Centerfield

One thing is certain to me now. Bush is your regular day CEO. He knows nothing of the details. In my personal opinion, I think Reagan was more hands on and involved then Bush Jr.

Everyone made mistakes in this in a snowball fashion. The largest was at the state and local level at inadequate evacuation response. The Federal failure was depending too much on the "rules." Once Lousiana's incompetent handle was obvious, there should have been a fed takeover first, ask questions later. Bush is not willing to make such a call.

My anger is at the BS cya that the administration has been in. I think the new old tape blows a hole in some of what they were saying. I have worked some EM. I have worked in New Orleans post flooding[not this time; but other times]. I had read enough to know that even a Cat three storm could be a danger to the levies. A four or five was almost certain failure. Once I heard reports of over topping of the levies, I knew that a full failure was very likely within a couple of days. The way they were constructed, any overtopping was going to weaken some areas. Not all of the failures were overtopping. Some, i think we will find, were simply old age combined with standard practices in New Orleans of skimping on some constructions techniques in just a slight manner; but enough to allow a failure this much time later.

FEMA had known this. The Hurricane Center was aware of some of this too. Granted, their concern was with overtopping from the storm. They did call it and they called it three days out.

This is a case of the people at the top not paying attention to the people who know what they are doing. Sound familiar? Shades of 9/11. It is a problem with government structure. Noting the problem is easy, fixing the problem? No idea. As long as there are political appointees running these agencies, I doubt it can be fixed.

All of the leadership failed terribly on this. From the President down to the local government. I will say this, I do not have trust that George W. Bush knows what he is doing enough that I believe him on anything these days. He has moved from having my trust to having to prove to me that I should trust him. Heck, I consider Bill Clinton a far more trusthworthy person then the President. If you had bet me $1M six years ago that I would ever say that, I would have taken that bet in a second.

I was wondering how long it would be till this post to showed up.

If I were the president, I would have taken the last word in the meeting (simply because I would be getting the blame is things go to hell)

I would have said: "What the worst case scenario, and are we prepared if thing are twice as bad as that". (Mostly because that's what I say at every meeting.)

One of the things I always liked about McCain is that he was tortured. He understands on a deep emotional level what can happen when things go disastrously wrong. Even now, I don't think bush understands the level of pain, suffering and loss experienced by the poor.

If you all want to go and pin all this on Bush and the feds, be my guest.

I'm going to give the lion's share of the blame to the hurricane itself. Days prior to this storm, the only thing we could do about levees was hope they'd hold. They didn't.

You guys have fun tearing the federal government to shreds though. Just make sure you come up with a solution that guarantees that this never happens again. Perhaps if we put a 12 ft tall, electrified guarded chain link fence around New Orleans to keep everyone out...

Hmmm!
Electric fence....
It would cut down on the crime rate.
Cities are associated with crime. If we keep the people out.......

I think I like this idea!
It would also make evacuation a snap!

You guys have fun tearing the federal government to shreds though. Just make sure you come up with a solution that guarantees that this never happens again. Perhaps if we put a 12 ft tall, electrified guarded chain link fence around New Orleans to keep everyone out...

Okay, I think that critique is fair to an extent. It is fair to say that even if Bush was a great leader things would have gone the same, I accept that. However, it is part of the problem that we do not know, and the reason that is has to do with specific actions the man took at the time. Maybe the argument that it was going to happen anyway would be acceptable if we had the security of knowing they did everything possible. To me it more and more seems that was not the case, and it more and more seems that the President's leadership style was counter productive in this instance. And I don't know if it is my wording or your misunderstanding, but I AM IN NO WAY BLAMING THE GOVERNEMNT, that is what Bush has done. I am blaming the White House and their political appointments. If anything, I think the only heroes in this thing are those field employees of state, local, and the Federal government that are still risking their lives everyday in New Orleans.

I worked at a Federal department that was involved in Katrina relief at the time, not FEMA. Trust me, the issue here wasn't a willingness from the civil servants to do the job, the problem was a vision from the top, a poor allocation of resources, and lack of planning. All things that 72 hours before the Hurricane could have, IMO, improved dramatically if not in time to get the job done adequately, and definetely much quicker than the day or week after, which is when the Feds really started to do the work.

