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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (273120)	2/11/2006 6:57:03 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575608

Brownie's revenge Ex-FEMA boss hits feds over Katrina BY KENNETH R. BAZINET and JAMES GORDON MEEK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - Fired FEMA chief Michael Brown rocked the White House yesterday by insisting he alerted top officials that Hurricane Katrina was a looming disaster and said it was "baloney" they didn't immediately know New Orleans was flooding. Fed up at being what he called a scapegoat, Brown used a Senate hearing to rip his Homeland Security Department bosses who claimed to have been unaware for more than 24 hours of the catastrophe unfolding in New Orleans. "For them to now claim that we didn't have awareness of it, I think, is just baloney," Brown told the Senate Homeland Security Committee. He said that on the day before Katrina hit, Brown warned the White House that Katrina was going to be a major calamity. And on the evening of Aug. 29 - only hours after the flood began - Brown said he told one of President Bush's closest aides and confidantes, Joe Hagin, that the levee washed away and the Big Easy was drowning. Hagin was with Bush at his ranch in Texas. "I think I told [Hagin] that we were realizing our worst nightmare," he said. Katrina killed more than 1,300 people as it turned New Orleans into a swampy bayou of corpses and chaos. Much of the city remains uninhabitable. Bush went golfing the next day and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff attended a conference on avian flu in Atlanta. Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, became the symbol of everything that went wrong with the relief effort, highlighted by the notorious Bush compliment: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." Brown resigned weeks later. "Unfortunately, he called me 'Brownie' at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir," Brown said yesterday. Even before he testified, steaming Bush spokesman Scott McClellan snapped, "There was official confirmation that the levees had been breached the next morning, on Tuesday morning. But there were conflicting reports coming in that day of the storm, later in the day." Bush aides got redder as Brown's testimony wore on. Some shouted at their TVs as he spoke and others insisted they ignored his testimony. "I've been too busy to watch," said one Bush aide. Brown testified that he kept his DHS bosses in the loop, but preferred to go straight to the White House with information. Two Department of Homeland Security officials testified that numerous conflicting reports came in about levee breaches and that Brown was withholding information. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) said he was surprised Brown thought it unnecessary to even speak with Chertoff, the member of the cabinet who oversees his agency. "It demonstrates a dysfunctional department to a degree far greater than anything we have seen," said Bennett. nydailynews.com