NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody...

[pisshead]

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509030001

kind of reminds me of...no one had any idea planes could be used as missiles and hit buildings...we're all just so retarded that we can't even think of it...even though everyone else has...

NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees"

In a September 2 article headlined "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure," The New York Times printed without challenge President Bush's false claim, originally made on ABC's Good Morning America, that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" surrounding New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, dozens of news organizations had reported on the possibility of a breach well in advance of the hurricane, and even the Times' lead editorial in the same day's newspaper flatly stated that "[d]isaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees."

From the September 2 Times report:

The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow.



[...]

In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

Though the Times kept it a secret from its readers, Bush simply wasn't telling the truth. Many people "anticipated the breach of the levees," as Media Matters for America has detailed. A September 2 Washington Post editorial similarly noted:

It is simply not true, as Mr. Bush said yesterday, that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees." In fact, experts inside and outside of government have issued repeated warnings for years about the city's unique topography and vulnerability, and those warnings were loudly and prominently echoed by the media both nationally and in Louisiana.

Not only is it not true, as Bush claimed, that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees," it seems that nearly everybody anticipated the breach. The problem wasn't lack of anticipation, it was lack of preparation.



A June 8, 2004, New Orleans Times-Picayune article noted: "For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees." The article quoted the manager of the Army Corps of Engineers' Lake Pontchartrain levee project saying that "people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place." A Corps senior project manager added, "When levees are below grade, as ours are in many spots right now, they're more vulnerable to waves pouring over them and degrading them." And Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the paper: "It appears that the money [for hurricane-protection efforts] has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. ... Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten noted on September 2:

Three years ago, New Orleans' leading local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio's signature nightly news program, "All Things Considered," and the New York Times each methodically and compellingly reported that the very existence of south Louisiana's leading city was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week. All three news organizations also made clear that the danger was growing because of a series of public policy decisions and failure to allocate government funds to alleviate the danger.



[...]

Since 2002, when all these reports ran, the Times-Picayune has published no fewer than nine stories reporting that the combination of tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the demands of homeland security had led President Bush's administration to repeatedly reject urgent requests from the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana's congressional delegation that it allocate the money to save New Orleans.

Former Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) told the Associated Press that it was well-known that the levees could not withstand a major hurricane: "Those levees are OK under normal times but once every hundred years, that's not enough. ... We've all said for years that a category 4 or 5 hurricane hit just right on New Orleans, there was nothing there sufficient to prevent New Orleans from being 20 feet under water."



And Mike Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi who headed the Army Corps of Engineers in the Bush administration until losing his job after criticizing the White House budget office, told the AP: "I'm not saying it wouldn't still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have."

On September 1, the Chicago Tribune reported details of some of those budget shortfalls:

For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).



Because of the shortfalls, which were caused in part by the rising costs of the war in Iraq, the corps delayed seven contracts that included enlarging the levees, according to corps documents.

A quick search of the Nexis news database reveals no shortage of news reports about possible levee breaches that could occur in the event of a major hurricane. Here's a small sampling:

• ABC's Nightline, 9/15/04: "If it sounds overly dramatic, it is not. This city is surrounded by water on three sides. Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi below. A major hurricane hitting right here would breach the levees. Water would cascade in, submerging the city. And because of the levees, it would have no way of escaping."
• Associated Press, 5/16/04: "Officials have warned that if a major hurricane hits New Orleans, thousands of people could be killed and the city could be flooded for weeks as flood waters breach the levees ringing the city, which has the topography of a saucer that dips several feet below sea level in many places."
• The Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 9/19/03: "... the Hurricane Center has developed an 'extremely detailed' map of New Orleans because the city, which sits about 6-feet below sea level and is surrounded by levees, is a 'worst-case scenario' for a major storm to hit. Knowing how far and how fast the water in the inlets will rise, evacuations and cleanups can be better planned, [LSU Hurricane Center director Ivor] van Heerden said. In the case of south Louisiana, a breach of the levees would trap the flood water on the wrong side of the bank once the bayous and rivers receded, van Heerden said."
• Richmond Times-Dispatch, 8/6/02: "New Orleans, with more than 460,000 residents, lies entirely below sea level and depends on a system of levees to hold back the Gulf of Mexico. Some researchers say a Category 3 hurricane could breach the levees and kill thousands of people."