Matt, I just can't come round to the view that the President deserves to be the focal point of Katrina ire. Where he's appointed incompetent cronies, that's certainly our bad. How difference they made, who can say?

And I agree that we need to try to do better. I hope this serves to focus our attention on the need for a clear and competent chain of command, and for everyone in the chain to understand what responses may be called for and how to implement them.

I hope we end up with a better system. IMO, for it to be better, we need BOTH leadership and a system that grants decision-making license to the people who are in a position to recognize this: it's often more important in times of crisis that ANY decision be made so as to allow action than to delay decisions, either because one is not sure which decision is right or because one is afraid they'll get in trouble if they take any authority or responsibility that's not in the letter of their job description.

Frankly, I'd like to see a national-disaster domestic national guard. Presumedly, such functions might HAVE TO be a military function in a worst case scenario of a domestic attack or invasion anyway. Maybe a volunteer corps could get paid with free healthcare, interest-free loans, or tax credits. Maybe the government could take national airtime to educate people on the logisitics. Maybe it could even be a designated national holiday geared specifically to volunteering and educating people about such "civic defense."

The stories that troubled me most were ones where, say, some expert got sent to another state and wouldn't be released until they got their sexual harassment training, or some storage yard mayor was holding up trailers or supplies until the right form got transmitted, or some doctor or nurse was forbidden to treat the sick because they didn't have credentials or a permit or something. Sometimes you just have to say what the $^&(*%$# and get it done.

Matt, I just can't come round to the view that the President deserves to be the focal point of Katrina ire.

I don't think he should be "the focus" either, but rather the systematic failures, a big part of which is the failure of executive leadership meaning the President and his political appointments, IMO.

I hope we end up with a better system. IMO, for it to be better, we need BOTH leadership and a system that grants decision-making license to the people who are in a position to recognize this: it's often more important in times of crisis that ANY decision be made so as to allow action than to delay decisions, either because one is not sure which decision is right or because one is afraid they'll get in trouble if they take any authority or responsibility that's not in the letter of their job description.

Can't argue with that... I don't know how many times I heard as a Fed: "I can't make that decision, although it is obviously a good one... I am not authorized."

I don't it really mattered whether Bush was engaged or not. Government bureaucracies exist to develop and execute solutions within their area of expertise--if the Navy had to wait for the president to tell them how to launch an air strike, that would be pretty bad. The president's responsibility, which he utterly failed at, is to insure that he appoints competent persons to run federal agencies and that resources be available to those agencies. We don't need Rudy Giuliani running here and there bucking people up; we need an administration that thinks government is important enough to hire people with at least minimial competency. The kind of conservative Republicans that now control the government don't like government, don't think it's important, and would rather it went away (except for DOD, of course). It's no surprise then, that when they find that they need government after all, it doesn't work.

I agree, though, that there is plenty of blame to go around--the state and local levels responded abysmally as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked in the federal government for nearly 20 years (not involving disaster relief). I can tell you that the attitude of the people running the agency makes a big difference in how the agency functions.

Mathew, much of that article seems to be recycled old malarkey. The criticism about not sending in active duty military and national guard from other states is directed at Bush in the article, but in fact the blame for that lies largely here in Louisiana for being unwilling to accept a larger federal role at the get-go.

I'm disposed at the moment to be really mad at the President because he killed the Louisiana Recovery Corporation bill proposed by my Congressman, which was universally recognized by all parties in this state to be the only real and fair way to help deal with a lot of the issues surrounding property loss. But accuracy and realism is still important, even though I'm mad at the SOB.

What was he supposed to do in that week as he offered to take control and put the military in charge and was consistently rebuffed by Louisiana officials unwilling to give up control of the state and the city, despite their own woeful inability to lead? Go on TV and say the Louisiana governor is incompetent and I'm ignoring her? Pick an even more public fight with her than was already going on?

By asking for an "apology", you are playing the blame game, not looking for real solutions to keep this from happening again. Frankly, as much as I think government at all levels screwed up royally during the disaster, I'm not all that angry at anybody in particular because of the unprecedented scale of this disaster.

The risk of the levees breaking and catastrophic damage being done was known widely by EVERYBODY before the storm hit. See the full text of the Sunday 10:11 AM (CDT) National Weather Service warning which I quoted in my own post that day here.

