Brown blames Homeland for Katrina response

Recounting conference calls that described initial damage reports the day Katrina hit, Brown scoffed at claims that Homeland Security didn’t know about the devastation’s scope until the next day. He called those claims “just baloney.”

Some senators suggested Brown look inward before pointing the finger elsewhere.

“You’re not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies,” said Norm Coleman, R-Minn. “Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this.”

Brown responded: “That’s very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government.”

FEMA, Homeland Security ties problematic
The disjointed federal response, Brown said, was in part the result of FEMA being swallowed in 2003 by the newly created Homeland Security Department, which he said was focused on fighting terrorism.

Natural disasters “had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. Had there been a report that “a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that,” he added.

Some senators attempted to trace the failures back to the White House.

“You quite appropriately and admirably wanted to get the word to the president as quickly as you could,” said Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., asking about Brown’s conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29. “Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?”

Brown answered: “I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true.”

Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, suggested Brown may have delayed the federal response by cutting Homeland Security out of the loop about the levee failures and going straight to the White House.

“I think I now understand why Secretary Chertoff says he didn’t know,” Bennett said. “The reason he didn’t know is because you didn’t think it important to tell him.”

Brown said he communicated directly with the White House instead of Homeland Security because FEMA’s parent agency “just bogged things down.”

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