A city official in Kenner, La., was found to have been stockpiling relief supplies for his own personal use, and a new report shows that federal officials really are idiots when it comes to terrorism and natural disasters.

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd’s home Tuesday because of complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner, was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck, Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

“It was an awful lot of stuff,” he said.

The donations have to be processed as evidence but eventually will be distributed to victims, Caraway said.

“We have lots of families that are begging for these supplies,” said Attorney General Charles Foti, whose office assisted in the investigation and search.

Philip Ramon, chief of staff to Kenner Mayor Philip Capitano, has said city officials were investigating the alleged pilfering but added that many employees were themselves hurricane victims. . . .

Caraway said he plans to file a charge of committing an illegal act as a public official against Floyd, and more charges against other city workers are possible. — Associated Press

Is corruption just ingrained into the culture down there, or what? There certainly seems to be a lot of it.

In other news, the Department of Homeland Security is wasting time and taxpayer money on the painfully obvious.

DHS likes to say that it is thinking out of the box in getting inside the minds of terrorists. Its main vehicle to do so is its so called “Red Cell,” a group of consultants established “to complement traditional intelligence-based threat projections by taking an ‘out of the box’ approach that is achieved by drawing on the talents of a broad range of individuals, such as best-selling authors, academics, the military, and pop musicians.”

A year ago, the Red Cell published a “For Official Use Only” report How Terrorists Might Exploit a Hurricane and published here for the first time, to respond to a DHS request “to speculate on possible terrorist exploitation of a high category hurricane.”

The only reason I can imagine why the four page report is stamped “For Official Use Only” and carries the warning that “any release, dissemination, or sharing of this document, or any information contained herein, is not authorized” is to hide the fact of how inane the analysis is.

“Terrorists are unlikely to exploit a hurricane,” the report’s summary begins. It took “experts” to conclude this? — William M. Arkin

The FBI responded, of course.

U.S. intelligence agencies have not detected any signs that terrorists are planning attacks because of Hurricane Katrina despite weaknesses that the storm exposed in disaster readiness, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

”We have not seen any indication that terrorists see this as a unique opportunity or that this would in any way trigger an attack that perhaps was not in the staging process before,” Mueller told reporters at a briefing at FBI headquarters. — Associated Press

Oh, and it’s official: Storm surges did not flow over the top of New Orleans levees. Instead they failed due to faulty design, construction or both.

Hurricane experts said Hurricane Katrina’s storm surges were smaller than authorities have suggested and that poor design, faulty construction or a combination of the two were to blame for the failure of New Orleans’ flood-protection system, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center — with the help of computer models and visual evidence — concluded the levee system should have been sufficient to keep most of the city dry.

They also said Katrina’s storm surges did not come close to going over the floodwalls, contradicting statements from the Army Corps of Engineers, which has said the surges sent water from Lake Pontchartrain over the top of the concrete walls. — Reuters

Of course, the floodwalls were only constructed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina hit at the high Category 4 range.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier for the umpteenth time.