As for the attack by the paper in suggesting "conflicts" with previous "defenses", such as being blinded by the "fog of war", there is a HUGE difference between talking about THREATS and talking about ACTUALITIES. It's one thing to know that there is a risk of the levee going. It's another thing entirely to know that the levee did, in fact, go. You may be fully aware that the levee could breach, but then have a difficult time coordinating communications to discover that the levee really did breach.

At any rate, the main levee breach was not the one everybody thought would breach. The nightmare scenario played out in the Hurricane Pam practice was for the storm surges to vastly exceed the height of the levees (which would have happened had the storm made landall 10 or 20 miles more to the west). That would have required a different response than the breach (in a levee which was probably improperly constructed) which did occur.

Brian, I don't know that we need the large official-type-thing you describe. There was LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of volunteer help down here, spontaneously and immediately. The problem was that government bureaucrats who won't make decisions and take responsibility for them (at all levels of government) wouldn't get out of the way and let them in to help. As another post recently noted, FEMA wouldn't even let the Department of Interior help out. The very last thing we need is for somebody else to have some "turf" in the battle.

All we really needed from the federal government to finish evacuating people was the helicopters and the medical ships, and some type of law enforcement (although NRA members in general probably could have helped out a lot in that regard, too). But both the local government and the federal government stopped a lot of volunteer help from coming through, and the state refused substantial offers of federal law enforcement help because the governor didn't want to be seen as surrendering state authority.

Mathew, much of that article seems to be recycled old malarkey. The criticism about not sending in active duty military and national guard from other states is directed at Bush in the article, but in fact the blame for that lies largely here in Louisiana for being unwilling to accept a larger federal role at the get-go.

I am not saying Louisiana is without blame.

What was he supposed to do in that week as he offered to take control and put the military in charge and was consistently rebuffed by Louisiana officials unwilling to give up control of the state and the city, despite their own woeful inability to lead?

There is a lot that could have happened that week before the Hurricane regarding Federal preperation, had the urgency came from the top. For instance, sending Federal employees to Louisiana was delayed after Katrina because of bureacratic processes that could have been taken care of before... The talk the day before was that the media reports were over hyped and it wasn't going to be that big of a deal, at least in my circle. In other words, there wasn't anything to prepare for.

By asking for an "apology", you are playing the blame game, not looking for real solutions to keep this from happening again.

To an extent that is a fair statement, but I think that admitting blame may be the first step to real solutions. The blame game could be stunted if someone would end this Congressional charade and say I did it, I screwed up, I made mistakes, rather than general apologies for the entire Federal government, which pretty much gets us nowhere because it attempts to generally say that it is everyone's fault. Do we really not think that at the highest levels they don't know why the Katrina response was so poor? Do we really need to keep discussing it?

You may be fully aware that the levee could breach, but then have a difficult time coordinating communications to discover that the levee really did breach.

Fair, but shouldn't you have been prepared for it knowing it could happen a week before hand? Are we really saying that we didn't think it a likelihood that a high level 3 to level 4 storm wasn't going to break those levies? I don't think that is the case.

I believed strongly his experience and widely accepted success as the Governor of Texas prepared Bush for the Presidency.

You must not be very familiar with the role of the Governor in the Texas system. The Texas Governorship is viewed as one of the weakest Governorships in the country. In the State of Texas, the Lt. Governor weilds a significant portion of the power.

Abel's right. The Texas governorship is little more than a figurehead.

I understand that, but disregarding the power of the executive in Texas, Bush has some success there that lended credibility to the argument he could get things done.

According to this new Redstate article, the LA Times is reporting that the released video omitted key portions of the tape. From the report:

The AP video does not include footage of Chertoff asking Brown whether he needs any other help or of Chertoff asking whether Brown wants him to approach the Department of Defense. Transcripts show that to both questions, Brown indicated that no additional assistance was needed.

The latest revelation that the President was told by Brown that there were doubts about the levies surrounding New Orleans and the ability to respond, is IMO, the smoking gun.

I read the transcript and watched the video. That smoking gun is a cap pistol. The AP has actively misrepresented this story, and their version can not be relied upon. Why they have done so is your own mileage. But I don't see anything that changes my initial assessments from sitting in ECS comm for most of a week, watching it unfold.

A few key points:

Brown now says that the White House was overconfident. Yet in that final pre-storm briefing Brown was asked twice, point-blank, if he needed more assets, military or otherwise. Both times he said what he had was sufficient. AP edited that out of the video.