At least two other news organizations pointed out the contradiction between Bush's words and reality:

• Cox News Service, 9/1/05: "On ABC-TV Thursday, President Bush acknowledged the 'frustration' of New Orleans residents, but said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.' In fact, such a failure has been forecast for years."
• San Francisco Chronicle, 9/2/05: "'I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I mean, I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. I can -- I just can't imagine what it's like to be waving a sign saying "come and get me now,'' ' Bush said. 'But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming. ... I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' he said. That point was fiercely contradicted on blogs and talk radio Thursday."

When Bush claims nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees," he isn't telling the truth; he's trying to avoid responsibility for underfunding Army Corps of Engineers' hurricane-protection projects. And the New York Times is helping Bush avoid responsibility by repeating his false comments without contradiction. Indeed, the false claim that nobody anticipated a levee beach occurs throughout the Times article (headlined "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure"), with nary a hint that it isn't true.

And yet, if Times readers turned to the editorial page of the same September 2 paper that contains that article, they would see a lead editorial that declared: "Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees, yet somehow the government was unable to immediately rise to the occasion."

Times readers with long memories might also remember an August 11, 2002, Times article in which Times reporter Adam Cohen warned:

New Orleans ... may be America's most architecturally distinctive and culturally rich city. But it is also a disaster waiting to happen. New Orleans is the only major American city below sea level, and it is wedged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. If a bad hurricane hit, experts say, the city could fill up like a cereal bowl, killing tens of thousands and laying waste to the city's architectural heritage. If the Big One hit, New Orleans could disappear.



[...]

There is considerable agreement about what the Big One would look like. A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would move up from the Gulf to Lake Pontchartrain, forcing lake water over levees and into the city. If the New Orleans "bowl" filled, the Red Cross says, there could be 100,000 deaths. An additional 400,000 could be stranded on roofs, surrounded by a witches' brew of contaminated water. Property loss estimates run as high as $150 billion, though much of the imperiled architecture -- like the St. Louis Cathedral -- is priceless.

So far, Washington has done little, and New Orleans's response has been less than satisfying. The city is focused on evacuating its 500,000 residents. But the roads leading out would flood quickly, stranding those who lingered. Then there is the thorny issue of the 100,000 residents without cars. "When I do presentations," said Terry Tullier, head of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness, "I start by saying that 'when the Big One comes, many of you will die -- let's get that out of the way.' "

Mr. Tullier has seen computer models of Canal Street under 20 feet of water and heard that the floodwaters could stay for weeks, that the National Guard might bring in thousands of body bags -- and that New Orleans might never recover. "In this business, we bring no good news," he said. "It's full of worst-case scenarios."

It's clear that there has long been wide recognition that a large hurricane could cause exactly the kind of devastation currently being seen in New Orleans, and that the levee system would not be sufficient to stop it. The Army Corps of Engineers knew it; the Times-Picayune knew it; countless news stories over the years have dealt with the possibility; Congress knew it; the former Republican congressman who lost his job as head of the Corps of Engineers for complaining about budget cuts knew it -- and The New York Times knew it.



â?? J.F.

Posted to the web on Friday September 2, 2005 at 8:40 PM EST

pisshead Reviewed by pisshead on 09-04-2005. NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody... http://mediamatters.org/items/200509030001 kind of reminds me of...no one had any idea planes could be used as missiles and hit buildings...we're all just so retarded that we can't even think of it...even though everyone else has... NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees" In a September 2 article headlined "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure," The New York Times printed without challenge President Rating: 5

[Tholiak]

Liberals are scum, they will take a disaster like this and turn it into a Bush bashing Festival. Put the blame where it belongs..the Government of LA, and the throngs of blacks who decided to stay behind so they could rape and pillage the city.

[pisshead]

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...cbccdrcrd.html
Hurricanes
At 20 feet below sea level, new orleans is a prime target. An ambitious new levee system would decrease the risk

By Michael Behar|April 2005
It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea levelâ??with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the otherâ??it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricaneâ??s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.


Long before settlers decided that the shores of the Mississippi would be a nice place to raise a family, the river regularly topped its banks, heaping silt and mud onto surrounding wetlands. After a particularly nasty flood in 1927 that killed 300 people and left 600,000 homeless along the length of the river, city leaders in New Orleans decided to construct leveesâ??some up to 25 feet highâ??to contain the swelling river during heavy rains. Residents had also been battling yellow fever, a viral disease spread by mosquitoes. From 1817 to 1905, the epidemic killed 40,000. "So people decided to drain the swamps," says Al Naomi, senior project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. With the levees in place and the swamps pumped dry, the city could now spread into areas that were once uninhabitable. "But when you take the water out of the swampy soils," he continues, "they start sinking."

