I got fired up on Saturday after reading a first-hand account about Al Gore's mercy mission to airlift patients from Charity hospital here (
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/7/1647... ) and wrote a post about it here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... Yes, I wrote it to show what a great person the man who should be our president is and also to contrast his response with the pitiful response of the current pResident.
However, the bigger issue is the massive effort, from many different fronts, to prevent Gore from helping people who desperately needed help. Multiply this by everything we've heard about other countries, agencies, companies, and individuals trying to help out and being turned away.
The bigger issue is "who" and "why." Who is behind this and why--especially when the poor response is being used to justify other actions: like using paid mercenaries (paid by who? corporations, private citizens, the state and/or Federal government?) to "protect" property; using our military forces to respond to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, riots; and so forth.
Here are some excerpts from Greg Simon's account of what happened (some are repeated from my previous post, but I think they are important):
"Starting right after midnight I began receiving calls from FEMA, HHS, TRANSCOM and other groups whose acronyms I still cannot explain. LCDR Kennedy from FEMA called to understand what I was trying to do. I told him. Fifteen minutes later Mimi Riley, Deputy Director from NDMS called to beg me in a plaintive and exhausted voice not to carry out this mission. She had many reasons "you need doctors on the plane, Chicago is too far from their home, how will we track the patients, this is a military operation and we were not military."
Over the next three hours (from 2a.m. to 5 a.m.) I was called by an array of Majors and Lieutenant Commanders telling me to stop. ("I don't mean to be rude, sir, but you must not do this. You must stop this now.") Major Webb from GPMRC (don't ask), Grant Meade from ESF. Major Lindquist from TRANSCOM (at last!) all telling me they would not cooperate and they did not know how we had gotten permission to land. I never mentioned Gore's name because no one ever asked me who was paying for the flights or how we had come so far.
Finally at 5 a.m. Major Lindquist said if we landed he would not put any patients on the plane and we should expect no cooperation and there was no place to store the plane so we would have to leave.
And now consider this as reported in the Philadelphia Daily Herald: (
http://www.harktheherald.com/modules.php?o... ):
"Bush is just fine with naming his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, to lead an internal inquiry -- which the White House believes is investigation enough -- into the bungled federal response to Katrina. Townsend certainly has more qualifications for this post than the clueless Michael Brown, the recently departed FEMA chief, had for his. But her close ties to the White House and Department of Homeland Security cast doubt over whether she would be able to issue findings she knows could displease Bush."
And also ponder on the fact that Bush is using the terrible response to Hurricane Katrina to try and justify using the Department of Defense to militarize future disaster response.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... This is why we absolutely need an independent investigation into what went wrong. We need to find out who was lying and saying "Everything is being taken care of and we don't need outside help" when obviously that wasn't the case. The fact that so many agencies, the military, and so forth were unified in this (non)response means that they were (I would think) told to do this by someone or some group. Who is this group? Who was in charge of this group?
That's the bigger issue. And it goes way beyond building up Al Gore, and it is at the heart of the big picture in what is going on right now in our country.
I don't know what we can do about it except continue doing what we're already doing: protesting, writing letters to the media and politicians, and telling everyone you can about what's really going on.