Brown says that the briefing showed that the possibility of levee breach was well known and covered--a charge repeated by AP--yet both the transcript and a watching of that video show that levee breach never even came up. There was extensive discussion that the storm surge might overtop the levees and flood the city, but not a single word about levee breaches. (The difference between a 10 foot over-topping and a levee breach is the difference between filling your bathtub by pouring a fifty-five gallon drum in it all at once, or filling the tub with the spigot.)

Once Lousiana's incompetent handle was obvious, there should have been a fed takeover first, ask questions later. Bush is not willing to make such a call.

Can't argue with that, even if the tenses are mixed. All Bush had to do was declare the state of Louisiana to be in a state of rebellion or insurrection, and send in the troops. Last Prez that did that was Lincoln. (Though I suspect a Truman or a Reagan might've done just that, when Blanco's shortcomings became apparent.) Then we coulda spent some time arguing about that tyrannical and overbearing federal government--and gained about 48 hours on effective federal military response. The bureaucratic reponse still woulda sucked.

Giving the federal bureaucracy a bigger role probably did as much to slow down applied response as anything, in a completely systemic fashion, by pushing reponsibility and expectations upward, leaving those on the spot waiting for orders and response from above. Which kinda defeats the entire first responder principle. ("HI! I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you!")

Has anything changed since Katrina? I don't believe we would be any better off today if another large scale disaster hits. At some point this will happen again. Mount Rainier, Earthquake in LA, tsunami anywhere, chose your poison it will happen. The Federal Government cannot protect us, they are not prepared for every likely disaster. Local government can prepare for the disasters that are likely in their area. Florida was ready for hurricanes, Hawaii is ready for volcanos. When people continue to focus on the federal level you keep the discussion from the important questions... What is likely to happen near me, are the locals ready, do they need any help, what can I do to prepare. I wish we would disband FEMA, take away a useless crutch.

Bernie, FEMA's primary original mission was cleaning up and paying for the mess AFTERWARDS, not being the front-line relief troops. It's the constant barrage of people criticizing President Bush and the federal government for not doing more that have led to the unrealistic expectations for its role.

Historically, the primary responders to these sorts of disasters have been the National Guard. Gov. Blanco refused to sign the letter requesting Guard troops from other states for a long time, which delayed their response to the crisis. Gov. Blanco instead chose to loudly complain about the presence of some La. National Guard units in Iraq and demanding that those few units be sent home immediately (when even in the best of circumstances it would have taken them days or a week to move all of them and their material back to positions here.

And yep, the President could have declared Louisiana to be in a state of rebellion or insurrection. He would have had to do so in the face of active opposition from the duly elected governor of the state, however. She was given documents to sign which would have eased a federal take-over within the first 48 hours. She refused to sign them because she did NOT want to turn over control to the federal government. It's doubtful, sadly, that she would have sat their quietly and taken that. And then we would have a real political mess and possibly a constitutional crisis on our hands in the midst of all that devestation.

The AP articles continue to claim that the tapes and transcripts show that the administration was warned directly about levee breach concerns before landfall, during the briefings in the two days before landfall. They weren't, not in any sections of the selective source material AP has released to date. NOT ONE WORD about potential levee breaches prior to landfall in that material. Yet the text stays in each new updated release.

...AP obtained footage of an Aug. 28 briefing - the day before Katrina hit - that showed officials warning the storm might breach levees...

That appears at this point to be a blatant lie. I'll spare y'all the details for now (I'm positive other places are covering that more throughly than I'm willing to at this sitting) but for other reasons as well the story looks like an actively misleading piece with glaring factual errors. Unless AP is holding back major substantiating evidence, this story has SERIOUS holes in it.

I went back to the AP source stories and noted the authors. Margaret Ebrahim broke it, and her subsequent articles included co-writer credits for John Solomon and Lara Jakes Jordan.

Margaret Ebrahim lost her job last year as producer at 60 Minutes II in the wake of the Rathergate flap. Her previous gigs were writing for THE NATION and being Senior Associate at the Center for Public Integrity.

