Katrina report blames White House

Katrina report blames White House

February 2, 2006 BY LARA JAKES JORDAN


WASHINGTON -- The White House and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff failed to provide decisive action when Hurricane Katrina struck, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

The White House had no clear chain of command in place, investigators with the Government Accountability Office said, laying much of the blame on President Bush for not designating a single official to coordinate federal decision-making for the Aug. 29 storm.

Bush has accepted responsibility for the government's halting response, but for the most part Michael Brown, who was FEMA director at the time and quit days after the hurricane hit, has been the public face of the failures.

''That's up to the president of the United States,'' GAO Comptroller General David M. Walker said after reporters asked whether Chertoff should have been the lead official during the emergency. ''It could have been Secretary Chertoff'' or someone on the White House staff, he added.

The report, which the congressional agency said was preliminary, also singled out Chertoff for several shortcomings. Chertoff had largely escaped direct criticism for the government's poor preparations and slow rescue efforts.

Valid report, or publicity stunt?

The Homeland Security Department angrily responded to the GAO report, calling the preliminary findings a publicity stunt riddled with errors. Homeland Security oversees FEMA and issued a national plan last year for coordinating federal disaster response with state and local agencies.

Investigators noted that they had urged the Clinton White House to appoint a single disaster coordinator more than a decade ago after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Andrew. Still, they said, the Bush administration continued the failure with the lack of a clear chain of command, and that led to internal confusion when Katrina struck.

''In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command,'' the report found.

The assessment -- the first of several reports about the Katrina response -- noted that Chertoff authorized additional assistance to overwhelmed state and local resources on Aug. 30, a day after the storm hit. But Chertoff did not classify the storm as a catastrophic disaster, which would have triggered a faster response.

Copyrighted by the AP