Today, parts of New Orleans lie up to 20 feet below sea level, and the city is sinking at a rate of about nine millimeters a year. "This makes New Orleans the most vulnerable major city to hurricanes," says John Hall of the Army Corps of Engineers. "Thatâ??s because the water has to go down, not up, to reach it."

The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale defines a category-5 storm as one with "winds greater than 155 miles per hour and storm surge generally greater than 18 feet." Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rareâ??occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 yearsâ??should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corpsâ??s New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year. To determine exactly where and how high to build these levees, the engineers have enlisted the aid of a 3-D computer-simulation program called ADCIRC (Advanced Circulation Model). ADCIRC incorporates dozens of data pointsâ??including seabed and coastal topography, wind speed, tidal variation, ocean depth and water temperatureâ??and charts a precise map of where the storm surge would inundate New Orleans. The category-5 levee idea, though, is still in the early planning stages; it may be decades before the new barriers are completed. Until then, locals had better keep praying to Helios.

[pisshead]

fuck off...i'm not a 'liberal' to begin with.

[pisshead]

awww, bush and his daddy's best friend bill clinton...they care so much.

Clinton, Bush slashed spending on levees
[align=left]World Net Daily | September 3 2005[/align]

While the Bush administration is sure to get most of the heat for cuts in proposed expenditures to maintain and upgrade New Orleans flood control system, the Clinton administration repeatedly cut congressional allocations for the projects and the recommendations on spending by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Most of the attention to date has focused on the fact that last year the Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans, while the White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request.

Some have been quick to point out the same Congress and Bush administration agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers, as well as allocations for dust control on Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie Canal and a $231 million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island. However, 10 years ago, the Clinton administration cut 98 flood control projects, including one in New Orleans, saying such efforts should be local projects, not national.

Army Corps of Engineers officials freely conceded in 1995 the cuts might be penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they said they were forced to eliminate some services the corps has historically provided to taxpayers to meet the administration's budget-cutting goals.

A $120 million hurricane project, approved and financed annually from 1965 was killed by the Clinton administration after being approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was designed to protect more than 140,000 West Bank residents east of the Harvey Canal.

On June 9, John Zirschky, the acting assistant secretary of the Army and the official who refused to forward the report to Congress, sent a memo to the corps, saying the recommendation for the project "is not consistent with the policies and budget priorities reflected in the President's Fiscal Year 1996 budget. Accordingly, I will not forward the report to the Office of Management and Budget for clearance."

The following year, Congress approved more for flood-control projects than was recommended by the Clinton administration. Likewise, in 1999, Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to spend only $47 million on New Orleans area hurricane flood control projects â?? half of what local officials had requested.



Again, in 2000, Congress approved a $23.6 billion measure for water and energy programs, with sizable increases for several New Orleans area flood-control projects. Clinton, however, promised to veto the annual appropriation for the Energy Department and Army Corps of Engineers, not because it was $890 million larger than he proposed, but because it did not include a plan to alter the levels of the Missouri River to protect endangered fish and birds.

[Sinsemilla Jones]

...but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......he bashed Bush, so he's liberal... but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative......but he bashed Bush, so he's liberal...but he bashed Clinton, so he's conservative...



BOOM!

[andruejaysin]

How about I bash a conservative (Bush) and a liberal (the gov. of LA, whatever the fuck her name is) So, am I a liberal or a conservative? I say put them both on a roof without food or water and leave them there for a week.

[bhallg2k]

Liberals are scum, they will take a disaster like this and turn it into a Bush bashing Festival. Put the blame where it belongs..the Government of LA, and the throngs of blacks who decided to stay behind so they could rape and pillage the city.

You got it all wrong, man. They were waiting for you to come so they could rape and pillage you.

And I've always wondered this: do you use starch on those white sheets when you press them or not? They're always so neat.

[nicholasstanko]

Liberals are scum, they will take a disaster like this and turn it into a Bush bashing Festival. Put the blame where it belongs..the Government of LA, and the throngs of blacks who decided to stay behind so they could rape and pillage the city.

whats up, makor.

[amsterdam]

fuck off...i'm not a 'liberal' to begin with.

yes you are.the best is where you said you used to be a conservative to earn brownie points.hahahah.be gone loony leftie.head over to the dailykos where people of your class belong.