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Here are some people who have to lose their jobs, and maybe also get sued for wrongful death. Or go to jail.

1. Whoever is in charge of Louisiana’s state office of Homeland Security, maybe it’s this Major General Bennett C. Landreneau? Whoever it was who made the decision not to let the Red Cross into New Orleans. This person needs to lose his job, and he’s on my “get sued into the ground and maybe go to jail” list. If my baby had died of dehydration in the Superdome, I would be ready to kill this guy.

2. Whoever it was who gave the Gretna police orders to turn people back at gunpoint and prevent them from walking out via an Interstate to a shelter 2-3 miles away in Jefferson Parish. The Gretna Police Chief (Chief B.H. Miller, UPDATE: Arthur Lawson, guilty as charged.)? The mayor (Ronnie Harris)? Again, fuck these bastards. I’m not even that sympathetic to the policemen on the front lines obeying these orders. Is it even legal for local police to ban citizens from using public roads? I imagine there is leeway for emergency situations, but if no orders came down from above? If they did get an order from higher up, fire that bastard too.

3. Governor Kathleen Blanco. I have seen nothing to convince me that she has been at all competent in dealing with this catastrophe.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.

“I need everything you have got,” Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.

In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. “Nobody told me that I had to request that,” Ms. Blanco said. “I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then.”

Look, I think the feds are hiding behind a fig-leaf of federalism on this one. When she said “we need all the help you can give”, the 82nd Airborne should have been there the next day. Nonetheless, whatever i’s she had to dot or t’s to cross, she could have damn well figured out herself before the hurricaine hit, like, I don’t know, when she first got into office? Likewise, she could have put everyone in the same room and knocked heads together earlier to get some kind of unified effort going. Crying about how you’re dissappointed in looters don’t cut it.

4. Michael Brown, FEMA head. I don’t think I need to say anything here.

5. Michael Chertoff, head of DHS. There was a pop quiz on homeland security last week. He failed.

6. President Bush. There’s no point in suggesting that he resign or be impeached, since I might as well just wish that everyone had a pony. Still, we can try our best to hold him morally responsible for hiring incompetent political apparatchiks to do crucial jobs, and for manifestly failing to mobilize federal resources in a timely way once the scope of the disaster (that includes local failings too) was known. The buck has to stop somewhere, and I think the President’s desk seems a likely place. He will never run again, and the only punishments he can receive will be moral opprobrium, diminished political influence, and a severe hit to the electoral chances of his party. I suggest he receive them all.

UPDATE: I think it should be obvious that I listed these people in bottom-up hierarchical order, not decreasing-level-of-blame order. (Perhaps, in that case, 1 and 2 should be reversed, but you see my general thrust.) Someone who has 1000 gallons of water is more to blame when someone near her dies of thirst than someone with 1 gallon. The locals were overwhelmed and the feds should have stepped up to the plate, not complained about the mysteries of federalism. That doesn’t mean Gov. Blanco magically did a great job, or Jefferson Parish officials weren’t a bunch of racist bastards.

Go read “this L.A. Times report”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-children5sep05,0,113027.story?coll=la-home-headlines about seven children — mostly toddlers, the eldest, six years old — who were lost and found in New Orleans these last few days.

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

The story of how they got there, and what happened next, is just remarkable. There are a lot of lessons you might draw from it — organizational failures and successes, the appalling choices that people sometimes have to make, courage in unexpected places, and how important it can be be for people to pay attention and make an effort. It’s also a reminder of something else, something I can’t quite articulate properly. Events like Katrina breed chaos, and that leads to long chains of contingencies, to accidents piled upon accidents, sometimes lucky sometimes not. We come across people in the middle of such chains of events. In most cases, their situation will not conform to some tidy morality tale. It might _look_ like it does, but that’s because we like to tell stories about how people got what they deserved. What you are really seeing — as in the case of these seven children — may turn out to be another thing altogether, or the accidental byproduct of many things.

Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera “resist Sean Hannity’s efforts”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/09/02.html#a4763 to spin the scale of the disaster and, in particular, the suffering caused by clear, continuing failures of organization. Smith, especially, was working hard to stay calm and focused on relaying the conditions in front of him — he seemed like he wanted to reach through his camera, throttle Hannity and shout “Can’t you see what’s happening here?”

Like many people, I made a donation to the Red Cross – then took up Ted’s offer.

I do not regret this decision. And I am sure the money will help people in need.

But I thought some of it might help the people who are trapped and dying in New Orleans. Turns out, the Red Cross is not allowed into New Orleans (tip to Atrios):

“As the National Guard delivered food to the New Orleans convention center yesterday, American Red Cross officials said that federal emergency management authorities would not allow them to do the same.”

There are understandable security concerns, but the main reason seems to be the following: “The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there.”

I am (once again) speechless – and literally trembling. How is it even conceivable that someone would think that relief operations would keep victims there – and that depriving them of emergency food and water would be the the extra little nudge that would convince them to get out?

In comments to Kieran’s last post Daniel has catalogued “some”:http://www.pardonmyenglish.com/archives/2003/08/yeah_so.html “of”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003888 “the”:http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/004000.php “things”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9574 that the right-wing blogosphere said about the French heatwave of 2003. We could add op-eds like Denis Prager’s “Socialism Kills”:http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34372 to the roster, but pride of place should surely go to — who else? — Mark Steyn. Steyn makes the following observation in his “‘Events’ don’t just happen”:http://www.middleeastinfo.org/article3822.html :

bq. One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: “Events, dear boy, events.” It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it’s some brilliant insight. It’s not. It’s an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners’ strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States. A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of “events” is supposedly natural phenomena.

He draws the following conclusion about earthquakes in Iran, SARS in China, and the French heatwave (having paused to kick the Canadian welfare state along the way) :

bq. By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They’re vulnerable to “events” because of their organizational principles – a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens’ ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

According to AP, this photo shows a man covering the body of a man who died — apparently in a chair — on Thursday outside the convention center in New Orleans. The baby in his arms looks to be about three or four months old. I wonder whether she has any milk to drink.

Plenty of people are “saying”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_08_28_atrios_archive.html#112559511188392756 “this”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/09/this_is_not_goo.html “already”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007022.php, but the situation in New Orleans and the surrounding areas is just unbelievable, and the official response thus far is pretty appalling. The United States is the most powerful country on the face of the earth. Over the past few years in particular, a lot of money and thought was supposed to have been devoted to planning for rapid response to large-scale urban disasters in the wake of 9/11. While authorities in Louisiana and New Orleans are not as powerful as the Feds, they have known for years that a disaster of this kind was likely and were told in detail what it would do to their city. And yet. The “reports of what’s happening”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/katrina.impact/index.html convey little except how “poorly-prepared”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm, “ill-coordinated”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5248531,00.html and “slow-moving”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/impeach_george_.html the disaster response is. As “Mark Kleiman”:http://WWW.markarkleiman.com/archives/microeconomics_and_policy_analysis_/2005/08/failing_to_plan_is_planning_to_fail.php comments, failing to plan is planning to fail. Kevin Drum provides “a demoralizing chronology”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php explaining why FEMA is being run by people with “no experience”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002458.html in disaster management.

Meanwhile, apparently the secretary of state has been “shoe-shopping on 5th avenue”:http://www.gawker.com/news/condoleezza-rice/index.php#breaking-condi-rice-spends-salary-on-shoes-123467.

“The whole of New Orleans is being evacuated”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/national/29katrinacnd.html as “Hurricane Katrina”:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/index_hls2.shtml moves toward the coast. It’s been known for a long time that New Orleans could be devastated by a hurricane under just the right (meaning, very, very wrong) circumstances. The city is located in a bowl-shaped depression with water on three sides, and under the “worst-case”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BJK/is_15_11/ai_68642805 “outcome”:http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/wetlands/hurricane1.html, if it flooded severely it would be tremendously difficult to get rid of the water. There’s a scholarly literature on the danger. “One government report says”:http://water.usgs.gov/wrri/02grants/prog-compl-reports/2002LA4B.pdf:

