WASHINGTON - The Bush Administration has been slammed for its handling of Hurricane Katrina in a scathing report into its "dismal" response to it from a Republican panel.
The 520-page report blasted officials at all levels of government, from President George W. Bush down to community leaders in New Orleans,
for failing to react to the calamity that left 1300 people dead on the Gulf Coast.
The report said Homeland Security had a "blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making" that "needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horrors".
At a Senate hearing, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff said the storm and its aftermath had been "one of the most difficult and traumatic experiences" of his life.
He rebutted the suggestion, however, that both he and the President were "disengaged" before and after Katrina struck.
Asked why he travelled to a bird flu meeting in Atlanta and not to New Orleans the day after the hurricane struck, Chertoff said he went to bed that night with the "belief that the storm had not done the worst that had been imagined".
Senator Joseph Lieberman asked: "How could you go to bed that night not knowing what was going on in New Orleans?"
- INDEPENDENT