John Solomon was the Clinton White House's "go to" guy for selectively timed news releases. If it was good news, they gave it to Solomon on Sunday for Monday publication and full-week coverage. If it was bad news, they gave it to him on Thursday for Friday publication, so that the story would be dead by Monday. Solomon also broke the Sandy Berger story--but only with Berger's version, which turned out to be "less than accurate," according to Berger's plea bargain. Reliable Mr. Solomon.

Lara Jakes Jordan is an AP reporter married to Jim Jordan, the former executive director of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and former campaign manager of John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. After Kerry replaced him with Mary Beth Cahill, Jordan became spokesperson for America Coming Together (George Soros' anti-Bush 527).

If your BS detector isn't in full scan mode by now, you need new batteries. Maybe it's time for another thread on media bias.

I'm siding with Tully on this one. I'm a liberal and I'm sick of the "Bush failed" issue over Katrina. He 's suppposed to be Superman, but Blanco and Nagin can be human and make mistakes? That is just plain wrong.
Here are some of my questions...
If y'all are blaming Bush, what are your big ideas? What would you have done if you were in his place?
What about Mississippi? And Alabama?
How well did Texas do with Hurricane Rita?

In my opinion, Texas did very poorly with Rita. The "evacuation" of Houston was a miserable failure.

As for the others, the damage to New Orleans was of an entirely different caliber than the damage to the other places. New Orleans had flood waters which lasted for close to two weeks. The damage to the other areas, while very bad (especially around Biloxi) was a more typical type of hurricane damage, it's all done at once, and then the weather, at least, returns immediately to normal, making access by relief agencies possible. New Orleans, on the other hand, was cut off from relief agencies for a long time.

Katrina is a text book case of cascade failure in the system. I still consider the Governors and Mayors response to be the most deadly and incompetent. The failures in making proper decisions in evacuation leads to further failure down the road that did not have to happen. The failure to order mandatory evaction of EVERYTHING in New Orleans 72 hours out was the most deadliest failure.

I may not like the President's CYA in this case. I do fault his people for not pushing the issue of federalizing the response once it was obvious, 24 hours in, that the state and local authorities could not and would not be able to handle the situation. The President, in an emergency, can do a lot of things. Within in 24 hours, I felt he should have mobilized the military a lot faster. Has this been their job? No. But they have done it before and further away.

I think what the President is guilty of here is not taking action when the situation was obviously out of control. Is this the fault of people below him not knowing the situation? Was he getting bad information? Messages about overtopping probably did not mean much to him. I doubt there were a lot of higher ups that understood that overtopping leads to a good chance of breeches within a period after the overtopping.

I don't think he was as engaged as I thought he should be. Then again, I don't think he is as engaged in anything that I think he should be. My personal feeling, and that is all it is, is that he is too detached from the details. I think that is this administrations style. I know I will be looking for someone, next time, who I think is a little more hands on. That is neither here or now, though.

The real failure in Katrina was at State and Local level. It was inflamed by slow response from the Feds to cover for the gross incomptence on Louisiana and New Orleans proper.

Even the scare scenarios of the disaster planners didn't assume levee breaches, Jim, only over-topping that would fill "the bowl" that is NOLA. And those were the worst-case Armageddon planning scenarios that the locals (purportedly) used for their disaster planning. We know now, of course, that instead of actually spending all that funding they receieved on real planning and training and equipment and evacuations and comm sytems, they spent it elsewhere and crossed their fingers. And lost.

Just as many of the levee authorities took the construction funding for Cat III and Cat IV construction and then passed the contracts off to Cousin Bubba to cap some dirt with cheap concrete after they pocketed their shares, both the state and NOLA took their funding and dribbled out just enough to look good. And when the crunch came, the stuff that funding was supposed to have done simply hadn't been done. No one had organized the evac plans or trained for them, or cataloged the available transportation and made the arrangements with the bus owners and drilled for them, etc.

Oh, they took the funding and filed the paperwork. But the equippment was never purchased. The drills and training were never done. The coordinating agreements were never implemented. And so on.

Where all the money went, we don't know yet. We just know where it didn't go.

Tully,

From what I understand, if the leevees were overtopped, then the government should have expected them to be breached as well. The reasoning is that this would cause water to be on both sides of the levee, thus weakening it's structure and eroding it. Therefore when the official said he worried about the levees being overtopped, it should have been assumed that meant to be worried about them being breached as well.

I've seen corpses on CSI look more engaged.