bq. New Orleans is the most vulnerable major city on the Gulf Coast and perhaps in the entire United States. Had Hurricane Georges not taken a last minute turn to the east in 1998, major portions of New Orleans would have flooded. It would likely have been one of the worst disasters of the century in terms of loss of life and damage. Additionally, Louisiana has extensive infrastructure of oil and gas facilities, chemical plants, and hazardous, industrial and residential landfills. Most of these facilities are in flood prone areas and within the confines of levee systems protecting housing and other structures from flooding. Even in areas where mitigation strategies have been engineered (i.e., levee, drainage, and pumping systems), such designs are unable to capture and control all storm water runoff from occasional extreme rain events.

“Another, from LSU,”:http://www.publichealth.hurricane.lsu.edu/Adobe%20files%20for%20webpage/LevitanHurrVulnBR&NO.pdf, tries to map the likely range of flooding from a category 2 or 3 storm. It’s not pretty. Hopefully things won’t go so badly, of course. But then again it might be the biggest thing to hit the region since the “Great Mississippi Flood”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684840022/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ of 1927.

_Light Relief Update_: In the “CNN story on this event”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/28/hurricane.katrina/index.html, the mayor of New Orleans is quoted as saying “About 70 percent of New Orleans is below sea level, and is protected by a series of levies.” I’m sure our “libertarian friends”:http://www.highclearing.com/ would heartily endorse this statement, but I don’t think the transcript quite conveys the mayor’s meaning.

From the Washington Post today, a supremely depressing tale of 15 Uighur men trapped in Guantanamo:

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said….

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. “They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban,” Willett said. “But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court.”

Let’s give the government some nano-credit in that it recognizes that these men will be imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese government if returned. But they’re still pretty badly overdrawn at the moral bank:

In the meantime, the men are still treated as prisoners. Sabin P. Willett, a Boston lawyer who volunteered to take the cases of two Uighurs in March, finally met with them last month, after he and his team went through their own FBI clearances. One of the Uighurs was “chained to the floor” in a “box with no windows,” Willett said in an Aug. 1 court hearing.

Relatedly, this account of prison life in Iraq is not one to inspire confidence:

Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the military said it has arrested more than 40,000 people…. The average incarceration at Bucca is a year. The military attributes the surge in detentions to an increase in combat operations and the inability of the nascent Iraqi justice system to handle the crushing caseload.

Many of the freed detainees express bewilderment at why they were held; even the U.S. commander who oversees Bucca, Col. Austin Schmidt, 55, of Fairfax, estimated that one in four prisoners “perhaps were just snagged in a dragnet-type operation” or were victims of personal vendettas.

“This is like Chicago in the ’30s: You don’t like somebody, you drop a dime on them,” Schmidt said. “And by the time the Iraqi court system figures it out, they go home. But it takes a while.”

Well, just 25%…

So “we now know”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm that the young Brazilian electrician gunned down by police as a suspected suicide bomber was not wearing a heavy jacket, paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, used his travelcard to pass the barrier, did not run from the police, who did not warn him, found a seat and was restrained before being shot. This, in addition to having been allowed to board a bus earlier.

What did Sir Ian Blair know when “he said that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707509,00.html the Metropolitan Police were “playing out of their socks” ? If he knew at that stage that this was an disastrous catalogue of incompetence then he surely ought to resign. And who told the papers, and with what authority “that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707779,00.html de Menezes

bq. decided to run away from police, vaulting the ticket barrier and running down to the platform. ?

They ought be identified and made to resign too.

There are reports of a “series of explosions”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4659093.stm on the London Underground. It’s not clear what’s happening. Another Madrid? Or something else?

_Update_: The “eyewitness reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4659243.stm on the BBC make it clear that it’s a co-ordinated bombing of the tube and some buses. I hope they catch the bastards responsible.

_Update 2_: Reports are all over Australian TV now, and obviously this will be a major story across the media so I won’t make any more updates here. But I will keep comments open, of course. At this point the hope is for as few fatalities as possible.