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Having covered the initial Katrina disaster extensively, as time went on, I grew to disrespect Governor 'Firing Blancos'. Her Pol Pot solution in the final days of the disaster being the final straw.
Hence the news today comes as no surprise to me, but may indeed burst the bubble of many an aspiring President Bush basher. New tapes have come to light and this is indeed not good news for the left's angry rants:
In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana's governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans' protective levees were intact, according to new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials. "We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time."
Some more AP clarification of the mud they threw in the first place, from Scott Johnson @ Powerline:
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. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.
The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.
More from Drudge
Just to fill you in on yesterday’s fiasco over the ‘other tapes’ in case you missed it. From Ed Morrissey:
Most news agencies have reported on the AP's tape of a meeting involving President Bush, Michael Brown, and a number of other FEMA officials and local and state politicians during Hurricane Katrina. In the tape, most of the reports claim, Bush specifically heard warnings about levees being breached. However, that's not what the tape shows, at least the portion aired by the AP and NBC on their broadcast last night (available at MS-NBC at the above link). What is does show is an expert saying to the group, "At this point, we don't know whether the levees will be overtopped or not." As
Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards points out, breaching and overtopping are two very different events. Neither are particularly desirable, of course, but overtopping would result in the release of excess water from Lake Pontchatrain, while the breaches released an exponentially larger volume, resulting in far more devastation. No one in this clip mentions the word "breach" at all, and the breathless reporting at the AP winds up being highly misleading. It's used to indict the president, who later said that no one imagined that the levees would be breached -- and if this clip is as good as the media has, then apparently the president is right.
Patterico:
Whether levees were going to “stand up against the storm” — in other words, whether they are going to be breached — is a very different question from whether levees are going to be overtopped by flooding. As John Hinderaker and Dafydd ab Hugh have already observed about the AP story on the video, there is a big difference between the levees being overtopped and the levees breaking. Let me quote Dafydd on the related AP story: [T]he video footage shows no such warning, either inside or outside the meeting, that Katrina might “breach levees.” The video shows one person . . . warning that people could be in danger if the levees were “overtopped.” Overtopping is not breaching, as common sense and English as our primary language should tell us. The distinction is critical, because Bush never said nobody anticipated that the levees might be overtopped. He said nobody anticipated the breach of the levees — a much more serious event.
Even Fatcheck who are no friends of the President had to admit:
Bush is technically correct that a “breach” wasn’t anticipated by the Corps, but that’s doesn’t mean the flooding wasn’t forseen. It was. But the Corps thought it would happen differently, from water washing over the levees, rather than cutting wide breaks in them.
Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:
Breerword: We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached.
Again, the entire briefing that related to levees only focused on the effects of the wind on Lake Pontchartrain and its effect in pushing water over the top of the levees. Mayfield never even addressed the possibility of breaches in the levee walls. And in fact, the storm track shifted eastward in the final hours before Katrina hit, which eliminated much of the predicate for even the worries Mayfield expresses in this transcript. The media got it wrong yet again on Katrina. The notion that the experts warned of levee breaches is nothing more than a hack job initiated by the AP and continued by the rest of the Exempt Media even after the source material has proven it false.
Why did I know Governor ‘I need 24 hrs to decide’ Blanco would have to be involved somehow. As I have said before, the President's failure during Katarina is already too woven into the public’s consciousness to be overcome by anything, least of all reason. Now if there is even a remote chance of being able to use the favorite "Bush lied" mantra at any later stage, the party just goes on and on....
Don't miss The Galvin Opinion. It's a humorous take on what has to be the most amusing echo of the prognostications of Geraldo Rivera, Anderson Cooper and Katie Couric.
Mickey Kaus:
Topping Out: A good deal of the gleeful Froomkinian outrage in the press and Democratic party over that pre-Katrina video seems to be based on what is at best is a semantic misunderstanding. After Katrina, Bush said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In the video, Patterico points out, Bush is warned by hurricane expert Max Mayfield that there's a chance the "levees will be topped." Topping is different than breaching, no? When a levee's "topped," or "overtopped," some water sloshes over it and into the city. Then the storm passes and that's it. When a levee's "breached," there's a hole in the levee and Lake Pontchartrain pours in the gap and keeps pouring in until the city is completely flooded. What Bush said after the storm seems quite consistent with what Mayfield told him before the storm--i.e., he thought the levees might be topped by the storm surge but not that they'd be breached, with the catastrophe that resulted. ... P.S.: Is the despised, self-parodying MSM intentionally glossing over this important difference in order to exaggerate the anti-Bush shock value of the video? I don't know--but I do know that the actual "topped" quote was hard to find in print, lending some of the stories an eerie, undocumented quality. Do reporters not print the quote because then they couldn't justify the charge that Bush lied about the "breach"? You make the call. I'm too paranoid at this point. ... P.P.S.: Shouldn't Bush's press operation, rather than Powerline and Patterico, be forcefully pointing all this out? ...
Update: Several readers note that "topping" is not as benign as I make it sound, since water flowing over the top of a levee can erode it and lead to a "breach" (though it's not clear that this is what happened in the New Orleans breaches that did occur). But "topping" and "breaching" are still two different things.
More from Ed Morrissey on the AP clarification.
Kevin Aylward @ Wizbang has discovered a Rathergate connection in this newest made-up fake news story.
UPDATE MARCH 4TH: From Scott Johnson @ Powerline :
The clarification does not turn up anywhere online except as noted here. Today's Washington Post carries an editorial condemning the Bush administration based on its own misreporting of the video story: "Caught on Tape." I can't find the AP clarification in the Post or in any other newspaper. Lord help those who rely for their news on the mainstream media and their inferior imitators around the country.
More @ The Anchoress, California Conservative, Protein Wisdom, Blogs for Bush, Poli Pundit, Right Winged, Patterico's Pontifications, Gina Cobb, Ace, Sister Toldjah, Iowa Voice, Jawa Report, Outside The Beltway, Martin's Musings, Unpartisan, The Sundries Shack, Betsy's Page, A Blog For All, Confederate Yankee, The Washington Monthly, The Moderate Voice, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, The Strata-Sphere, Generation Why?, Flopping Aces, Expose the Left,
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