Comments on: FEMA e-mails show disorder, chaos in Katrina response

By: One year after Katrina, victims don’t trust government - Homeland Stupidity

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 11:38:37 +0000

[...] Most striking from a libertarian perspective, though, were the increased distrust in government, especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency, viewed as having completely bungled the job of disaster response, and the large outpouring of personal help from ordinary people, charities and for-profit companies. Seven in 10 say someone went out of their way to help them over the past year. One in four say someone tried to take advantage of their situation. The leading culprits: Contractors, FEMA and gas stations. [...]

By: Chertoff: We need to keep FEMA - Homeland Stupidity

Chertoff: We need to keep FEMA - Homeland Stupidity — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 05:22:53 +0000

[...] Chertoff argued at a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the government’s failures to respond appropriately to Hurricane Katrina last year were caused in part by the agency attempting to act independently, and laid the blame squarely on former FEMA head Michael Brown. [...]

By: Bureaucratic turf wars destroyed FEMA from within - Homeland Security or Homeland Stupidity

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 04:19:34 +0000

[...] This account — drawing on internal documents and e-mails as well as interviews with Brown, FEMA officials and many of the DHS leaders who clashed with him, including Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and his predecessor, Tom Ridge — reveals a more complex Brown than the now-familiar caricature of cronyism and incompetence. Long before his e-mails portrayed a befuddled bureaucrat who fretted about restaurant reservations and his Nordstrom wardrobe while New Orleans drowned, he was known at DHS as a fierce turf warrior whose griping about FEMA’s role alienated superiors and marginalized his agency. [...]

By: Chertoff: I’m “retooling FEMA” - Homeland Security or Homeland Stupidity

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 23:16:10 +0000

[...] “So I think in the next weeks you will be seeing that we come forward with some specific plans to strengthen FEMA’s logistic systems, give the leadership of the department better situational awareness about conditions on the ground, and to improve our customer service, our service to the people, who, after all, are our clients, the people who suffer when they are the focus of a catastrophe,” he said. [...]