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Bush to lead inquiry into Katrina (Investigating Himself?)
US President George W Bush says he will lead an investigation into how the Hurricane Katrina disaster was handled.
"I'm going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong," he said in reply to criticism that the authorities were too slow to respond.
The US Senate is to hold two inquiries of its own into the disaster which hit the Gulf Coast and New Orleans.
Officials in New Orleans have urged its last residents to leave the swamped city, saying it is now uninhabitable.
The city's Times-Picayune newspaper has demanded the sacking of top officials at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
One allegation levelled at Fema is that at the height of the crisis it turned away water and diesel because of bureaucracy.
In other developments:
* Environmental experts warn that human sewage and chemical pollution from the flooded city could create a second disaster if they are pumped out untreated into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi
* Two United Nations aid agencies, Unicef and the World Health Organisation, send teams of specialists to Texas and Georgia to help the US federal emergency effort
'No blame game'
Ex-President Bill Clinton, and his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, have been among those to call for an inquiry into the handling of Katrina.
How the different levels of government had reacted to Katrina would be examined, Mr Bush said, but he refused to "play the blame game" and said he wanted to focus on the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm.
America, he added, had to be sure it could respond properly to another disaster, whether natural or an attack with weapons of mass destruction.
And he announced that Vice-President Dick Cheney would visit Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help assess the government's work.
Mr Bush's promise of an inquiry falls well short of demands being made by his opponents for a full independent enquiry, the BBC's Jonathan Beale reports from Washington.
The Senate homeland security committee has already launched its own investigation into the disaster.
Its senior Democrat, Joe Lieberman, said government failures had led to more human suffering and destruction than should have been allowed.
The Senate governmental affairs committee is also to hold hearings, pointing to "the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4220246.stm
The US Senate is to hold two inquiries of its own into the disaster which hit the Gulf Coast and New Orleans.
Officials in New Orleans have urged its last residents to leave the swamped city, saying it is now uninhabitable.
The city's Times-Picayune newspaper has demanded the sacking of top officials at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
One allegation levelled at Fema is that at the height of the crisis it turned away water and diesel because of bureaucracy.
In other developments:
* Environmental experts warn that human sewage and chemical pollution from the flooded city could create a second disaster if they are pumped out untreated into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi
* Two United Nations aid agencies, Unicef and the World Health Organisation, send teams of specialists to Texas and Georgia to help the US federal emergency effort
'No blame game'
Ex-President Bill Clinton, and his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, have been among those to call for an inquiry into the handling of Katrina.
How the different levels of government had reacted to Katrina would be examined, Mr Bush said, but he refused to "play the blame game" and said he wanted to focus on the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm.
America, he added, had to be sure it could respond properly to another disaster, whether natural or an attack with weapons of mass destruction.
And he announced that Vice-President Dick Cheney would visit Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help assess the government's work.
Mr Bush's promise of an inquiry falls well short of demands being made by his opponents for a full independent enquiry, the BBC's Jonathan Beale reports from Washington.
The Senate homeland security committee has already launched its own investigation into the disaster.
Its senior Democrat, Joe Lieberman, said government failures had led to more human suffering and destruction than should have been allowed.
The Senate governmental affairs committee is also to hold hearings, pointing to "the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4220246.stm
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Mr Bush also declared that he was sending Vice-president Dick Cheney to the ravaged Gulf coast region to assess recovery operations, and remove "any bureaucratic obstacles that may be preventing us from achieving our goals".
The announcements, made after a cabinet meeting in the White House, reflected anxiety that the humanitarian crisis remained grave and that the political threat to the Bush presidency's legacy and second-term agenda was growing, as more details emerged of the failure of Washington's immediate response to the disaster.
"What I intend to do is to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong," Mr Bush said. "We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there's a WMD attack or another major storm."
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1564257,00.html
President George Bush's political agenda - indeed his very standing as his country's leader - was on the line as Congress returned yesterday with anger and embarrassment at the botched response to Hurricane Katrina stretching across normal party divides on Capitol Hill.
The next three months, political analysts say, could decide whether Mr Bush acquires premature "lame duck" status. It is essential he shows he is in command of the storm relief effort. Otherwise, they warn, his legislative plans, including further tax cuts, a contentious reform of immigration rules, and cuts in the Medicaid healthcare programme, will be in ruins.
As the country went back to work after the Labor Day holiday which traditionally signals the end of summer, the President was everywhere visible at the helm. After chairing a cabinet session, Mr Bush held talks with congressional leaders on the hurricane crisis, before meeting representatives of charities leading the relief effort.
The White House also announced that Vice-President Dick Cheney would travel to the region tomorrow - the latest in a procession of leading officials to inspect the devastation.
Mr Bush tried to distance himself from the blame game already in progress. "I'll lead an investigation of what went right and what went wrong," he insisted.
Even so, the President faces an uphill climb at best. Even before the hurricane struck, his approval ratings had slumped to under 45 per cent, the lowest of his presidency. New polls show that two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government, which he heads, was at fault, both before and after the disaster.
Senator Hillary Clinton, a probable presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2008, has urged the creation of a bipartisan blue-riband commission, similar to the bipartisan 9/11 panel, to examine the handling of the hurricane tragedy.
The petrol price increase in the wake of Katrina, from an average national level of $2.30 to more than $3 (£1.60) a gallon, is also menacing for the White House. Unless swiftly reversed, higher petrol costs will feed into prices across the economy. Most economists expect at least a temporary faltering in growth in the final quarter of the year.
"We must ensure that the national nightmare that was Katrina never happens again," said Joe Lieberman, the senior Democrat on the Senate's Government Affairs Committee which is planning hearings on the disaster. "My feelings went from concern to grief to anger, and then to embarrassment," Mr Lieberman said, expressing a sentiment shared by Republicans as well as Democrats.
The debacle has made a mockery of claims that a new and efficient system had been put in place after the 9/11 attacks to tackle national emergencies - of which a hurricane-provoked flood of New Orleans was near the top of every list.
Indeed, such is the frustration and anger on Capitol Hill that Mr Leiberman's inquiry will be only one of several to be held into the calamity. All are bound to bring fierce criticism of the government.
Barbara: 'Victims poor anyway'
Barbara Bush, the former first lady, courted controversy by pointing out that many of the people forced out of their homes by Hurricane Katrina "were underprivileged anyway". Mrs Bush, who joined her husband, George, on a tour of the Houston Astrodome, said: "And so many of the people in the arena here were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310798.ece
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And here's one for Godwin's Law:
"Hitler studies what went wrong with the showers in the death camps"