(response to original posting -no time to read everyone else's response - sorry)

From what I understand, if the leevees were overtopped, then the government should have expected them to be breached as well.

You understand wrong, Jeff. A levee is a ground-piered dam. Equalizing the pressure on a load-bearing dam structure doesn't weaken it, it actually takes some of the load off. Cat III & Cat IV levees are piered deep enough that erosion from surface flow shouldn't be a problem at all--unless you're facing a Biblical-scale flood that would scour the earth to bedrock anyway. The problem envisioned in the worst-case scenarios was that the levees would keep the top few feet of water from an overrun from flowing OUT of the "bowl" when the storm surge receded, making it that much harder to empty the bowl and conduct rescue operations.

AP has finally issued a partial correction to the story, regarding the "breaches" statements. AFTER it sat out there for 48 hours, and AFTER the close of the Friday news cycle in the evening, at about 6pm Eastern. Most people will never ever see that correction, even if they're actively looking for it, and the initial false story WITHOUT the correction will be what pops up on Google searches forever. A classic media hatchet job.

Lanny Davis would be proud. No doubt John Solomon is.

Tully,

I asked someone who studied about dam and levee structure, and this is what he had to say

It's not erosion on the canal side of the levees that would be the problem. When water goes over the levee, it is flowing over an embankment that isn't covered by concrete or by riprap or any other kind of erosion protection. Whether the erosion from a single overtopping surge could have be enough to weaken the support on the downstream side is debateable, but only in hindsight. When planning for this kind of event you don't say, "well, maybe a little bit of overtopping and erosion will be fine", you assume that moving water downstream of the levee where moving water hasn't been before = possible failure = get everyone nearby out.

Jeff, I have accurately reported the contents of the NOLA worst-case hurricane planning documents. Those are the plans and scenarios developed by the experts familiar with the area, on behalf of NOLA. And I have accurately reported the August 28th briefing. Levee breach was not discussed as a consideration. The AP FALSELY reported that levee breach was warned about and discussed at length in the August 28th briefing. It was not. It was the heart of the story, and it was a blatantly false assertion*.

There's simply NO way that the story authors could not have known this. ANY editorial review of the source material should have made it obvious. The original story, and the several follow-up stories by the same trio of reporters repeating that glaring falsehood, ran for sixty hours before AP issued a "clarification" that gutted the heart of the story. They issued the "clarification" after the close of the news cycle on a Friday evening, guaranteeing almost no one would ever see it.

Fri Mar 03 2006 19:48:29 ET

Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. [NB--As does anyone fluent in the English language, which presumably includes those who write in it as a profession.] The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

If you wish to "assume" that bureaucrats and politicians who are not hydraulic engineers should have "assumed" things that are not in evidence on the basis of what your anonymous friends think, be my guest. But it's at best a quibble in defending a blatant media hatchet job. And if you check the investigative reports you'll find that the three breaches that caused the massive flooding were all shear failures caused by soil saturation of the concrete levee bases, not surface erosion. One of them was also possibly slammed by a runaway barge, whcih is also not surface erosion.

Yes, I'm calling it a blatant media hatchet job. The fingerprints are those of the reporters and editors involved, but the stench and style are more Lanny Davis or Joe Lockhart or Mary Mapes. Your mileage may vary--widely.

[*--there are other "inaccuracies" in the original and follow-up stories as well that remain un-"clarified".]

Oh, and as to other things. Engaged and concerned" are subjective. Anyone not a psychic who wasn't present saying they know how "enagaged and concerned" anyone was is expressing a subjective opinion, not a fact.

Aha! It's all a big media conspiracy! That must be why the AP released this damning video about Blanco 24 hours later. Those liberal running dogs are sneaky; they're trying to make us all think that they're interested in the truth, no matter who looks bad. But we know the truth, don't we? ;-)

Better go read that article again, Jean. It's Jordan and Ebrahim, flailing around for new ways to keep the "Blame Bush" meme afloat. They're still beating that horse.

AP never sent their "clarification" out over the wires. Instead, they just inserted it in Nexis/Lexis. Had someone not tipped off a few people, we might not have seen it yet.

The other factual inaccuracies in the original articles by Ebrahim, Jordan, and Solomon have not been "clarified" yet, either. Unless those "clarifications" have also been buried in Nexis/Lexis, and just not yet discovered.