[quote]
JustTheFacts wrote:
The only caveat is, we have to wait until the President authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can’t just act in this fashion, we have to wait for the President to give us permission.
thunderbolt23 wrote:
This is why you can’t rely on conspiracy theorists to get you goo information:
UPDATE: Lt. Commander Sean Kelly emails with a clarification:
USNORTHCOM was prepositioned for response to the hurricane, but as per the National Response Plan, we support the lead federal agency in disaster relief ? in this case, FEMA. The simple description of the process is the state requests federal assistance from FEMA which in turn may request assistance from the military upon approval by the president or Secretary of Defense. Having worked the hurricanes from last year as well as Dennis this year, we knew that FEMA would make requests of the military ? primarily in the areas of transportation, communications, logistics, and medicine. Thus we began staging such assets and waited for the storm to hit.
The biggest hurdles to responding to the storm were the storm itself ? couldn’t begin really helping until it passed ? and damage assessment ? figuring out which roads were passable, where communications and power were out, etc. Military helos began damage assessment and SAR on Tuesday. Thus we had permission to operate as soon as it was possible. We even brought in night SAR helos to continue the mission on Tuesday night.
The President and Secretary of Defense did authorize us to act right away and are not to blame on this end. Yes, we have to wait for authorization, but it was given in a timely manner.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007054.php
Your inference - that Bush never gave the authorization because (fill in the blank with ludicrous conspiracy excuse, be it PNAC, Bush hates blacks, an international Jewish banking cartel, or weather-controlling space weaponry testing) - is false.
Whether the feds got it right or wrong on the response is a different question, but let’s stay firmly rooted in reality.[/quote]
thunderbolt,
Don’t forget an additional factor as well – the confusion that arose due to the fact this was the first national disaster under the new organizational structure. People seem to expect that people will have mastery of large, complex, mind-numbingly written laws they have never implemented previously. It seems to me that they are still trying to work out who has the authority to do what down there, and, like typical bureaucrats, don’t want to do anything that isn’t “properly authorized” in the most documented CYA fashion.
This, of course, is why some of us think adding layers of bureaucracy as a response to a problem, in order that politicians seem to be “doing something”, is an extremely bad idea. And, of course, why passing huge, mind-numbingly complex pieces of legislation to govern things is generally a bad idea.
Hell, people still don’t understand the tax code, the securities laws or the anti-trust laws, to name but a few examples, and they’ve been around for almost 100 years (though they change from time to time, the changes aren’t broad).
Clear, simple rules are almost always preferable to large, complex ones. And CYA bureaucrats being in charge is always a bad idea, no matter what you’re talking about.
If nothing else comes from this, perhaps at least the people in Congress will pass a simple, one or two page law authorizing immediate federal response and sovereignty over national disaster sites, with state and local authorities officially empowered to make any and all decisions if the feds aren’t there yet.