is beginning to be restored in the city. A temporary
detention center has been set up in the city to house those arrested for
looting and other crimes after the hurricane, and the city's court personnel
have been relocated to neighboring jurisdictions unaffected by Katrina, said
New Orleans U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. Trials are expected to begin within two
weeks, he said. "We're going to bring these guys to justice," he
said. Members of federal law
enforcement agencies are in the city, he said. More than 200 Border Patrol agents have been sworn in to reinforce New
Orleans police, and state police officials said hundreds of law enforcement
agents from other states are expected in the coming days. Hsu
reported from Washington. Staff writers Justin Blum, Dana Milbank, Jacqueline
L. Salmon and Josh White contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html |
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